As Dave mentioned, there is a lively WhatsApp group of BP authors and editors, and it inevitably shapes the comment ecosystem. But one comment on the blog stood out:
âThe very foundation of Pakistan is an anti-position. What is not India is Pakistan. So isnât it obvious?â
Itâs an extraordinarily crisp description of Pakistani identity-building. What is not India is Pakistan. That is not a slur; it is, in many ways, a psychologically accurate frame for how the state narrates itself.
What I increasingly find misplaced on this blog is the recurring assumption that Pakistanis are somehow âIndians-in-waiting,â or that Punjab is âWest Punjab,â Pakistan âNorthwest India,â or Bangladesh âEast Bengal.â These are irredentist projections that simply do not match lived identities. This is not âNorth Koreaâ or âEast Germany,â where both sides continue to imagine themselves as fragments of one common nation.
Yes, Pakistan consumes Bollywood and Hindi music, which themselves derive from Mughal and Indo-Persian syncretic traditions. Yes, Pakistan is culturally embedded in the greater Indo-Islamic civilizational sphere. But emotionally, Pakistan has severed itself from the Indian Subcontinent as a cohesive landscape. It has constructed a hybrid identity; part Turko-Persian, part Islamic internationalist, part anti-India.
I donât personally agree with this move, and my own trajectory has been toward a strong Hinducised, Dharmic identification. But my view is irrelevant here. What matters is that Pakistani identity is defined negatively; as the commentator put it, âWhat is not India is Pakistan.â
Whether that is healthy or sustainable is another matter. But identities can persist in unhealthy configurations for a very long time; the stock market can be irrational longer than your liquidity can survive.
Being ‘Not India’ is something Pakistan has worked hard to inculcate. Since inception. And by all accounts succeeded.
Identity discussions generate a lot of ‘heat’ to borrow your metaphor, but in some ways are not as important. What matters is affordability. You already alluded to that in your post.
Ok, great. You are NOT Indian. You are something else. Then what?
The problem for the Pakistani nation state is that it has handed over the keys to the kingdom to an organization that is fixated on re-litigating partition in ways that are simply impossible for Pakistan to prosecute. And the incentives in a non-democratic state are never going to be aligned to prevent this focus to shift.
Paradoxically, this has allowed growing challenges to Pakistani identity to fester – in ways expected and unexpected. From the former state of Kalat, to the Pashtun Tahufuz movement.
Rewind a few decades back and it was India that was seen as the one with greater risk of balkanization. How the historical table turns. Some of it is accident. A lot of it is an outcome of a whole series of choices.
Both India and Pakistan have hit several forks in the road since independence. India mortgaged its gold reserves, but then made some difficult choices. Its army endured a decade or longer of “austerity measures” – something that’s …unthinkable in the Pakistan project side of things.
Pakistan has had its own forks, from 1971, to 9/11, to seemingly every coup and half-coup. But the choices that have been made? Bit by bit, step by step – they’ve pushed the Pakistani state further along the road to circular debt and seemingly never ending perdition.
Can things change? Even with the same entity at the helm. who knows. After all, the CCP killed millions of its own citizens in the cultural revolution but then was able to pivot and deliver economic prosperity. I’m sure PakMil views itself along similar lines. The praetorian savior that will firewall Pakistan from collapse, “keep enemy India at bay” and lead it back to glory.
Whether we like it or not, Pakistan is an ideological state. That ideology is the Two Nation Theory– the idea that the Muslims of British India were not a minority but a nation and thus needed their own nation-state. One could argue that without this ideology there is no point to Pakistan. What is the difference between a Pakistani Punjabi (60% of our population) and an Indian Punjabi other than the fact that the Pakistani Punjabi is Muslim and the Indian Punjabi is Hindu or Sikh?
Certainly immediately after Partition, the idea was that Pakistan is the “not India”. In my own dissertation, I wrote about the decline of Hindustani music in Pakistan and how this was in part because genres like khayal and dhrupad were considered “Hindu” and thus ceded to India. This is despite the fact that khayal developed in the Mughal courts under Muslim patronage.
I personally think that we should be move beyond TNT. Pakistan has now existed for almost eight decades. We don’t need to define ourselves with reference to India. We should own all the history that existed on the land that is now Pakistan.
What people on this blog refuse to understand is that the hostility doesn’t go only one way. Every time the Indian PM tells Muslims to “go to Pakistan”, every time a Muslim is lynched in India, every “Operation Sindoor” only serves to strengthen the hold of “PakMil” in Pakistan. Hindutva is the mirror image of TNT.
Blaming India, or hyping up random bits of anecdotal incidents in India, isn’t going to bail the Pakistani economy out. It will however serve as distraction while the kleptocrats keep playing musical chairs.
At some point, Pakistanis need to take responsibility for the shambolic state they find themselves in. Or continue wallowing in it.