Who are we NOT?

Books upon books can be written about Pakistan's identity crisis.

A state created 60 years ago, on a piece of land that has hosted civilization for centuries. A country created in the name of one religion, yet being home to people and sacred sites of other faiths. Created for Muslims of South Asia, forgetting momentarily that Islam, however much some religious wackos may say, and what the creation of Bangladesh proved, is not and can never be the sole source of identity for the various ethnicities that span Pakistan's length.

Sure, we have always been faced with an identity crisis. Who the hell are we exactly? What are our anthropological origins, as Pakistanis? No one knows, and I have no intention of even speculating an answer - more out of fear that there probably isn't one.

But it is interesting to note that given the absence of even a vaguely convincing answer to our identity, we have worked over the past decades in improvising an answer by looking at nations outside our borders and then work our way inwards. If by merely observing ourselves leads to nothing, we have had to look at others and see how are we different.

We as a nation define ourselves from the outside in.

What do I mean by that? Let's take India, from which we separated and are permanently wary of being absorbed into (even though absorbing Pakistan into itself would be the last thing India would want). Through our post-independence history, we have gradually tried to shut ourselves out from anything that India seems to identify with. This tendency is particularly noticeable in culture, but has also permeated into our political ideology, social approach, economic orientation, even architecture! I am not mentioning foreign policy because I am trying to focus on the deliberate official moulding of our internal dynamics, even though our foreign policy has been virulently and blindly do-the-opposite-to-what-India-does and has significant implications on our internal workings.

Over the years, we have decided we will not be secular like India (even at the official level); we will not initiate land reforms like India did; we will not shy away from having our armed forces interfere in politics even if Indian politicians are equally inept as ours; we will be as capitalist as we can possibly be, at the expense of obscene levels of inequality, to differentiate ourselves from the socialist economic structure next door; and we will build lego-like, insipid, boxed government buildings all over Islamabad lest any semblance of rich South Asian architecture makes our capital look vaguely Indian.

And where do I even begin with on the cultural crisis we have landed ourselves in? Indian movies are a no-no because we fear that our countrymen are so naive that they would unreservedly dance and sing away into a union with India. Even Indian television channels are now blacked out because those senseless saas-bahu soap operas are too much of a distraction from the unending Quranic recitals that we need to expound upon for our 'cultural invention.' And of course, singing and dancing are certainly not to be aired, because apparently Islam forbids it (can someone please remind them that bribery, honor killings, mistreatment of women and illiteracy are also prohibited in Islam, but we have no official state regulations on those). We have gotten to the extent of regulating our dress too: on official gatherings with foreign dignitaries, wearing saris is especially prohibited - never mind that our mothers and grandmothers have worn saris through their lives and never felt any less Pakistani.

Of course, it has proven to be a futile task. Nations have inherent identities based on a common language, culture, religion and historical experience. There can always be sub-groups within a nation, but those sub-groups most often share the overall historical trajectory of the larger nation.

I like to look at the former Yugoslavia. At the surface, it made sense for the South Slavs to establish a state that encompassed the various Slavic sub-groups: Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Montenegrins and Macedonians under one flag and authority. They shared variants of the same language, historically experienced the same colonial back and forth between the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans and collectively espoused the same goal of shedding their subservience to their neighbors. But after the creation of a South Slav state, and at the demise of a dictatorial lordship who is politically expedient, diplmatically suave and brutally repressive in keeping the sub-groups together, that artificial state discovered eventually its in-built weaknesses that led to anarchy and collapse surprisingly quickly upon the slightest deviation by one of the sub-groups.

I am not suggesting that the former Yugoslavia is or could be a primer to Pakistan. What I am saying is that if the South Slavs could not create a national identity for themselves over a period of 70+ years, can a Pakistani identity ever be created?

I have been struggling with answers. The easiest and most thoughtless answer is that Pakistani identity is based on Islam, simply because it has been disproved (East Pakistanis were Muslims too, and so are some Baluchis who would prefer separating) and it is inherently untrue (what about the millions of Christians and Hindus who are Pakistani citizens?).