Pakistan has been independent for nearly eight decades. The Union Jack came down, the British went home, and we acquired our own flag, parliament, bureaucracy, courts and constitution. But independence leaves a harder question: did the colonial state really disappear, or did we simply learn to operate it ourselves?

Frantz Fanon, the psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker, understood colonialism as more than the occupation of territory or extraction of wealth. It also colonised the imagination. The colonizer became the benchmark of civilization, knowledge and competence; the colonized was taught, subtly and repeatedly, to doubt his own.

That is the essence of what might be called colonial narcissism. The colonizer did not merely exercise superiority; he needed to believe in it. More dangerously, some of the colonized eventually began to believe in it too. Fanon saw how educated colonial subjects could start seeking recognition through the language, manners and institutions of the ruling power. They began looking at themselves through somebody else's eyes.

Pakistan still occasionally looks into that mirror. English fluency can be confused with intelligence. A foreign qualification may carry authority disproportionate to the knowledge behind it. An argument Pakistani professionals have made for years can suddenly become compelling when repeated by a consultant from Washington or London. The problem is not English, foreign education or foreign expertise. It is the outsourcing of judgment.

But the deeper colonial inheritance lies in the relationship between the state and the citizen.........

© The Friday Times