Sure we call ourselves Pakistanis but its also evident that nationalist groups in Pakistan has strong voices and continues to cause chaos. Fall of dhakka was a manifestation of lack of nationalism as much as the respect of political mandate of Bengalis. So why we are not nationalist enuff, why we are not Pakistani 1st and everything else second. India has so many different ethnic groups and yet they have managed to instill nationalism on most parts of thier population. One reason is ofcourse India has existed for long time and even during the Pak movement many Muslims opposed it and sided with staying with India totally on the basis of nationalism. In contrast there were anti-urdu riots in East Pakistan as early as 1948when Quaid-e-Azam was still alive. In Sindh GM Syed who led the Pakistan resolution and movement in sindh has started talking abt jiye sindh as early as 1950′s. So what’s the problem and why we still have this lack of Pakistaniyat in Pak?

For me the reason we lack national identity lies in the conception of Pakistan itself. The idea of Pakistan was base on Islam i.e a land where Muslims can live according to rules and dictation of thier religion, it wasn’t a nationalist movement compared to India where Indian nationalism reigned supreme. The common thread holding all ethnic groups in Pakistan was Islam, when we didn’t implement that there was nothing holding us together. We can’t say lack of democracy was the main reason as I mentioned as early as 1948 and even when Jinnah was alive the voices from different parts of Pakistan was coming out calling for seperation. So what’s the solution, would installing a secular system in Pak will solve the nationalism problem? Or will implementing the Sharia will solve it. Yugoslavia was a secular country with serbs, croatian and bosnian. Bosnian muslims were muslim only on name and we saw what happened to them. But croatian and serbs fought too with each othere there was no religion involved. Implenting a sharia system will not fix the problem either. Sharia system should be the goal not the 1st step. I think the strategy should be
1 – Implement 1973 constitution in full.
2 – A uniform education system all over pakistan where from primary school should be emphasized in explaining and molding the young minds to understand the concept of Pakistan and Islamic principles.

These 2 steps will provide the basis upon which we can built a prosper Pakistan and promote nationalism.