Constructing the nation: nation-building and contestation in Pakistan under President Pervez Musharraf

© 2014 Dr. Gordon Francis WillcockWhen Pakistan was created in 1947, it was founded on competing ideological imaginings of Muslim nationhood and an ethno-linguistically and religiously diverse population spread between two distinct territories, East and West Pakistan. This left the Pakistani state with the challenge of constructing a unifying basis of nationhood on which to anchor national identity and foster integration. Since independence, however, the official nation-building process in Pakistan has struggled to foster national consensus and integration, and ethno-linguistic, sectarian and religious divisions have manifested as violent fault lines within society. These fractures continue to threaten the state and undermine civil society in Pakistan. This thesis examines how national identity is represented and constructed in Pakistan. The problem it seeks to address is why, after more than sixty years of independence, has Pakistan struggled to build a unifying national identity through which to foster national integration and bind the nation together? This project is motivated by an interest in the connection and correlation between the official construction of national identity through the promotion of national symbols, myths and memories, and the national integration process. In this study Pakistani nationalism and nation-building are situated in a historical context before discourse analysis is used to examine the construction of national identity in presidential speeches and media articles during the period when Pervez Musharraf was in power (1999–2008). The analysis reveals that national identity in Pakistan continues to be a site of ideological contestation between competing secular and religious conceptions of nationhood and between the idea of unitary nationalism and the plural identities contained within Pakistani society. This study argues that while Musharraf promoted a discourse of moderation and tolerance through his policy of ‘enlightened moderation’, he continued a historical tradition of unitary nation-building that fails to recognise or accommodate the ethno-linguistically and religiously differentiated population of Pakistan. This history of unitary nation-building has undermined and continues to undermine the development of a strong, cohesive, freestanding Pakistani national identity and, therefore, has weakened the process of national integration in Pakistan