Whwt would you do if people wanted to change the name of Pakistan and one of the options put forward was Punjab and it not so surprisngly got the highets number of votes ......should it be changed?
There is one thing you dont understand about the names of Punjab and Sindh. They are not ethnic names. Sindh takes its name from the river Indus/Sindhu and its people became named after this region, even though they belonged to different tribes. Punjab means 5 rivers - the people living here, like the sindhisbelonged to many different tribes but became known as Punjabis.
Balochistan was given by the British.
Pakhtuns have every right to make a pakhtun province but a chance has to be given to the minorities - do they accept the name? if they dont accept it - what options are there? a neutral name? opt out and make a new province?
sadly the minorities have been drowned out because of opposition based on pakhtun-phobia outside of NWFP and the pakhtuns ethnicising the whole issue. Some non-NWFP people are afraid of the whole pakhtun name thing because they see it as a step towards independence. At the same time pakhtuns have pakhtunised the whole issue and accused those out of nwfp being anti-pakhtun and they will give it what name they want - the sad thing about this is what the pakhtun supporters of the renaming thing accuse those outside nwfp of ie being racist, ignorant of our culture etc......the pakhtuns are going to end up doing the exact same thing to the chitralis, hindkowans, seraikis in nwfp.....
They are not just any old minorities but they are native to the area and deserve to have input. Is nt that what democracy is all about?
I personally think scrap punjab, sindh, balochistan, nwfp - cut them up and make more numerous provinces.
democractically, they have the right to call their land whatever the hell they want.
Furthermore the issue of hindko speaking people assumes that no other province has sizable minorities of another ethnicity. So its pretty illogical to use that argument when three other provinces have names associated with the dominant ethnicity. It doesnt matter if some of those provinces were arguably named before the ethnicity got its name, you could argue that it is now associated with the ethnic group, and therefore other minority sects feel sad, so lets change Punjab's name shall we?
And the whole we-came-here-first thing is lame beyond words. It doesnt matter who came first.
Finally, I fail to see what the national implication of this is, and if there is none, I fail to see why the federal govt has a say in it.