State and Nation-Building in Pakistan: Beyond Islam and Security (Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317448181
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-10-07T19:00:00+00:00

Postcolonial present

It was against this backdrop that Sindhi nationalist sentiment took more institutional form in the post-1947 period, fuelled by a combination of four main ‘ingredients’: hence, as Das argues, overlapping demographic, economic, cultural, and political factors must be taken into account when seeking to understand how and why Sindhi nationalism developed in the new state of Pakistan.18

Demographically, this sentiment was affected by the huge influx of refugees from India and migrants from other parts of what had become Pakistan. Apart from the hundreds of thousands of Urdu-speakers (around 20 per cent of the province’s population by the mid-1950s), the continued long-term migration of Punjabi-speakers to different parts of the province caused grave misgivings in certain circles about the growing numbers of other people in Sindh. By the early 1980s, over 50 per cent of the inhabitants of the city of Karachi were Urdu-speaking with over 13 per cent Punjabi speakers. In rural areas, during the Ayub period, the allocation of lands to non-Sindhis, and Punjabis in particular, accelerated. In economic terms, there seemed to be, to many Sindhis, a process of deprivation taking place, with frustration at developments both in urban and rural sectors of the economy, and complaints of ‘a calculated perpetuation of regional inequalities’. Third, Sindhis also experienced what many regarded as attempts on the part of the central Pakistani government to undermine Sindh’s cultural identity. In particular they saw their language – Sindhi – being challenged by the country’s national language, Urdu. ‘Urduisation’ policies seemed to confirm the threats posed to Sindhi culture, and its second-class status in official eyes. Such has been the extent of the damage inflicted that some commentators have spoken in terms of a ‘cultural genocide’ having been perpetrated by the federal authorities. Finally, there has been the political dimension. Political decisions right from the early years of Pakistan’s existence helped to reinforce Sindhi perceptions that they were on the losing end of the new arrangements as these unfolded after 1947. Sindh’s loss of Karachi in 1948 when the city became federal territory, the introduction of One Unit in 1955, martial law in 1958, all appeared in many Sindhi eyes as proof of the extent of outsider ambitions.19

The catalogue of grievances steadily grew, ranging from a Sindhi tendency to attribute what few incidents of communal violence that had taken place in Sindh to the presence of Punjabis, to (perhaps understandable) resentment at Sindh being saddled with a Punjabi governor from time to time, to the ‘usual tolerant contempt’ which they perceived Punjabis (but also Urdu-speakers) exhibited whenever issues connected with Sindh arose. At an official level, there were complaints that Sindh was unfairly treated by the central authorities, for example in the allocation of loans for development projects, as compared with other provinces, especially the Punjab. Sindhi politicians called on ‘new Sindhis’ (as post-1947 settlers in Sind were often labelled at the time) to assimilate themselves as quickly as possible into the rest of the population ‘for they could not expect discrimination in their favour against “old Sindhis” ’.

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