Following my conversation with Kabir; I mulled on the difference between criticising a state and fantasising about its dismemberment.
What should be the type of Critique?
Criticising a political party, a military institution, or a government’s failures is normal. It is necessary. Democracies depend on it. Even flawed democracies depend on it. Pakistan’s military can be criticised. India’s ruling party can be criticised. Iran’s clerical establishment can be criticised. No state is beyond scrutiny. But imagining the territorial breakup of a country, and doing so with visible satisfaction, is something else entirely.
Sacred States?
States are not debating societies. They are containers of memory, trauma, and blood. They are “almost” sacred spaces. For Pakistanis, 1971 is not an abstract lesson in federalism. It is a civilisational rupture. It was war, humiliation, loss of half the country, and a wound that still shapes the national psyche. For Indians, similar fantasies about Tamil Nadu, Punjab, or Kashmir breaking away would be equally triggering. Every nation has red lines embedded in its historical trauma.
Ex-USSR
When commentators casually speculate about Balochistan seceding, or Russian-speaking enclaves peeling off Moldova, or Armenia fragmenting further, they often treat territorial integrity as a chessboard variable. But for the people inside those borders, it is existential.
Geopolitically, fragmentation does not happen because Twitter wills it. States break when institutional weakness meets sustained external force. Ukraine is under invasion, not dissolving by civic boredom. Moldova and Georgia’s frozen conflicts are Russian projects. Armenia’s contraction followed military defeat. Sudan fractured along colonial fault lines and decades of civil war. Indonesia nearly broke in 1998, but the Javanese core held and re-consolidated.
Why States Collapse
The pattern is not that multiethnic states collapse. The pattern is weak institutions combined with sustained external pressure. States endure when they retain a functioning centre, fiscal capacity, coercive force, and often an external guarantor. They fracture when those fail simultaneously.
The Arab Spring Disaster
This is why the memory of the Arab Spring should sober any romanticism about state collapse. What began as domestic protest in several Arab states did not reliably yield stable reform. In multiple cases, the weakening of central authority created vacuums that were filled not by orderly democracy but by militia rule, proxy war, or prolonged instability. External intervention compounded internal fracture.
Why the Iranian Revolution Worked
The lesson is not that reform is undesirable. The lesson is that endogenous reform is structurally safer than exogenous rupture. Change imposed from outside often multiplies instability before it produces renewal; if renewal comes at all. That is why one can prefer gradual internal reform in Iran, for example, over externally engineered collapse. Sovereignty, however flawed, is still a stabilising framework.
A New State may not be a Fake State
There is also a double standard that creeps into this discourse. Some believe that because a country is “postcolonial” or “fragile,” its borders are negotiable in ways others’ are not. Yet no serious commentator cheerfully speculates about the dissolution of France, Germany, or Japan. Territorial integrity is treated as sacred in some cases and optional in others. That asymmetry breeds resentment.
Saffroniate need to let Pak breathe a little
A mature geopolitical culture distinguishes between critique and erasure. It recognises that sovereignty rests on political reality, not emotional approval. Pakistan does not cease to be legitimate because someone disputes its ideological foundations. India does not dissolve because someone critiques its democracy. Armenia is not fictional because it lost territory. Iran is not a laboratory for regime engineering.
Pakistan has a mature system of power distribution
States endure because they possess institutions, coercive capacity, fiscal systems, and external relationships. Pakistan has all four. Its party system is factionalised and regionalised — PPP in Sindh, PML in Punjab, PTI mobilising youth across provinces — but that diffusion is stabilising, not fatal. 1971 was an exceptional convergence of civil war, Indian intervention, and Cold War alignment. That configuration does not casually repeat.
Borders are real but can be unimagined
In a volatile global order — with Germany rearming, Japan recalibrating, Russia testing boundaries, and China underwriting corridors — the last thing serious analysis should indulge in is romanticism about dismemberment. Critique is legitimate. Breakup fantasies are unserious. Geopolitics requires sobriety. And sobriety begins with recognising that borders, however imperfect, are not toys.
Agreed.
My only caveat is that Kashmir is internationally recognized as disputed territory. There is a “Line of Control” and not an international border.
Balochistan is unequivocally a part of Pakistan. There is no debate about this. It is as unequivocally a part of Pakistan as Tamil Nadu is a part of India.
Your larger point is well taken. Basic decency demands that one respect the territorial integrity of nation-states. The Indian nationalists on this site love the Republic of India. I love the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. It’s incredibly rude and triggering to imagine the disintegration of someone’s nation.
yes but Kabir; Kashmir is never leaving India, not now not ever.
it’s likelihood is as much as Baluchistan, facts on the ground dictate that
despite international writ
My point is that International Law exists. Kashmir is not part of India. No country believes that. That is why the international community speaks of “Indian-Administered Kashmir”.
Balochistan is unequivocally a province of Pakistan. People on BP also like to bring up the Durand Line. The Durand Line is an international border not a ceasefire line.
Of course, with both India and Pakistan being nuclear states, I don’t imagine the ceasefire line changing anytime soon. But I will insist that it is a ceasefire line and not a border.
An Afghan perspective on the Durand line would likely differ, and quite strongly at that.
“Internationally recognized” is a vague term.
Tomorrow, India might recognize Balochistan as a separate country and it will be “internationally recognized”.
This is just absurdist .. Russia has recognised many de facto states
Is Balochistan subject to UN Resolutions? NO. Kashmir is.
Don’t be disingenuous.
Simla Agreement – a deal which by all accounts was incredibly generous to the defeated state of Pak, commits Pakistan to addressing J&K disput *bilaterally* – The UN resolutions on J&K – introduced by India, not Pak btw, are long defunct. Even the UN knows it.
Hanging your hat on “UN resolutions” isn’t the winning argument that you seem to think it is.
It is also incredibly rude to demand that Pakistani military – an entity with an incredibly long proven historical record of malfeasance, not be criticized, while you constantly plop a continuous stream of one-eyed blindly partisan critiques aimed at India. Its an attempt at monopolizing and ‘controlling’ discourse that is also triggering.
As XTM rightly points out –
>Pakistan’s military can be criticised. India’s ruling party can be criticised. Iran’s clerical establishment can be criticised. No state is beyond scrutiny.
I would in fact, embrace criticism of the current ruling establishment in India – there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit. Unfortunately instead of actual critiques, what we are subjected to mostly on BP is shrill OTT propaganda that is aimed more at reassuring Pakistani insecurities of the two-nation theory.
i) any multi ethnic state is liable to be split. brute force cannot hold for ever. there needs to be an underlying thread which keeps the factions united. for india it is hinduism, ( and its accommodation of others such as christians in the north east and muslims every where). for pakistan it is islam. but islam as it is not a ‘native’ faith of pakistan, is straining at tight leash to hold back the centrifugal forces of nationalism.
ii) i don’t see a pakistani ‘r s s’ which tries to take all in one umbrella.
iii) breaking of sudan and indonesia was historic as these were apart from india, the first countries to split having muslim central rule.
iv) syria ( for alwaites) , iraq ( for kurds) , periphery of fars in iran, will assert independence when the conditions are ripe.
Periphery of Fars in Iran???!???
Fars is the. historic core of Iran
While it is true that splitting up a state can be difficult, BLA, TTP and other affiliates can keep the Pakistani state so overwhelmed that it is unable to focus on reforms of any kind which allows India to peel away further.
In fact many sub-saharan African countries have begun to peel away.
Just like where India was in the late 2000s, a few African countries are where India was in the mid-late 2000s.
This feels disingenuous – Pakistan is not SSA.
But feel free to back up your claims with evidence?