The word Communalism is derived from Community. I would, therefore, define it as the fostering of cohesiveness within and allegiance to one's own ethnic, linguistic, religious, or sectarian community and discrimination of those from other communities. Whether within or without the national boundaries. In my opinion Communalisms leads to ‘Bigotry’ and therefore I am an anti-communalist.
Partition of the subcontinent was an extremely traumatic experience for nearly 15-million people. Most were forced to move due to a serious threat to their lives but many also opted to migrate on the hope of living among their co-religionists based on their belief in the ‘Two Nation’ theory and that promise that Pakistan was meant to be the home of all the Muslims of the subcontinent who chose to move there.
Since I have no direct experience with the plight of the Hindus & Sikhs who migrated from West Pakistan & East Pakistan into India; I would limit my post to those who came to Pakistan. Regardless of the reason for migration; the brutal fact is that it was the creation of Pakistan that caused the Muslims of the region that is now India to migrate.
Hindus from Pakistan and Muslims from India had to renegotiate their identities as rightful citizens of their adopted countries. India did not need to change its name thus the creation of the nation-state was not much of a problem. But the only “Raison D’etre” for the creation of Pakistan was religion; Founding Fathers, therefore, adopted a ‘Single’ language (Urdu) in an attempt the give the new citizens a sense of national identity other than religion. The attempt however backfired and very soon Pakistan had two national languages; the seeds of the destruction of the Two-Nation Theory thus had been ‘Sown’ as early as March 1948.
During both the Mughal and the colonial era subcontinent had been divided into provinces mainly for the purpose of the government, albeit the boundaries kept changing. Over the period the residents of the provinces adopted a cultural identity that was not based upon religion.
In my humble opinion, despite the fact Pakistan was to be home for all the subcontinent Muslims; understanding of the region based community identity continued and attempts of creating a national identity for Pakistan were not successful due to ossification/inflexibility of a largely illiterate population and because until the 1930's the political leaders were happy to remain with united India.
One would have thought that the 1971 disaster which resulted in the reduction of Pakistan to half her original size would jolt my fellow Pakistani into better cohesion, but alas it did not.
PPP continues to threaten with the ‘Sindh’ card. Baluchi nationalist movement has refused to die-down and until the 1979 Soviet invasion, the Paktunistan issue was very much alive.
Because the majority of the immigrants in Punjab came from Punjabi speaking areas and even those who were from Haryana & UP have assimilated with the indigenous population, the ethnic problem should have disappeared by now. It is therefore with great dismay that I see severe criticism of Urdu, the national language coming from Punjab, and whining that despite having so many top posts Urdu speakers are not satisfied.
Regardless of the region one is from, when a Pakistani travels abroad, he is treated as ‘Pakistani’. The achievements described in this thread were the achievement of Pakistanis. IMHO one the highest honors (Nobel Prize in Physics) was achieved by Prof Abdus Salam, who was a Qadiani but also a “Pakistani”.
I humbly request my compatriots to try overcoming the ‘Communal’ bias and stop criticizing Urdu and Pakistanis of different ethnicity and/or religion. No one is stopping anyone from speaking in their mother tongue and keeping their cultural heritage alive or following their religion. Like a bunch of mixed flowers, we may be of different colour but all of us are Pakistanis.
If we want to keep Pakistan strong and make it a prosperous nation, we need to break out from the provincial mind-set.
