Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore viewed India as a cosmopolitan civilization that evolved from the fusion of many ethnic strains and cultural streams. Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India's first prime minister, echoed Tagore's judgment when he described the subcontinent as an "ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reveries has been inscribed," making a syncretic culture.
The "palimpsest" of old India--comprising today's India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh--was created by wave after wave of human influx from western and central Asia and coastal Europe. The first of those inroads, which began with the dawn of civilization, was felt by subcontinent’s western fringe, which is now Pakistan. Pakistan has since remained a multiethnic, multicultural society. Its main ethnic groups include Baluchis, Pashtuns, Sindhis, and Punjabis. There are also many other, less conspicuous, ethnic and cultural groups. More recently, millions of refugees from India, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan have further embellished the country's ethnic and cultural mosaic.
Pakistan was created forty-one years ago as a homeland for Indian Muslims. It initially included Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), which has since seceded, and the four provinces that make up today's Pakistan: Baluchistan, Punjab, Sind, and the North West Frontier Province.
The nation's founding fathers were conscious of the rich cultural and geographical diversity of India's predominantly Muslim regions, for which they sought independence. So in their original Pakistan plan, adopted in 1940 at the Lahore session of the All-India Muslim League, they decided to create two independent states instead of one. One of those two nations was to be made up of today's Bangladesh and adjoining areas now in India. Furthermore, to ensure free play of the various social and cultural currents in the two proposed nations, the Lahore Resolution provided that their "constituent units [provinces] would be autonomous and sovereign."
The founders of Pakistan later changed their minds and decided to have one Pakistan rather than two. But neither they nor their successors have resolved the question of provincial autonomy, which has led to a ceaseless power struggle between the Punjab province and all other provinces of the country. The military and civilian elites of Punjab, Pakistan's so-called bastion of power, argue that Pakistanis, more than 90 percent of whom are Muslims, share the same Islamic culture and belong to the same Islamic brotherhood. Demands for provincial autonomy, they say, are divisive. The late President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, a Punjabi, was along the most forceful advocates of this conception of Pakistani nationalism. He used to say, “Pakistan was created in the name of Islam and will continue to survive only if it sticks to Islam." His Islamization campaign was intended in part to revitalize what he believed to be the nation's true social and cultural foundation.
The dominant elites of the country's three other provinces insist, however, that Pakistan is a multinational nation in which the provinces represent distinct social patterns, cultural norms, and economic interests. They do not consider pursuit of these interests inimical to their allegiance to Islam or Pakistan.
Seventeen years ago, the largest of Pakistan's provinces, East Pakistan, broke away over the
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