Which country are you talking about? Pakistan?
Oh, I'm talking about Sindh, not Pakistan. And then the Mohajirs, of course, who don't get along with the Sindhis, and both the Sindhis and the Mohajirs resent the dominance of the Punjabis. The Balochis resent the Punjabis because they see them as the Staatvolk (dominant people) of the State.
Like in France, it's supposed to be a civic country, but there is a group who view the (citizen) Algerians as not really French. There's something called the Francais de souche (French stock) and they are kind of the Staatvolk -- the national culture has wine and cheese as opposed to couscous.
In Pakistan, the Punjabis are so dominant because they are the largest ethnic group, but also because they control the military, and the military essentially is the State.
So the Balochis resent the Punjabis because they take all the natural gas and they don't give anything back to the poorest part of the country. So there's the Balochistan Liberation Army which seeking independence from Pakistan.
Then you have the North West Frontier Province which has been really divided for a long time but now there's even a movement to call it Pashtunistan, to give it a name like Balochistan, or Sindh: name the place after the people.
So the fact that the NWFP is dominated by one ethnic group is certainly getting more and more resonance, and the fact that that ethnic group is the same as on the other side of the border in Afghanistan is politically problematic.
There's no real agreement on participation in a Pakistan civil society. There's such a strong sense of separate identities among the different peoples. Most of the time it doesn't matter because there's control. So there's a kind of fiefdom in Karachi. Islamabad lets Karachi be run by the Mohajirs as long as they don't question the Punjabis.
Doesn't the bogey of India bring these peoples together?
Oh, absolutely. In the post-colonialist or anti-imperialist period, it is very easy to unite a country. You can get people to come together in opposition to a common threat, but that only works as long as there's a threat. If you get rid of the threat, then you're confronted with the problem of how do we get along among ourselves.
The logic there is that sometimes it is better to have an enemy than to not have one.
You can make an argument that for Pakistan, it is in its interest to maintain hostile relations with India, because it distracts people in Pakistan from the much harder questions about fairness and social justice within Pakistan. They can say, well, yes, that's a nice question but we really have to worry about India.
Image: A soldier surveys a wooden bridge, which has many of its planks missing, that connects Jammu and Kashmir with Pakistan occupied Kashmir. Photograph: Mian Khursheed/Reuters.
Also see: 'We are the masters of our land'
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