After protests in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), and amid renewed insurgencies in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Sindh, too, appears to be becoming increasingly restive. According to an exclusive News18 report, political groups in Sindh “have taken to the streets against proposals for new provinces and projects they say threaten the region’s land, water and resources”.
Historically, Sindh rising in protest against the Pakistani state brings the story of Pakistan’s internal contradictions almost full circle. Sindh, after all, was the only province to formally endorse the demand for Pakistan through its legislature in the early 1940s, at a time when powerful political forces in Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) remained opposed to the Muslim League. More strikingly, some of the forces that once pushed Sindh towards the idea of Pakistan — questions of water and provincial autonomy — are today fuelling discontent with the Pakistani state.
As author Khaled Ahmed writes in Sleepwalking to Surrender: Dealing with Terrorism in Pakistan, “Pakistan’s lower-riparian concerns about India stealing its waters are similar to Sindh’s fears about the Punjab. This latter discord is back in the news as the Sukkur Barrage, the oldest and most historically significant of Pakistan’s ten barrages, silts up. Commissioned in 1932, the Sukkur Barrage gave birth to Sindhi nationalism, which split the province’s Muslim and Hindu populations, and, ultimately, made the creation of Pakistan possible.”
Sindh became an autonomous province in 1936, following the Government of India Act of 1935. This strengthened the tendency among sections of Sindhi Muslim politics to support the Muslim League’s demand for a separate Muslim homeland. In this political transformation, the Sukkur Barrage played an important role.
Its significance was attested to by former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in her book Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West. Recalling her grandfather’s campaign for Sindh’s separation from the Bombay Presidency, Bhutto wrote: “The British ended Muslim Sindh’s separate identity by integrating it into Hindu-majority Bombay. My grandfather… had long struggled for the separation of Sindh from Bombay. The British said that the waterlogged, saline Sindh lacked sufficient revenues to be independently governed as a separate administration. My grandfather then initiated the Sukkur Barrage project to turn the arid lands of upper Sindh fertile. With the completion of the Sukkur Barrage, Sindh gained sufficient revenues for my grandfather to argue that Muslim Sindh be separated from Hindu India. He was successful, and Sindh once again emerged as a separate entity under British rule.”
Today, the old political anxiety about domination from outside Sindh has taken a different form: the fear of Punjab’s dominance within Pakistan. And this has been a recurring feature of Pakistan’s history. East Bengal, later East Pakistan, had itself been at the forefront of the Pakistan movement. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, one of Bengal’s most influential Muslim League leaders and a central figure behind the Great Calcutta Killings of 1946, was also a political mentor to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who would eventually lead the struggle that produced Bangladesh. A region crucial to the creation of Pakistan thus became the region that broke away from it in 1971.
PoK has likewise witnessed serious protests against Islamabad. Balochistan has faced a decades-long separatist insurgency, while KP has repeatedly been convulsed by militancy.
Pakistan emerged out of a “fear of the future” and “pride in the past”. Both were closely connected to the construction of an Islamic political identity and to apprehensions about Muslim political status in “Hindu India”. The problem was that religion alone could not permanently resolve Pakistan’s linguistic, ethnic, provincial and economic differences. These contradictions have followed the country throughout its history.
The Pakistan project itself contained striking paradoxes. It was created in the name of Islam under Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who “drank alcohol, went to the races for pleasure, never fasted during Ramadan, and could not recite a single ayat of the Quran”, as MJ Akbar writes in Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan. It joined the Western bloc very early in its nationhood journey, while forever remaining a self-proclaimed citadel of Islam. It fought the war against terrorism alongside the US-led alliance while simultaneously fathering the Taliban and other terrorist outfits.
