Pakistan, Bangladesh and core identity questions

The Hindu

07-05-2025

Pakistan reveals a tumultuous confluence of unresolved identity, ideological rigidity, persistent reliance on proxy warfare, and selective amnesia. Two events — seemingly distinct but deeply entangled — have reignited the foundational questions about what Pakistan is and what it seeks to remain.
Events of contrast
On one front, Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff, General Asim Munir, delivered a speech that resurrected the ghosts of the two-nation theory, the ideological foundation upon which Muhammad Ali Jinnah led the movement for the creation of Pakistan. In April, at the Overseas Pakistanis Convention in Islamabad, Gen. Munir declared that people of Pakistan are 'fundamentally different' from Hindus — by religion, by tradition, by culture, and by ambition. 'Our forefathers thought we were different in every possible aspect of life,' he remarked, invoking the foundational narrative of Pakistan's birth. His language and tone were nostalgic, divisive and arrogant — an impassioned appeal to safeguard Jinnah's ideological legacy from being forgotten.
A day later, in Dhaka, Bangladesh asked Pakistan to account for the horrors of its disgusting past. During the first Foreign Secretary-level talks in 15 years, Bangladesh's Foreign Secretary demanded a long-awaited apology for the atrocities committed by Pakistan's army during the 1971 Liberation War. Even though the current regime in Bangladesh is courting Pakistan, the demand for confession of guilt is not merely ironic — it is a regrettable theatre of amnesia couched as strategic pragmatism. However, Pakistan's role during the birth of Bangladesh is an episode of colossal brutality that it still echoes in the nation's soul. Along with the apology for a horrendous campaign of systematic repression, Bangladesh has reiterated its demand for more than $4 billion in reparations — its share of undivided Pakistan's assets, including aid, pension funds and other state resources.
The irony here could not be starker, perhaps even tragic. It is a moment rich in historical contradiction: while Pakistan's security establishment affirms the hypothesis that Partition was imperative and morally justified, its former eastern wing — once tethered by fraud and fiction — demands accountability for the violent consequences of that very Partition gone awry, before formal reconciliation can be pursued.
A theory, its reinforcement, the gaps
The two-nation theory argued that Muslims and Hindus were fundamentally distinct communities, defined by religious and cultural cleavages, and, therefore, could not function cohesively within a unified political framework once colonial rule ended in the Indian subcontinent. But this ideological assertion was not just a political device; it became a deeply embedded mythos, reinforced by the Pakistan state through textbooks and speeches. Yet, the theory contained its own seeds of disintegration. When the cultural and linguistic aspirations of Bengalis of East Pakistan were contemptuously denied, their votes in democratic elections utterly disrespected, and their cultural identity brutally suppressed by the Punjabi elite in Islamabad, the very logic of the two-nation theory turned in upon itself.
Gen. Munir's speech, then, needs to be understood not merely as a reaffirmation of a discredited ideology, but as an act of forgetting — a deliberate effacement of South Asian history's inconvenient lessons. It is a return to the familiar comforts of a useless theory that promises certainty in a world increasingly defined by ambiguity and fracture. But such affirmations, no matter how forcefully delivered, do not address the economic, political and security challenges that Pakistan faces.
Pakistan has never formally apologised for the atrocities against Bengalis, with successive regimes either denying or downplaying the violence, sometimes blaming rogue elements. Disturbingly, Pakistan appears ready to repeat the same pattern of repression in Balochistan, unapologetically demonstrating similar aggression, denial and unwillingness to engage politically with legitimate grievances. Instead of learning from its mistakes in East Pakistan, Rawalpindi seems trapped in a cycle of dictatorial responses to dissent, reinforcing the very divisions that once led to Pakistan's disintegration. The ideological orientation of the current Bangladeshi regime — emerging after Sheikh Hasina's ouster — represents not a principled shift but rather an opportunistic recalibration, driven by misguided beliefs that are causing significant tensions within the top echelons of the regime in Dhaka and in the relationship between the regime and many of the citizens, particularly as it seeks to distance itself from India and strengthen ties with Pakistan. Nonetheless, for most of the Bangladeshi people, the catastrophic events of 1971 are not matters of distant historical record; they are vivid inter-generational memories, reinforced by the collective trauma surrounding the nation's birth.
So profound is the burden of this trauma that it has driven the Dhaka regime to demand both a formal apology and reparations from Pakistan, even as Bangladesh signals a pragmatic turn toward normalisation. However, the demand for moral and material accountability is not driven by vindictiveness, but serves as a cathartic plea for the minimal recognition of responsibility from the aggressor. That Pakistan continues to withhold such recognition is indicative not merely of ideological obstinacy, but of a deeper pathology.
One must ask Pakistan's hybrid regime: what, precisely, has been gained through the repetition of ideology at the expense of self-examination? Has the invocation of the two-nation theory made Pakistan more cohesive, more egalitarian, or more at peace with its neighbours — or even with itself? The consequential question now is whether Pakistan can craft a national identity rooted in its own values and aspirations, not just in opposition to the 'Indian other'.
The two-nation theory may have been the genesis of Pakistan, but its emotionalism and divisiveness make it a very poor and inadequate guide for national action. As military tensions escalate in the wake of Indian airstrikes on terror camps in Pakistan following the Pahalgam terror attack, the dangers of following the theory are thrown into stark relief. The hybrid regime, grappling with the riddle of the Imran Khan phenomenon, the ongoing insurgency in Balochistan, and strained relations with the Afghan Taliban, can find little solace in the obsolete concept of the two-nation theory.
Vinay Kaura is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Affairs and Security Studies at Sardar Patel University of Police, Security and Criminal Justice, Rajasthan; and Non-Resident Fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore