Fire and the federation

For critics of Pakistan, much of what ails the country stems from the travails of its birth, the so-called original sin. Because it was carved out of the flank of the Indian Subcontinent with the help of the knife and the flame of Islamic nationalism, it was always destined to be permanently grappling with the effects of that impractical vision. Religion was a superimposed identity, a fake overlay, on a surface otherwise pockmarked by older, stronger claims defining groups that were strung together to constitute a Pakistani nation one fateful night in August 1947.

The creation of Bangladesh, in 1971, reinforced this view of Pakistan doomed to crash on the rocks of ethnic divisions, and since then most of the literature on the country's future has been steeped in doubt and dismay. This hand-wringing primarily concerns itself with what is commonly referred to as Pakistan's 'problem of national identity': a nuclear-armed country with a dramatic past and an unpredictable present that does not seem to have acquired the internal coherence to inspire confidence about its tomorrow. But this view, although with some merits, largely misses some remarkable changes that Pakistan has undergone over the last few decades – and which seem to have addressed, in the natural flow of events, the fundamental question about the place of the various sub-nationalities in the larger frame of Pakistani nationalism.