Pakistan did not emerge as the natural evolution of a shared national identity; rather, it was the outcome of a hurried and artificial colonial partition that disregarded the historical nations of the Indus region. Sindh, home to a civilization thousands of years old, marked by territorial continuity and a distinct cultural and linguistic identity, was forcibly absorbed into an unnatural political framework dominated by a single powerful province: Punjab. From the very beginning, Pakistan replicated the structures, hierarchies, and governing mentality of the British Raj, merely shifting the center of power from external colonial rulers to an internal Punjabi elite. The resulting state was not a federation of equal nations but an internal colonial empire, where Sindh, Balochistan, and the Pashtun regions were relegated to subordinate peripheries.
This artificial state-formation was not an accident of history; it reflected the strategic calculations of British imperial policy in the final phase of colonial rule. The creation of Pakistan was a deliberate geopolitical project in which religious sentiment was systematically instrumentalized under a well-organized imperial design. Within the broader dynamics of the “Great Game,” Britain sought to construct a reliable buffer that would prevent Soviet Russia from advancing through Afghanistan toward the warm waters of the Arabian Sea. Pakistan was therefore engineered as a geostrategic outpost, crafted for imperial objectives rather than arising from genuine nationhood or historical continuity.
In this sense, Pakistan’s foundational logic was colonial from the outset—externally conceived, internally imposed, and structurally dependent on centralized military dominance. Its subsequent political evolution, dominated by Punjab’s civil-military establishment, merely reinforced this original design: suppressing historical nations, undermining their sovereignty, and maintaining a coercive order essential for the preservation of a state created through strategic engineering rather than organic national existence.
To justify this artificial political construction, colonial powers promoted the unscientific and historically inaccurate notion that religion alone could define a nation. This idea, propagated through the rhetoric of Muslim nationhood versus Hindu nationhood, was deliberately injected into the minds of ordinary people. By manipulating religious emotions, exploiting communal insecurities, and fueling psychological divisions, the architects of this project succeeded in cultivating mass support for a fundamentally unnatural state structure.
The Muslim League, backed by segments of British power, played a central role in mobilizing Muslim populations under this religious banner. At the same time, certain Hindu organizations, driven by their own communal agendas, contributed indirectly to the polarization that facilitated the partition. As a result, an artificial state was carved out based on a divisive ideology rather than shared cultural, linguistic, or historical foundations. The consequences of this engineered nationhood continue to shape the region’s political instability and internal contradictions.
After the creation of Pakistan, a structural contradiction quickly emerged between demographic reality and the distribution of power. Although the Bengalis constituted the numerical majority of the new state, the military establishment was overwhelmingly dominated by Punjabis. Economically as well, the industrial and commercial heart of Pakistan lay in Sindh, particularly in Karachi, which, as the principal port city, was already far ahead in terms of industrial infrastructure and economic growth.
Faced with these realities, the Punjabi-dominated establishment developed a systematic strategy to neutralize Bengali political power. The tension had already begun when Muhammad Ali Jinnah attempted to impose Urdu on the Bengali-speaking majority, triggering widespread resentment. Over the years, this linguistic imposition was coupled with deliberate political and economic marginalization. Behind the scenes, Punjab-based power centers crafted a long-term plan to push the Bengalis out of the state structure to secure complete Punjabi hegemony over Pakistan’s military, bureaucracy, and economic resources.
By removing the Bengali majority from the equation, Punjab aimed to ensure two outcomes:
1. A homogenized power structure in which Punjabis remained the unquestioned rulers of the army and the central state.
2. Greater ease in transforming the remaining nations, Sindhis, Baloch, Pashtuns, and others into subjects of a modern Punjabi settler-colonial order.
The genocide of 1971 must be understood within this broader pattern of domination and strategic violence. The massacre was not only meant to break the spirit of the Bengali nation and force their separation; it also served as a brutal warning to all other oppressed nations within Pakistan. The message was unmistakable: any nation that attempted to assert its right to self-determination would face the same fate.
In this way, Punjab exhibited a level of brutality, authoritarianism, and fascist aggression in 1971 that revealed the true nature of the state structure it controlled. The objective was to intimidate the remaining nationalities into silence, fear, and political submission, preserving a centralized system of domination that continues to define Pakistan’s internal colonial architecture.
Punjab, being a landlocked region with a large population but limited mineral resources, has historically faced strategic insecurities. Lacking direct access to the sea and possessing relatively few natural assets, the Punjabi elite turned to political domination and military control as the primary means of securing influence and economic advantage. Compounding this, the mindset of the Punjabi military leadership, shaped during the British colonial period, was not one of solidarity with the indigenous peoples of the region. Instead, it inherited the colonial mentality of acting as an intermediary force for imperial interests, treating local populations with suspicion and exercising authority through coercion rather than empathy.
This structural and psychological legacy explains why Punjab pushed aggressively for centralized control soon after independence. The first major step was the imposition of the One Unit scheme, a political project designed to equalize the population of West Pakistan with that of Bengal. Under the guise of administrative efficiency, Punjab sought to dilute the demographic strength of the Bengalis and secure parity (parity) that would allow it to dominate state institutions from behind a manufactured balance of power.
In Pakistan, the Punjabi-dominated military has repeatedly imposed martial law for very specific strategic reasons. First, the purpose behind these successive military takeovers was to send a psychological message to the subjugated and forcibly incorporated nationswithin this unnatural state: that Punjab’s military power is the final authority. Any nation that dares to demand political or economic rights or seeks liberation from Punjab’s colonial occupation will be crushed through sheer military force. This policy was designed to suppress national aspirations and eliminate the possibility of any genuine federalism.
Second, these martial laws carried a message directed not only at the oppressed nations but also at the international community. Punjab wanted the world to understand that the real power in Pakistan rests exclusively with the Punjabi military establishment. Civilian governments and federal institutions function merely as symbolic entities, existing only for appearance. Any meaningful negotiation or engagement, therefore, must take place directly with Punjab’s military elite, not with the nominal federal government.
Third, by repeatedly deploying martial law, the Punjabi military sought to institutionalize fear, intimidation, and a climate of permanent insecurity within society. This atmosphere allowed the military to safeguard Punjab’s political and economic interests through the coercive power of the state. In political terminology, this strategy can rightly be described as the preservation of Punjab’s internal colonial rule, enforced by the gun and maintained through systematic repression.
Another major act of misconduct by the Punjabi military establishment has been its policy of dragging Sindh and other oppressed nations into unnecessary hostilities with neighboring countries such as India and Afghanistan. The truth is that the Sindhi nation has no natural conflict, hostility, or historical enmity with either India or Afghanistan. The tensions that exist today are entirely the product of the Punjabi military’s aggressive and adventurist policies.
For decades, the Punjabi military has pursued a strategy of confrontation and cross-border destabilization, especially against India. It has repeatedly supported militant and Terrorist activities inside Indian territory, provoking a cycle of hostility for which the oppressed nations inside Pakistan, particularly Sindh, pay the price. If, at any stage, India were to carry out retaliatory strikes in response to the Punjabi military’s actions, and if those actions result in geopolitical or territorial harm to Sindh, then the sole responsibility would lie with the Pakistani military establishment, not any neighboring country.
In simple terms, the Punjabi military’s terrorist and reckless policies have turned Sindh and other nations into hostages of its geopolitical adventurism, forcing them to bear the consequences of wars and conflicts they never chose, never supported, and never benefited from.
On the other hand, Punjabi colonial authorities also began executing carefully planned schemes to alter the demographic composition of Sindh. These efforts included dividing and provoking the population along ethnic lines, fostering linguistic polarization, and psychologically fragmenting society to weaken Sindh from within. Much like the strategy employed after the independence of Bengal, these policies were designed to politically and socially undermine the future struggle for Sindhudesh’s independence.
Punjab clearly understood that Sindh, an ancient nation with thousands of years of civilization and culture, would not remain deceived forever by religious manipulation, nor would it permanently accept a subordinate colonial status within Pakistan. For this reason, Punjab pursued a multi-layered strategy to weaken Sindhi society structurally, politically, and culturally.
On one hand, the Punjabi establishment empowered feudal elites under state patronage to control Sindh politically. On the other hand, it spread a dense network of religious seminaries across the province in an attempt to push the historically tolerant, humanistic, Sufi, and secular character of the Sindhi nation toward extremism precisely in line with the ideological needs of the state.
Simultaneously, the Urdu-speaking population, which settled in Sindh in 1947 due to historical circumstances, was confined within linguistic and ethnic organizations, deliberately alienating them from the broader Sindhi society. This calculated policy aimed to keep Sindh internally divided, estranged, and politically weakened.
Over time, however, the Punjabi establishment recognized a new strategic opportunity: its overwhelming dominance in the military. Instead of merely seeking parity with Bengal, Punjabi elites realized that their control of the army provided them with decisive leverage. They concluded that as long as Bengal remained part of Pakistan, the demand for fair representation within the armed forces would inevitably grow. Equal recruitment from all nationalities, Sindhis, Baloch, Pashtuns, and Bengalis would eventually weaken Punjab’s military dominance, dismantling the very power structure that enabled its internal colonial rule.
To preempt this outcome, Punjab exploited its numerical superiority within the army to launch a coercive campaign against the Bengalis. The aim was twofold:
1. To eliminate the demographic majority that threatened Punjabi political supremacy.
2. To prevent the future redistribution of military representation that would undermine Punjabi hegemony.
By acting before the other nations of Pakistan could gain proportional influence within the armed forces, Punjab secured a decisive strategic advantage. The military assault of 1971, carried out under the command of a Punjabi-dominated army, was therefore not an accidental escalation, but a calculated act meant to remove the Bengali majority from the state structure. In doing so, Punjab preserved its monopoly over the military and safeguarded its capacity to exercise coercive power over the remaining oppressed nationalities.
Thus, the events of 1971 must be viewed as part of a broader project of centralization, domination, and internal colonialism, an effort by the Punjabi establishment to maintain unchecked military supremacy and prevent the emergence of a truly federal, democratic, and multi-national political order.
During the massacre of Bengalis in 1971, the Punjabi political elite and the military establishment not only deployed their own forces but also exploited the Bihari population living in East Pakistan. By manipulating religious sentiment, they mobilized groups such as Al-Shams and Al-Badr extremist militias formed in the name of Islam to carry out violence against the very Bengali people and land with whom they shared daily life. These groups were indoctrinated into believing that religious loyalty to the Pakistani state was more important than their social, cultural, and territorial ties to Bengal. In reality, they were tools fashioned by the Punjabi-dominated state to maintain its internal colonial dominance.
This strategy is part of a long-standing pattern in which the Punjabi ruling class has used religion as a psychological weapon to subdue and divide historical nations. The same manipulation continues today: religion is invoked not for spiritual upliftment but as an instrument to control diverse peoples, suppress national consciousness, and legitimize authoritarian rule.
The logic of this ideology collapses under its own contradictions. If Muslims truly constituted a single nation solely based on religion, then the creation of Pakistan itself would be unnecessary. The Muslim-majority regions of the subcontinent could simply have been merged with Afghanistan or Iran. Likewise, if religious identity alone defined nationhood, then Iranians, Afghans, and Pakistanis would form a single nation living within a single state. Similarly, the Arab world, bound by shared religion, culture, and geography, would exist as one unified country.
But reality proves the opposite. Nations do not emerge from religion alone. They arise from a shared homeland, distinct history, common language, and collective political–economic interests. These elements, not religious identity, form the foundation of genuine nationhood. By ignoring these realities, the Pakistani state attempted to impose an artificial and bogus national identity that was neither historically grounded nor socially sustainable, resulting in conflict, repression, and the continued subjugation of the region’s indigenous and Historic nations.
Punjab today functions as a ruthless imperial force within the artificial structure of Pakistan. Behind the façade of religion, it has imposed a modern form of internal colonialism upon the historical nations of the region. Through centralized political domination, Punjab has reduced Sindhis, Baloch, Pashtuns, Brahuis, Seraikis, and others to subjects within a state engineered to serve Punjabi strategic, economic, and military interests.
This domination is not symbolic; it manifests through systematic political coercion, economic exploitation, and cultural erasure. Punjab continues to extract resources from all subordinate nations, while denying them political autonomy or control over their own territories. The languages, histories, and cultural identities of these ancient nations are suppressed to maintain an artificially constructed “Pakistani” identity that legitimizes Punjabi supremacy.
Sindh represents a particularly stark example of this internal colonial order. Despite being a historical civilization with its own language, culture, economy, and coastline, Sindh is subjected to continuous exploitation. Punjab exercises decisive control over Sindh’s ports, trade routes, and economic institutions. Most critically, Punjab maintains near-total control over the waters of the Indus River, Sindh’s lifeline.
Under the 1945 Sindh–Punjab Water Agreement, Sindh was legally recognized as the rightful claimant to 75% of the Indus waters, reflecting its geographical and historical dependence on the river. Yet Punjab has unilaterally violated this agreement for decades. Through the construction of canals, dams, and diversion systems, Punjab redirects the majority of Indus water for its own agricultural and economic benefit, depriving Sindh of its legally and historically guaranteed share.
The consequences have been catastrophic. Vast areas of fertile land of Sindh have been turned into barren wastelands. Rivers and delta regions have collapsed, salinity has spread, and millions of Sindhis have lost their livelihoods. This environmental destruction is not accidental; it is a structural outcome of a colonial system in which Punjab maximizes its gains at the expense of Sindh’s survival.
In this sense, Punjab’s role today is not merely that of a dominant province within a federation. It operates as a colonial center, extracting wealth, suppressing national rights, monopolizing natural resources, and using the state’s coercive apparatus to maintain its supremacy. The ongoing exploitation of Sindh’s water, land, language, ports, and culture is part of a broader imperial project that seeks to keep historical nations fragmented, weakened, and dependent.
Punjab today functions as a fully evolved imperial nation whose power structure depends on keeping the historical nations within Pakistan psychologically subdued, politically fragmented, and economically dependent. To maintain this internal colonial order, Punjab deploys a systematic psychological warfare strategy using state-controlled media, propaganda networks, and loyalist intellectuals to distort history, weaken national consciousness, and undermine the self-confidence of the oppressed nations.
A central element of this strategy is the falsification and manipulation of historical narratives. Instead of honoring the indigenous heroes of historical nations such as Maharaja Dahir, the last sovereign ruler of Sindh, the state glorifies invading forces that destroyed these civilizations. The invader Muhammad bin Qasim, who led an assault on Sindh, abducted Sindhi women and auctioned them in the slave markets of Baghdad, is promoted by the state as a “national hero.” This imposed narrative is not accidental; it is an ideological weapon designed to disconnect Sindhis from their own history and to legitimize centuries of external domination.
Meanwhile, Punjab and its military establishment continue to expand their control over Sindh’s land and urban spaces. Millions of acres of Sindh’s agricultural lands have been seized directly or indirectly by the Punjabi military-feudal complex. In cities, the expansion of DHA (Defence Housing Authority) schemes represents a modern form of colonial settlement, through which the army secures permanent territorial control under the guise of urban development. These encroachments are not urban planning; they are structured acts of demographic engineering and territorial occupation.
The military’s grip extends far beyond land. Punjab, through its control of the army and bureaucracy, has taken over virtually every strategic domain of the state: political institutions, the judiciary, the media, foreign policy decisions, internal security matters, major industries, banking, trade, and infrastructure. This all-encompassing monopoly is the backbone of Pakistan’s internal colonial system.
The consequences for historical nations have been devastating. Cultural suppression, economic dispossession, forced assimilation, and even demographic engineering all indicate a slow, ongoing form of ethnic cleansing. Despite these realities, a significant portion of the Punjabi population continues to view the military as a heroic institution, proudly identifying with an army that has systematically oppressed and exploited other nations.
This contradiction reveals the ideological conditioning of the Punjabi nation itself, a society taught to see militarism as patriotism and imperial domination as national unity. In truth, the structures they support are the tools of a modern empire imposed upon Sindh, Balochistan, Pashtun regions, and other indigenous nations whose identities and rights are being eroded through force, propaganda, and coercive state power.
Pakistan, an Unnatural state held together primarily to protect Punjab’s political, economic, and strategic interests, functions as a centralized imperial structure rather than a voluntary union of historical nations. Within this framework, Sindh’s vast mineral wealth, natural resources, and economic assets are treated as spoils of war, exploited by Punjab through a combination of coercion, administrative control, and constitutional manipulation.
The economic imbalance is stark and deliberate. Nearly 70% of Pakistan’s federal revenue is extracted from Sindh, particularly from Karachi and Sindh’s industrial and port-based economy. Yet, these resources are appropriated by the center effectively by Punjab under the façade of federalism. The so-called 1973 Constitution, far from being a democratic social contract, operates as a legal instrument designed to maintain the subjugation of the historical nations. It centralizes power, masks colonial domination behind parliamentary procedures, and provides institutional cover for the systematic exploitation of Sindh, Balochistan, and other oppressed nationalities.
This internal colonial system has escalated into a direct assault on the national existence of these Nations. Under Punjab’s imperial dominance, Sindhis and other nations face cultural erasure, political suppression, economic dispossession, and demographic engineering. The state rejects the thousands-year-old historical identity, culture, and nationhood of the indigenous peoples, and instead imposes the false narrative of a fictitious “Pakistani nationhood,” which serves only to pacify and disorient the victims of colonial rule.
At the same time, the state actively undermines any movement seeking national rights or historical restoration. To suppress the legitimate political struggles and national liberation movements of Sindhudesh, Balochistan, and other regions, the state mobilizes and protects a network of feudal elites, religious extremists, chauvinist racist groups, and militant outfits. These forces are systematically employed as instruments of state repression, sabotaging political mobilization, spreading fear, and destabilizing every effort toward national awakening or democratic self-determination. They are deliberately used as state tools against national movements and the Political struggle for freedom.
Punjab’s imperial machinery thus operates on multiple fronts:
· Economic extraction of Sindh’s resources
· Constitutional engineering to maintain centralized control
· Cultural distortion and historical falsification
· Suppression of political movements through coercion and proxy groups
· Systematic denial of human rights and national identity
This is not merely misgovernance; it is a consolidated project of internal colonialism aimed at maintaining Punjabi supremacy while weakening and fragmenting the historical nations that predate the modern state itself.
Today, within this artificial state, the people subjugated under Punjabi colonial domination, whether Sindhi, Baloch, Pashtun, Seraiki, or those of so-called Azad Kashmir, have reached a profound historical realization. Through the coercive rule of the Punjabi military, enforced by guns and justified through religious propaganda, it has become unmistakably clear that Punjab operates not as a partner in a federation, but as a fully entrenched occupying power. The Punjabi establishment has imposed an internal empire built on repression, economic extraction, demographic manipulation, and the systematic erasure of national identities.
Importantly, this understanding is no longer limited to oppressed nations alone. Even within Punjab itself, many educated individuals, journalists, writers, intellectuals, academics, and independent thinkers now openly acknowledge that Punjab’s role in Pakistan is that of a dominant, exploitative, and militarized imperial force, responsible for the bloodshed, resource plunder, and cultural destruction of historical nations.
Across Pakistan, people increasingly recognize that the Punjabi military establishment has monopolized everything: rivers, seas, land, natural resources, industries, trade, governance, foreign policy, and security institutions. Entire nations have been reduced to colonies dispossessed of their rights, stripped of their resources, and forced into political servitude.
In this context, the forcibly merged nations now see their future clearly. Just as the Bengali nation liberated itself in 1971, the remaining nations have reached the conviction that their survival, dignity, and collective future lie not within Pakistan, but outside it.
Writers, intellectuals, students, political activists, teachers, journalists, and conscious citizens across these historic nations increasingly understand that:
The preservation of their identity, culture, land, and human rights is impossible within Pakistan.
The path to survival lies in national liberation.
For Sindh, this realization has crystallized into a clear political truth:
The freedom of Sindhudesh is the only viable guarantee for the survival, progress, and dignity of the Sindhi nation.
Similarly, all other nations suppressed under Pakistan’s artificial structure have come to see that the dissolution of Pakistan is not merely a political demand but a historical necessity, a prerequisite for ending internal colonialism, stopping genocide, and securing a dignified future.
In essence, the end of the Unnatural state of Pakistan is the only path to the survival of the nations it has held captive. The national liberation of Sindhudesh is the sole guarantee for peace and justice, as well as for progress, freedom, equality, the protection of secular and humanistic traditions, regional security, and the elimination of extremist terrorism.
SHAFI BURFAT
Chairman
JEAY SINDH MUTTAHIDA MAHAZ, JSMM
Germany