The Antidote to Pakistan’s Identity Crisis

Pakistan came into being amidst the cataclysmic partition of India. This country had been demanded Muslims living in Muslim majority areas of North-Western and North-Eastern parts of India. However, it soon became clear that the regions that came to constitute Pakistan included many diverse people with varying beliefs, languages, and cultural heritage.

Despite this, the predominantly Punjabi military-bureaucratic state forcefully tried to assert a particular strand of identity on its people that revolved around Islam. This alone proved to be insufficient in terms of a project of nation-building, evident in the rejection of this monolithic project by people from Bengal, Balochistan, Sindh, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Pakistan’s ruling elites continue to look towards other nations and cultures for a story of our own identity, borrowing from Arabs to Turks. This project will continue to fail till such a time when the Pakistani project of identity is rooted in its own soil, history, heritage, and diversity.