Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [153]
As far as personal pride and identity are concerned, to be a Sayyid usually comprehensively trumps being a Punjabi or a Sindhi.
Many of the great landowning families of Sindh and southern Punjab are the descendants of Baloch tribesmen who conquered the local peasantry centuries ago, still speak Baloch at home, and owe allegiance to saints whose following is as widely spread as the Baloch tribal migrations which shaped these local societies.
As for the Pathans, as will be described in Chapter 10, though they have a very strong ethnic identity, their deep and rivalrous tribal allegiances and their division between Pakistan and Afghanistan mean that they have never been able to turn this into a strong modern nationalism – something in which they resemble certain other tribal ethnicities such as the Somalis.
Finally, Karachi, the country’s greatest city, is itself a major source of unity, since it includes not only indigenous Sindhis and Mohajirs from India, but also huge populations of Punjabis and Pathans. In fact, Karachi is the third largest Pathan city after Kabul and Peshawar, and probably the fourth or fifth largest Punjabi city. More Baloch may live in Karachi than live in Balochistan. These different populations in Karachi often loathe each other, but they also depend on the city for their livelihoods, and their more responsible (or self-interested) leaders and the businessmen who fund them do not want to destroy those livelihoods for the sake of nationalist dreams.
In Europe, the USA and Japan during the nineteenth century it was above all the modern state education system that deliberately created a sense of nationhood among the ordinary people of these countries, most of whom had previously had little sense of belonging to any identity beyond their village, region, local religious allegiance and kinship group.4 In Pakistan, state education barely reaches most of the population; and education in the religious schools or madrasahs obviously influences people more to a sense of being part of the universal Muslim world community or Ummah than to a sense of being Pakistanis – just as the Church schools of medieval Europe were designed to turn boys into Catholics, not into Germans or French.
But then none of the different bits of Pakistan’s education system is designed to make children into Sindhis or Punjabis either. So it would probably be wrong to see Pakistan as necessarily following a classical Western course in this matter, or to assume that because Pakistan’s national identity is weak, other, inherently stronger identities are waiting in the wings to break the country up.
Rather, therefore, than an early disintegration, the greatest threat would once again seem to be that long-term ecological degradation – especially in the area of water resources – will over time so increase tensions between different regions, and so reduce the ability of the regional elites to contain these tensions, that national government becomes unworkable. By this stage the situation may have become so bad that effective provincial government will also be unworkable.
DIFFERENT PUNJABS
In the case of Punjab, not only the great majority of the Punjabi establishment but a great many ordinary Punjabis identify their provincial identity with that of Pakistan as a whole; and this identification is one of the things which makes writing about Punjabi identity and Punjabi attitudes to Pakistan so difficult. Apart from the fact that there are simply so many more Punjabis than others, and of more varied kinds, the identities of most of Pakistan’s other nationalities are to a considerable extent shaped by their differences with the Punjabis (except for the Mohajirs), and their ambiguous relationship with the Pakistani state.
Many Punjabis, by contrast, believe that they are the state, and if they define themselves against anybody else, it is against India. An adviser to Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif with whom I spoke