In standard narrations of Pakistan’s creation, considerable emphasis is devoted to the lack of material resources available for the new state. A state carved out of the subcontinent’s Eastern and Western agrarian, emerged on the map with a largely rural population, a miniscule industrial base, and pre-ordained conflicts on the division of British India’s monetary and military resources.

On the other hand, official historiography rarely talks about the uncertain cultural inheritance of the new state. This is expected, given that the Pakistani nationalist reading of Partition sees a pre-existing Muslim nation, i.e. a unified cultural entity, succeeding in obtaining a political and territorial home for itself.

In an excellent new volume, ‘Qaum, Mulk, Sultanat: Citizenship and National Belonging in Pakistan’, Ali Usman Qasmi complicates such linear accounts and lays out how early uncertainties of cultural statehood were navigated by the state elite: how they converged on various rituals and symbols, on the standardization of language, on the elevation of Muslim celebrations to state-sanctioned ones, and on the political tensions these acts of ‘nation-building’ set-off, especially on communal and ethnic lines.

As an invariable consequence of these processes, ethno-nationalist movements provided the most forceful political critiques to top-down, authoritarian nation building. 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh stands out as the heightened culmination of one such pushback, but recurring instability in Balochistan, and past troubles in Sindh and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa are outcomes of the same basic tension.

Given its tumultuous, conflict-ridden history, what does the future of Pakistani national identity look like? It is my (cautious) contention that the largely state-led experiment of nation-building is closer to its stated objective, albeit unevenly, than it has at any point in the past eight decades.

The unevenness of a Pakistaniat defined along language standardization, Muslim-ness, and adherence to the state has been a feature from day one. State elites, middle class Punjabis, and Urdu-speaking migrants were early proponents, while all others expressed varying degrees of scepticism. Today, that unevenness is most forcibly visible in the nationalist challenge among the Baloch and troubles along the Durand Line. But it is telling that all other politicized groups have been, at least, partially incorporated into a national community.

Sindhi elites and middle classes, represented through the PPP, may reject religio-communal identity and language homogeneity, but accept adherence to the state, especially in its federalized form after the 18th amendment. Ironically, the federal government today, along with its centralizing tendencies is propped up partly by the support offered by Sindh’s ruling party.

Pashtun nationalism stands mostly marginalized from mainstream politics. Its most visible manifestation, the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement, has been coercively sequestered into a localized, rights-based entity in the tribal belt. On the other hand, populations of the Peshawar and Malakand regions – the so-called Pashtun heartland – act as the load-bearing pillar for a party, which, other than being the country’s most popular, is also the biggest proponent for a centralized political system.

Elsewhere, a third generation of North and Central Punjabis remains culturally cocooned in Pakistaniat’s fold, while Seraiki and Muhajir nationalism is occupied in efforts to carve out political and cultural space within a federal structure.

How did this uneven yet substantive subduing of ethnonationalist assertion come about? Structurally, several factors can be identified. The past few decades have seen the strengthening of a national market, characterized by significant internal migration (especially Pashtun migration to Punjab and Karachi), increasing shared economic stakes across different regions. Simultaneously, the development of a country-wide media ecosystem – both traditional and digital – has helped generate shared practices of consumption, common political and cultural dispositions, and forms of self-identification.

Much of this has been aided by global transformations. Islamophobia, imperial aggression in the region, and the recent Palestinian conflict, has helped accentuate and politicize religious aspects of official Pakistani identity, plausibly at the cost of more localized, language-based attachments. Similarly, migrations abroad produce a Pakistani ‘diasporic’ culture based on religion, food, popular entertainment, and sentiments of territorial attachment that is subsequently imported back into the country.

Domestically, state-sanctioned efforts to forge national identity through curriculum content have been fairly successful. Urdu is now entrenched as a mutually legible language across the country. And nationalist historiography of the Partition, the Two-Nation theory, and ideas of Muslim nationhood, remain the standard account for large swathes of the formally educated classes across nearly all ethno-linguistic groups.

But perhaps the most recent, and noteworthy, catalyst is that for the first time ever, custodianship of who gets to define and perpetuate a national identity seems to have passed from the military establishment to a civilian political entity in the form of Imran Khan’s PTI. Conflict between the two since 2022 has led to the wholesale endorsement of the PTI’s politics by the country’s middle-classes, which in earlier periods acted as the core source of social support for both entities. For the first time in such large numbers, segments historically aligned with the military’s statist vision of the polity are questioning the institution’s primacy on state functioning, as well as its narrations of both past and present.

It is now common to see young social media users pose questions around the presidential election of 1965, the secession of Bangladesh, troubles in Balochistan, and (surreal) commemorations of what happened on 9th May 2023. Such critiques, till quite recently, were the preserve of marginalized ethno-nationalist or progressive segments.

The populist outflanking of the military is providing widespread, civilian legitimacy to core ideas of Pakistaniat that remain central to the PTI’s ideology, such as adherence to a strong centralized state, pan-Islamic identity, and hawkishness towards India. In essence, the top-down, authoritarian nation-building project is closer than ever to forging firm, societal roots through a political entity that can plausibly claim electoral legitimacy.