Borders and constitutions may frame a state, but a shared collective memory gives it a soul. As Max Weber noted, the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence rests on legitimacy itself, which is measured through the lived experiences of its people. In Pakistan, this architecture is dangerously fragile, not because we lack a past, but because we have buried it beneath layers of denial, distortion, and elite-sponsored mythmaking by the right-wing. The forgetfulness isn’t accidental; it’s carved out of conscious political decisions. From the wilful erasure of the 1971 trauma to the Arabization of cultural identity, the state, in cahoots with crony capitalists and the religious right-wing, has curated a past that flatters power and erases dissent, leaving a rootless society allergic to introspection.
The prevailing state narrative of Pakistan’s creation is not rooted in history but mired in theology. It is presented as a linear inevitability, a moral culmination of centuries of estrangement and difference. This is not historical inquiry, but nationalist metaphysics. All ambiguities, contradictions, and counter-narratives are either omitted or pathologised. The emergence of Pakistan is not portrayed as the result of complex political negotiations, centre-periphery tussles, and colonial contingencies, but as a moment of divine will realised through a handful of sanctified figures. What is obscured in this narrative is the fragmented, negotiated, and often contested reality of Pakistan’s birth. The histories of Bengal, the intellectual and demographic core of Muslim politics, especially since 1905, Sindh and Balochistan, with their deep-rooted indigenous traditions, and the princely states coerced into accession, are not permitted to disrupt the polished symmetry of the official origin myth. The logical cement employed completely wipes away the narratives and struggles of those at the margins. The political diversity of the pre-partition era, the compromises, the dissensions, and the dissonances in competing visions are all flattened under the weight of ideological convenience.
There is no rupture in Pakistan’s national story more profound, and more resolutely denied, than the secession of East Pakistan in 1971. The dismemberment of the country, the slaughter in Dhaka and the exodus of millions are not merely inconvenient truths. Official historiography attributes the catastrophe to “foreign conspiracies,” absolving the state of its own catastrophic failures, such as the One Unit Plan, EBDO, an authoritarian Presidential system, and the consequent arbitrary nature of rule, leading to the emergence of the infamous 22 families. The electoral mandate of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, arguably the only truly democratic moment in our history, was crushed under boots and bullets. Operation Searchlight, a euphemism for one of the most brutal crackdowns in South Asian history, is nowhere in our textbooks. What kind of nation forgets the disintegration of half its body? One that prefers myth to memory.
Since the 1980s, Pakistan’s ideological project has undergone a radical narrowing. What began as a struggle for a Muslim-majority homeland to guard against majoritarian tyranny in a United India has been reimagined, through coercion and curricula, as an exclusionary Islamist republic. This mutation has entailed not only the persecution of religious minorities but the obliteration of memory itself. The rich Sufi and Maulai traditions of Punjab and Sindh, the shared civilizational heritage of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Buddhists, tand he aesthetic pluralism of Indus Valley civilisation have all been systematically stripped from our collective imagination. In their place, we are fed an anaemic, Arabized identity that bears little resemblance to our soil or sensibilities.
Textbooks now privilege tales of distant conquerors over indigenous saints. We revere Gaznavi but forget Bulleh Shah. We celebrate Mohammad bin Qasim but silence about Abdullah Shah Ghazi. Our youth does not know about the struggles and humanist philosophies of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, G. M. Syed or Hossein Shaheed Suhrawardy. This is not simply miseducation; it is cultural lobotomy. Promised in the 1940 Lahore Resolution and only partly realised through the 18th Amendment in 2010, provincial autonomy never translated into empowered local governments, as parties hoarded power at the provincial level. Only statist loyalists enter the national pantheon, yielding hollow, infallible, and politically inert saints. Conspicuously absent are the iconoclasts: the poets, the revolutionaries, the heretics of empire and orthodoxy. Where is Habib Jalib, whose verses electrified a generation against dictatorship in the global left-centric fashions of the 1960s and 1970s? Sanitised in the anthems in election rallies of catch-all parties across the political spectrum. Where is Manto, whose stories held up a mirror to our moral hypocrisy? Reduced to a cultural mascot, trotted out at literary festivals by the very class whose masquerades of piety he once smashed. Where is Fatima Jinnah beyond the ceremonial role of “Madar-e-Millat”? Absent, since the electoral rigging in the 1965 Presidential Elections and the shameless misogyny of the West Pakistani political class in their electioneering against her. Where is the left? The students? The trade unionist? The farmers? The feminists? The dissenters? Their absence is not an accident. It is a purge. And it reveals the state’s pathological fear of historical complexity. The dialectical tussle between state-led authoritarianism and popular resistance was never as charged as it was in 1968-1970, something current PTI followers do not seem to absorb, since history for them, starts from the 1992 cricket World Cup.
If memory is power, education is its sharpest weapon. Since the Zia era, Pakistan’s curricula have been used to enforce ideological conformity, replacing history with hagiography, inquiry with rote learning, and critical thought with reverence. Regional, linguistic, sectarian, and gender differences are erased under a single state narrative, imposed from above, producing generations that are ignorant of their complicated past. This enforced uniformity has deepened divisions, fuelling insurgency, ethnic rifts, sectarianism, and terrorism. Denying history is not just an academic lapse—it is a moral and political failure. The Baloch insurgency and terrorism are the bitter harvest of the state’s own policy misadventures and myopia.
States dignify themselves by viewing historical episodes as genuine learning experiences. This can only be done by institutionalising Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and Restorative Justice bodies. As Walter Benjamin warned, “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Until we learn to understand the nuances of that binary, we will remain intellectually and morally stunted. Pakistan needs fresher myths that align with the diverse emotional memories of its multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian and multi-linguistic population. It needs the courage to name its wounds, which have caused generational traumas and not wrap them in ideological gauze. In a world built on forgetting, remembrance itself is rebellion, owed equally to history and to what lies ahead.
Irtiza Shafaat Bokharee
The writer is a faculty member at the Department of Political Science at Forman Christian College University.