Borders and constitutions may frame a state, but a shared collective memory gives it a soul. As Max Weber noted, the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence rests on legitimacy itself, which is measured through the lived experiences of its people. In Pakistan, this architecture is dangerously fragile, not because we lack a past, but because we have buried it beneath layers of denial, distortion, and elite-sponsored mythmaking by the right-wing. The forgetfulness isn’t accidental; it’s carved out of conscious political decisions. From the wilful erasure of the 1971 trauma to the Arabization of cultural identity, the state, in cahoots with crony capitalists and the religious right-wing, has curated a past that flatters power and erases dissent, leaving a rootless society allergic to introspection.

The prevailing state narrative of Pakistan’s creation is not rooted in history but mired in theology. It is presented as a linear inevitability, a moral culmination of centuries of estrangement and difference. This is not historical inquiry, but nationalist metaphysics. All ambiguities, contradictions, and counter-narratives are either omitted or pathologised. The emergence of Pakistan is not portrayed as the result of complex political negotiations, centre-periphery tussles, and colonial contingencies, but as a moment of divine will realised through a handful of sanctified figures. What is obscured in this narrative is the fragmented, negotiated, and often contested reality of Pakistan’s birth. The histories of Bengal, the intellectual and demographic core of Muslim politics, especially since 1905, Sindh and Balochistan, with their deep-rooted indigenous traditions, and the princely states coerced into accession, are not permitted to disrupt the polished symmetry of the official origin myth. The logical cement employed completely wipes away the narratives and struggles of those at the margins. The political diversity of the pre-partition era, the compromises, the dissensions, and the dissonances in competing visions are all flattened under the weight of ideological........

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