Tariq Mahmood Awan
Punjab’s Political Blindness and the Question of Pakistan’s Federal Survival Pakistan’s most serious political problem is not that it contains many nations. That is not the problem. The problem is that its largest nation, the Punjabi nation, has become the most indifferent to its own national identity. Look across Pakistan’s constituent peoples and the contrast is impossible to miss. Sindhis, Baloch, Pashtuns, Kashmiris, Seraikis, Gilgitis, and Bengalis all carry a living emotional and political relationship with their language, their history, their land. The Punjabi collective consciousness, by comparison, remains strangely hollow on precisely this question. That hollowness is not incidental. It is one of the central reasons Pakistan’s federal politics has remained in permanent crisis.
This is not merely a cultural matter. It is historical, political and psychological all at once. Look at Punjab’s own history and you find that Muslim, Sikh and Hindu Punjabis shared a long political struggle on the same soil, yet religion rather than language or geography became the basis of political identity. Muslim Punjabis located their political survival in Islam. Sikhs found theirs in Sikh religious identity. Hindu Punjabis anchored themselves in their own religious and civilisational world. The consequence was that Punjabiyat, a complete political philosophy rooted in shared Punjabi identity, never fully developed. It was crowded out before it could grow.
At the time of Partition, Muslim Punjabis identified themselves primarily as Muslims rather than as Punjabis. The same logic held on the other side. After Pakistan was created, this tendency deepened rather than corrected itself. Punjabi Muslim elites moved into the bureaucracy, the military, the judiciary, academia and the technocracy. They advanced professionally and institutionally, but the federalist sensibility, the awareness of national diversity and the respect for other identities, remained weak in their political consciousness. Partly this was because Punjab had relatively better educational opportunities under colonial administration. Partly it was because the centres of state power were geographically closer to Punjab. Partly it was the accumulated weight of administrative preference during the colonial period. These were not conspiracies. They were structural advantages that produced a particular kind of political psychology.
The trouble began when this Punjab-dominant state mind started seeing Pakistan not as a federation but as a centralised unitary state. The Punjabi establishment appears to have assumed, consciously or otherwise, that all the other peoples would gradually shed their separate identities and merge into a uniform Pakistani nation. No successful federation in the world operates on that assumption. In the United States, Canada, India, Switzerland or Belgium, citizens share a common state identity while national, ethnic and linguistic identities remain intact alongside it. Being Pakistani is a constitutional and civic identity. Being Sindhi, Baloch, Pashtun, Punjabi or Kashmiri is a historical and human reality. You cannot legislate it away. You cannot absorb it into a slogan.
Pakistan learned this first in Bengal. When the majority population of East Pakistan demanded protection of their language, their culture and their political rights, the state read it as a threat to its own narrative. The imposition of Urdu as the sole national language deepened the wound. Urdu was not the mother tongue of any major constituent unit of Pakistan. Bengali nationhood felt itself excluded from the very state it had helped create. The result was the break-up of 1971. And yet Punjab did not draw the full lesson from that catastrophe. Instead, Urdu replaced Punjabi in Punjab itself, because the idea of Punjabi nationhood had never taken deep enough root in the Punjabi Muslim subconscious. Punjabis have invoked Punjabi identity when it has served material interests. As a sustained political philosophy, it has remained underdeveloped.
The tragedy is that the lessons of 1971 were not fully absorbed. Today, Sindh carries a deep sense of deprivation. Balochistan contains active separatist movements. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is unsettled on questions of identity and resources. Gilgit-Baltistan and Kashmir carry their own unresolved political complexities. At the root of all these crises lies not only the distribution of resources but the unresolved question of identity itself. These are not separate problems. They share a common cause.
The deepest complication within the Punjabi political mind is that it remains confused about its own identity. The emotional relationship with Punjabi language, history, culture and geography that exists naturally in other nationalities has not formed with the same force in Punjab. Punjab’s revolutionary figures, its Sufi tradition, its cultural heroes, its historical struggles do not enter the collective national consciousness with the same weight as religious references or external historical narratives. The result is an elite psychology that views identity diversity with suspicion rather than confidence.
It would be unfair to say that Punjab is consciously working against the other peoples of Pakistan. That is not the argument. The argument is that Punjab’s political psychology has consistently failed to develop genuine federal sensitivity. Because Punjabis have historically dominated state institutions and power centres, their mental habits have shaped state policy. An elite that considers identity unimportant will inevitably build a centralising state. And a centralising state cannot hold together a society as diverse as Pakistan. Only genuine federalism can do that.
Pakistan needs a new intellectual direction. Punjab must begin by understanding itself. Being Punjabi is not opposed to Pakistan. It is part of Pakistan’s federal reality. When Punjab honestly acknowledges its own language, history and culture, it will be better placed to respect what others carry. That acknowledgment is the beginning of real federalism.
Pakistan must become a state where every people feels safe within its own identity. Federation is not only a constitutional arrangement. It is a psychological compact. As long as the powerful within the state do not understand that nations live through their language, their culture, their geography and their history, political harmony inside Pakistan will remain out of reach.
Pakistan’s survival lies in a strong federation. And a strong federation is only possible when Punjab seriously revisits its own political psychology. Because Pakistan’s problem is not only the restlessness of the smaller nations. It is equally the insensitivity of the largest one.
