Pakistan and Nationism

I wrote in one of my Ilogs about Qaid E Azam's Speech on 23 March 1940 at Manto Park Lahore. My father had attended that gathering and he noted in his copy,

"Pakistan is a Nation and now must have defined Boundaries"

I also theorized in my essay on Civil Society of Pakistan by writing that,

"Pakistani civil society is distinct in its evolution. It took birth much before the geography of Pakistan was drawn" (http://www.chowk.com/articles/7674).

With the resignation of the President, much is being discussed on ethnic lines and I see a battle line being drawn by supporters of MQM and Non MQM. If one was to agree on the politics of vendetta, it is acceptable on the margins of relevance. It may be tolerable but certainly not desirable.

Nonetheless, this is a phase that we as Pakistanis will have to weather in order to form the true construct of a Nation.

But one point is clear. If we accept Qaid’s logic of Nation before a Boundary, the Pakistaniat existed in the hearts and minds of millions of people who subsequently migrated to East and West Pakistan. MQM is one such group that is quickly metamorphosing into the mainstream. This is what happened to John Brown, Likud and very recently Ireland, PLO and Hammas. It will also happen here.

Below, I am producing some parts of my essay to support what I mean by all this.

“The state primarily belongs to the realm of geography, governance and political systems. The Nation is the psychological approximate of oneness comprising abstracts like benefits, ideologies, aspirations, patriotism and emotional identity with the State……..Because civil society is an evolving concept, it embraces an entire range of assumptions and facts that are indispensable preconditions for democracy……..At the conceptual level, the state is a discrete phenomenon, which either exists or does not, with reference to a people and territory. The ‘nation’ in contrast, is a variable on a continuum. It moves through a non-linear process of constructions and reconstructions and does not need a state to survive. The delicate linkage between the state and its people is primarily based on political economy and ideologies. The state-society relations need to create legitimate institutional spaces and structures for the regulated articulation and resolution of conflicting and competing interests and values of the whole range of structural categories that compose the state. The process involves the sharing and shaping of power and the distribution of material and non-material resources among contending social and political forces. The very existence of conflicts within a state indicates that the mere establishment or existence of a state does not necessarily mean that the state is a crystallised nation-state. The process of nation building is seldom a unilateral evolution. However, only when ‘nationalism’ culminates into a state does the nation emerge congruent with the state. It then has to go through the crystallisation test to find out its ‘score’ on the solidity of its nationhood. This constitutes the society centred project of nation building�. Then it is Nationism.

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