State Versus Nations in Pakistan

Book excerpt: The present monograph traces the origins of the Pakistani state and the processes that encouraged the state-sponsored efforts to build a Pakistani nation, and seeks to isolate various problems associated with such nation-building efforts. It introduces various conceptual categories of state, nation, nation-state and state-nation, and identifies the superfluity in the argument that state and nation must be coterminous for a state to survive, an argument which has been unquestioningly taken up by the leaders of the India and Pakistan in their nation-building endeavors. Based on such a proposition, the prolonged effort of the Pakistani state to impose an artificial identity, privileging certain markers of nationalism unacceptable to local identities, has resulted in demands of the latter for secession and self-determination. The monograph tries to identify and compare the separate markers of state-nationalism and the Sindhi, Baloch and Pakhtun identities, and argues that dissonances among the way these identities are projected and internalized would continue to make the process of nation-building difficult for the elite in Pakistan. It recognizes the potential of the Pakistani state to evolve a neutral, and territory-based civic-nationalism as an antidote to the ongoing confrontation between the state and the 'nations', but concludes that the present power-elite in Pakistan may not be ready for such a transformational change in its outlook.