Pakistan’s Inner Logic

On Nivedita & Archer’s joint request (Mamnoon/Tashakor/Merci for the kind words); I’m going to expand on my comment:

“Kabir is definitely right. Ethnicity in Pakistan is complex; there are three tiers of society. The English speaking elite (Imran is part of that so is Kabir), who are “Pakistanis” and ethnicity isn’t really reflected on…”

This comment, which the BP archives have tons of similar posts on (BP was venerable even in 2014), sketches the bones of Pakistan’s sociological map. But what lies beneath the skin?

Pakistan is feudal; India is not.

That one statement alone explains much. Landholding elites dominate politics, rural economies still function on patronage, and class mobility is rare. Caste, though “denied,” is real and sharper, in some ways, than it could ever be in India (the reservation system does not really exist in Pakistan except for religious minorities but not for socio-economic castes). Pakistanis can sniff out class in one another with a dexterity that’s probably only matched in the United Kingdom, which is the home of class stratification (I remember reading Dorian Gray in Karachi in the early millennium and shocked how similar late Victorian early Edwardian England was).

The postcolonial state froze itself in amber. There has never been a serious leftist rupture, excepting 1971’s successful Bengali revolution. Even Imran Khan, who styled himself a reformist, is a product of elite schools, Aitchison College, Oxford, and aristocratic lineage. His “Islamic socialism” was only ever viable because Pakistanis still believe in myths of the benevolent landlord.

And yet, Pakistanis sometimes seem happier than their Indian counterparts, even if not remotely successful. Why?

Hypnosis, Feudalism, and Incomplete Modernity: 

Because they haven’t tasted the acid of modernity. Because they haven’t seen their old gods fall. Because they haven’t been told their languages and cultures are “vernacular.” Because they never truly faced the annihilation of the rural.

Modernity arrived, yes; on phones, through Instagram, in the form of Turkish serials and Gulf remittances. But the deep structure of Pakistan remains unshaken and so is their psyche; it is unbroken (in fact post-Pahalgam has reinforced it, the downed planes are a histrionic victory of sorts). High birth rates persist. Social media saturates the culture, yet the psyche resists exactly as George Orwell touched on in his seminal England essay:

but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.

Something in the Pakistani imagination remains similarly untouched. That is why Iranian Baluchs find their Pakistan Baluch kin to be extremely conservative (whereas the former are not religious) and Indian Muslim wilt to the old-school Pakistani ways (a Pakistani, to a rule, will have a more traditional outlook to an Indian). An Urdu speaking Muslim in India will be more traditional (not necessarily religious) than a vernacular speaking Muslim (Malayee, Konkani or Tamil).

Call it religion. Call it Hindu-Muslim cultural memory. Call it a Western inoculation through elite schooling and overseas networks. But more than that, Pakistan is the only country in the world created to fervently believe its own borders.

It wanted to hypnotise itself. And it succeeded. Pakistan, more than any other nation, built a story for itself that had never existed before. Bharat, Iran, Israel, Arabia; these are real constructs. There never was a Pakistan but for a dream in Cambridge carried forward by the scions of Hindu converts (QeA and the Great Allama). Idea, theory and execution; it’s almost a perfect exercise in how to get a start-up off the ground.

The post-1971 Pakistan is only 54 years old, younger than many assume. In that moment, West Pakistan had to reimagine itself, not as a Muslim umbrella for all South Asians but as a fractured federation barely holding together its provinces. In truth, Pakistan and Bangladesh were both born in 1971. That’s when the fiction collapsed, and something new began.

And that fiction still holds power. It explains why “the Pakistani psyche is almost impossible to understand but completely transparent to insiders.” It’s shapeshifting but bounded. It’s not trying to become Arab or Turkish or Persian. It is something else; something imagined, yes, but rooted. Far more rooted than Israel, for instance. Israel was forged from memory; Pakistan from living inheritance, with the plains of the Punjab, the waters of the Indus and the mountains of the Hindu Kush forming real definition..

That’s why when I make provocative statement that Urdu is a circumcised version of Brahmin culture; it is so “offensive.” My Shijrah goes to Arabia and Afghanistan (on my desi side) but I have “crossed over” to Hindu civilisation; whereas my forebears betrayed their Faith for a more Glorious one, I have betrayed my bloodline and civilisation for a more Grander one (much as I love Pakistan, I now see it as a subset of Bharat Mata)..

I’m not quite a Salman Rushdie; I’m partial to both Pakistan and Islam and even the Ummah but I don’t stake my future on any of them (nor have I defected to the West, which would at least be understandable).

But where Israel is drunk on supremacy, Pakistan swings wildly between inferiority and superiority complexes, between grand civilizational pride and endless national anxiety.

This context is critical to understanding Pakistan today. Its contradictions are stable. Its feudalism is structural. Its nationalism is both performative but permanent. And its modernity is half-swallowed; seen, but not digested.

So yes, Kabir is actually right; he is the Cassandra of Brown Pundits. But only someone inside can truly know how right and its cost (lost dreams, lost pride, lost decades in having to constantly service Great Powers).  

AMA compadres | unlike Kabir Bhai, I’m not angling for a fight and I’ll also sign off with a Namaste.