ABSTRACT
When the British colonisers consolidated Northern India as part of their colonial empire, they found themselves unable to manage the mutinous tribes of the Northwest and Southwest frontier. The British, therefore came to a working agreement of a ‘live and let live’ policy in what came to be known as ‘Tribal Areas’. The inhabitants of this region of Pakistan are ethnically and linguistically distinct from the rest of the country, belonging mostly to the Pukhtun-Afghan race (although the Baluch also form part of the tribals of Baluchistan). Fifty-three years after the departure of the colonisers, the legacy of treating the Tribal Areas as a separate entity with its own governance structures persists, as does its abject state of legal, social and economic neglect.
