President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif spent Saturday in the same room in Lahore, talking about the same country. A day later, Pakistan has three different accounts of what they decided about new provinces, and not one of them exists on paper.
The meeting took place on 14 November at the prime minister’s Model Town residence in Lahore.
The route the sources describe
Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz sources told The News the two leaders worked through the legal and constitutional process for a referendum on creating more provinces. The proposal is not new: it is the referendum proposal Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi floated on Thursday. What is new is the machinery the sources say is now prepared.
The sources said the government has completed its homework on a procedure under Clause 6 of Article 48, which lets the prime minister seek Parliament’s permission for a referendum on an issue of national importance. Approval would come from a joint session of Parliament. If the government failed to win a majority there, it could ask the Federal Constitutional Court to settle the referendum’s constitutional status.
The sources also said Hamza Shehbaz had been given an assignment, meeting the Attorney General and the law minister. A resolution on new provinces was expected in the Balochistan Assembly in the coming weeks, and progress was judged necessary before the Senate elections expected in the first week of March 2027. The proposal would create 12 provinces from the present four.
The sources said the PML-N will wait and see: it will watch the PPP and the PTI, and follow them if both back the proposal. The PTI has started its own internal debate and has not said whether it will back a constitutional amendment.
The record that says nothing
The Prime Minister’s Office statement records something else entirely. It says the two leaders discussed the country’s overall political, economic and security situation, that the prime minister briefed the president on his Turkiye visit and the $188bn climate ask Pakistan took to COP31, and that both reaffirmed their commitment to coalition cooperation. It mentions no provinces, no referendum and no procedure.
A senator who was in the room gave a third version. Saleem Mandviwalla told The Express Tribune that new provinces had not been discussed at all and the PPP had yet to take a position. He described a conversation about the country, sugar prices, wheat imports and keeping the coalition intact.
The two accounts cannot be reconciled from the public record, and until a procedure is published the joint-session route is a plan described by unnamed sources, not a decision on paper.
The one line the accounts share
Dawn reported, citing official sources, that the two leaders agreed any move must strictly follow the Constitution and that Parliament cannot be bypassed. The majority in Parliament will decide whether a referendum is held and what its questions should be. Without consensus, the report said, the matter cannot move an inch.
President Zardari made it clear the PPP stands by the Sindh Assembly’s unanimous resolution against dividing Sindh. Dawn’s editorial argued a referendum “will not clear the constitutional hurdle” and is “not thought through”.
The deadline arithmetic
The March 2027 date is what turns the debate into a timetable. Senate elections are expected in the first week of March 2027, roughly fifteen weeks from now. In that window the route needs a Balochistan resolution, a joint-session majority, a referendum law, and then an amendment passed by two-thirds majorities in both houses and the affected assemblies.
None of that has happened. No referendum rules, draft amendment or timetable have been published. Pakistan has no referendum law for a civilian government: the only two referendums, in 1984 and 2002, were ordered by military rulers. Whether Article 239 even permits carving new provinces out of existing ones has been before the Lahore High Court since 2011.
The meeting also discussed the operation against terrorism in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, days after the Kolpur raid and the drone attack on the N-40.
What happens next
Three tests will tell whether the Lahore meeting was a roadmap or another round of debate. The first is the Balochistan Assembly: a resolution there would be the first concrete step. The second is paper: referendum rules, a draft amendment or a timetable. The third is the parties: the PML-N will follow rather than lead, the PTI has not decided, and the PPP’s line on Sindh has not moved.
Until one of those tests is passed, the position is simple. A referendum has been proposed, a procedure described by unnamed sources, and a meeting has produced three versions of itself. No referendum, and no new province, without Parliament, and Parliament has not yet been asked.
