In fragmented societies, recruitment into the civilian bureaucracy has always proved a locus of contention. To alleviate state-society tensions, governments often sought to expand bureaucratic recruitment to absorb competing elite groups into power arrangements, from Lebanon, Cyprus, and Northern Ireland, to Kenya and China (McGarry & O’Leary 1999, Hood & Lodge 2006, 34-36, Hassan 2020, Liu 2021). Quota systems have especially been employed as a nation-building tool whereby critical constituencies’ “passive representation” in the administration is expected to generate loyalty to the state and regime longevity (Mosher 1968, Van de Walle & Scott 2009). Designed to alleviate the domination of one group in the state, positive discrimination instruments are meant to supplant inherited patronage-based arrangements, but also to compensate for the limits of merit-based examinations that have disproportionately favored certain groups, particularly in postcolonial states (Kuipers 2022). After the 1947 partition of British India, its powerful bureaucracy formed the backbone of Pakistan’s nascent state. In 1948, a provincial quota system was introduced for the recruitment into the civil service, ambitioning to “make the nation” more efficiently than poorly institutionalized party politics. Contentious quota politics, whereby misrepresented ethno-linguistic groups (Bengalis, rural Sindhis, Baluchis) demanded quota reforms, ultimately made a quota system be enshrined in the 1973 Constitution. Scheduled for a period of ten years, it was however extended for twenty, then forty years, deemed ineffective due to persisting inter-provincial disparities in economic and educational development. The paper investigates the failure of the quota system to democratize Pakistan’s upper civil service. To do so, it unpacks unexploited administrative records that compile family profiles, educational trajectories, and examination results of successful candidates to the civil service exam (1973-2021). It particularly investigates two of the most powerful bureaucratic cadres: the Pakistan Administrative Service, whose members staff Pakistan’s territorial, provincial, then federal administrations (N=1003), and the foreign service (N=673). Complemented by eight-months of fieldwork in Pakistan’s administrations and bureaucratic training institutions, the paper shows that the quota system was never designed to alleviate social inequalities to access state positions, but rather functioned as a mechanism whereby provincial elites seek to forge a consociational distribution of power and uphold elite status within their own province. Put differently, it suggests that nation-building in Pakistan has consistently been based on mitigating provincial-based rather than class-based struggle, perceived harmful to state-building. It ultimately accounts for the reproduction of the Pakistan bureaucracy’s authoritarian and counter-revolutionary tendency until today.