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21 " The uneasy symbiosis between a military authoritarian state and democratic political processes is often attributed to the artificial nature of the country and the lack of a neat fit between social identities at the base and the arbitrary frontiers drawn by the departing colonial masters. "
― Ayesha Jalal , The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics
22 " With doubts about its ability to survive being expressed both within and outside its freshly drawn boundaries, Pakistan’s insecurities were given full play in fashioning the nation’s history. Using the “two- nation” theory as their crutch, state- sponsored historians wrote histories for schools and colleges as well as for more general consumption that highlighted the tyranny of the Hindu community in order to justify the creation of Pakistan. "
23 " Tarring regional demands with the Indian brush became such an entrenched part of the official discourse of nationalism in Pakistan that the managers of the centralized state regarded legitimate demands for provincial autonomy with deep suspicion. "
24 " Sudden and unexplained deaths of keypoliticians have been a recurring feature of Pakistani history since 1951.Oft en the reasons have been patently evident. "
25 " Pakistan’s first crop of leaders at the center consisted mainly of migrants from India with limited or no real bases of support in the provinces. Suspicious of their provincial counterparts, émigré politicians at the center focused on consolidating state authority rather than building the Muslim League into a popularly based national party. "
26 " As the commission tartly noted, no two religious divines could agree on the definition of a Muslim. If the members of the commission tried imposing a definition of their own, the ulema would unanimously declare them to have gone outside the pale of Islam. Adopting the definition of any one religious scholar entailed becoming an infidel in the eyes of all the others. "
27 " With the potentially disruptive issue of the role of Islam in the state temporarily out of the way, the praetorian guard and its mandarin friends sanguinely accepted the constituent assembly’s stance on fundamental rights. As they knew only too well, the proof of the pudding lay in the eating. "
28 " At the root of Pakistan’s national identity crisis has been the unresolved debate on how to square the state’s self- proclaimed Islamic identity with the obligations of a modern nation- state. This has been confounded by an official history that cannot explain the gaping inconsistencies between the claims of Muslim nationalism and the actual achievement of statehood at the moment of the British withdrawal. "
29 " The Unionist construct of “Muslim interest” that was eventually incorporated in the Government of India Act of 1935 was a rude shock for minority- province Muslims, accustomed as they were to riding on the coattails of their coreligionists in the majority provinces. The revival of the AIML in 1934 with Jinnah at the helm was a direct result of minority- province Muslim dissatisfaction with the new constitutional arrangements. "
30 " What came in the wake of 1971 promised to be an endless trial by fire for the constituent units of a Pakistani federation that the military in league with the central bureaucracy insisted on governing as a quasi- unitary state. "