IT has been 79 years since Pakistan was brought into being. Much water has passed under the proverbial bridge, but basic contradictions around national identity, resources and representation, and relations with neighbouring countries are as acute as they were in 1947. At the heart of it is the ahistorical notion that the subcontinent’s Muslims are a timeless nation with social mores and interests distinct from Hindus. East Pakistan’s secession in 1971 could have spurred a fundamental reformulation, but the state chose to reinforce this narrative.
The rise of Hindutva in recent years, and the events of May 2025 in particular, have given state ideologues a new lease on life. Yet the treatment of Pakistan’s peripheries continues to provide fuel for competing national claims amongst politicised youth across numerous geographies. These voices remain at best unheard and at worst suppressed. And so, Pakistan remains beset by a fundamental paradox — a state that insists on projecting itself as a Muslim power at home and abroad even as a significant cross-section of ethnic-linguistic groups and non-Muslims assert entirely different ideological claims.
This, of course, isn’t just a matter of identity. It’s also about power and resources. The modern nation-state is a constructed entity everywhere, not just in Pakistan. But in many other cases, diverse ethnic-linguistic, religious and other communities have made compromises over national identity because they have devised more or less acceptable power-sharing arrangements.
Take Malaysia, for instance. Big non-Muslim Chinese and Indian minority populations that enjoy significant economic privilege have acquiesced to a political order which enshrines the supremacy of the Malay majority. Mandarin and Tamil are not national languages, but enjoy constitutional protection. The Malaysian system has many faults, including a significant Malay underclass in rural peripheries and a penchant for authoritarianism, but as messy postcolonial systems of power go, it certainly functions better than what exists in Pakistan.
Indeed, Pakistan has virtually no functioning representative institutions; its unelected apparatuses of state gobble up resources in peripheral regions and dispossess the wretched of the earth with reckless abandon. Regime ideologues spew rhetoric about sardars and nawabs who deprive their people, while devising hare-brained schemes to replace existing provinces with dozens of administrative units themselves.
Pakistan faces a fundamental paradox.
In a nutshell, a militarised ruling class refuses to share power with even the elites of the historical peripheries, yet it struggles to keep every pliant regime intact for a few years before unceremoniously removing the incumbent bourgeois motley crew and replacing it with another.
All of this carries on almost 80 years after it started on the back of geography. There remains a conviction within the establishment that palace intrigues and dumbing down of the masses are viable strategies because the US, China, Gulf kingdoms and other benefactors are invested in keeping the security-centric state afloat. In fact, the ordinary Pakistani has become weighed down by suffocating debt and a completely unproductive formal economy.
Dependence on geostrategic rents coexists with the framing of our immediate neighbours as adversaries. Of course, rapacious, hate-mongering ruling regimes in India and Afghanistan do the cause of regional peace no favour. Indeed, on Aug 15, the Indian establishment will do its hyper-nationalist jig too, pretending that it is free of internal dissidents from occupied Kashmir to Nagaland in the form of cockroaches or whatever else.
In the same vein, the state has imposed a rinse and repeat project upon long-suffering peripheries and working people in this country. Oppression and exploitation are rationalised under the guise of stamping out foreign conspiracy — almost inevitably hatched in India or Afghanistan. The ‘enemies’ within, however, have multiplied over time; this, above all, is an indictment of a decrepit system kept afloat by small-minded rulers who only desire power and wealth. All while an exceedingly young population is deprived of basic human needs and liberties.
What, then, are the prospects for resolution of Pakistan’s tortured national question? Not high, but there are still many in our midst who continue the struggle for genuine decolonisation. It will be a tall order to create the conditions for it, but we need a plurinational social contract that treats all of Pakistan’s constituent peoples as equals.
Resources bequeathed to us by nature must be used to meet the needs of all, including future generations. And there must be peace with our neighbours. It’s only then that the self-proclaimed guardians will be subject to the popular will.
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
Published in Dawn, August 14th, 2026
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