After protests in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), and amid renewed insurgencies in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Sindh, too, appears to be becoming increasingly restive. According to an exclusive News18 report, political groups in Sindh “have taken to the streets against proposals for new provinces and projects they say threaten the region’s land, water and resources”.
Historically, Sindh rising in protest against the Pakistani state brings the story of Pakistan’s internal contradictions almost full circle. Sindh, after all, was the only province to formally endorse the demand for Pakistan through its legislature in the early 1940s, at a time when powerful political forces in Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) remained opposed to the Muslim League. More strikingly, some of the forces that once pushed Sindh towards the idea of Pakistan — questions of water and provincial autonomy — are today fuelling discontent with the Pakistani state.
As author Khaled Ahmed writes in Sleepwalking to Surrender: Dealing with Terrorism in Pakistan, “Pakistan’s lower-riparian concerns about India stealing its waters are similar to Sindh’s fears about the Punjab. This latter discord is back in the news as the Sukkur Barrage, the oldest and most historically significant of Pakistan’s ten barrages, silts up. Commissioned in 1932, the Sukkur Barrage gave birth to Sindhi nationalism, which split the province’s Muslim and Hindu populations, and, ultimately, made the creation of Pakistan possible.”
Sindh became an autonomous province in 1936, following the Government of India Act of 1935. This strengthened the tendency among sections of Sindhi Muslim politics to support the Muslim League’s demand for a separate Muslim homeland. In this political transformation, the Sukkur Barrage played an important role.
Its significance was attested to by former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in her book Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy and the West. Recalling her grandfather’s campaign for Sindh’s separation from the Bombay Presidency, Bhutto wrote: “The British ended Muslim Sindh’s separate identity by integrating it into Hindu-majority Bombay. My grandfather… had long struggled for the separation of Sindh from Bombay. The British said that the waterlogged, saline Sindh lacked sufficient revenues to be independently governed as a separate administration. My grandfather then initiated the Sukkur Barrage project to turn the arid lands of upper Sindh fertile. With the completion of the Sukkur Barrage, Sindh gained sufficient revenues for my grandfather to argue that Muslim Sindh be separated from Hindu India. He was successful, and Sindh once again emerged as a separate entity under British rule.”
Today, the old political anxiety about domination from outside Sindh has taken a different form: the fear of Punjab’s dominance within Pakistan. And this has been a recurring feature of Pakistan’s history. East Bengal, later East Pakistan, had itself been at the forefront of the Pakistan movement. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, one of Bengal’s most influential Muslim League leaders and a central figure behind the Great Calcutta Killings of 1946, was also a political mentor to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who would eventually lead the struggle that produced Bangladesh. A region crucial to the creation of Pakistan thus became the region that broke away from it in 1971.
PoK has likewise witnessed serious protests against Islamabad. Balochistan has faced a decades-long separatist insurgency, while KP has repeatedly been convulsed by militancy.
Pakistan emerged out of a “fear of the future” and “pride in the past”. Both were closely connected to the construction of an Islamic political identity and to apprehensions about Muslim political status in “Hindu India”. The problem was that religion alone could not permanently resolve Pakistan’s linguistic, ethnic, provincial and economic differences. These contradictions have followed the country throughout its history.
The Pakistan project itself contained striking paradoxes. It was created in the name of Islam under Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who “drank alcohol, went to the races for pleasure, never fasted during Ramadan, and could not recite a single ayat of the Quran”, as MJ Akbar writes in Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan. It joined the Western bloc very early in its nationhood journey, while forever remaining a self-proclaimed citadel of Islam. It fought the war against terrorism alongside the US-led alliance while simultaneously fathering the Taliban and other terrorist outfits.
These contradictions help explain the durability of the famous shorthand for Pakistani power: the 3As — Allah, Army and America. Religion can be a formidable force for political mobilisation and national identity, but there are limits to its ability to override competing linguistic, ethnic, economic and regional identities indefinitely. The creation of Bangladesh in 1971 demonstrated this dramatically.
The second A — Army — has traditionally been Pakistan’s most powerful institution. Its capture of the state apparatus could be gauged from the fact that while other countries have armies, in Pakistan the Army has a country. In recent years, the military’s prestige and political legitimacy have come under intense scrutiny, especially after the Imran Khan “rebellion”, which has brought forth hostility towards the military establishment even within Punjab, traditionally the Army’s principal political and recruitment base.
Given the siege within Pakistan, it is not surprising that it is witnessing a renewed sense of Islamic identity — Field Marshal Asim Munir gave voice to it openly in April 2025, and more pronouncedly thereafter, by vouching for the idea that Muslims and Hindus are fundamentally distinct nations that cannot coexist as one.
That brings us to the third A. With Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025, Washington and Islamabad have again found areas of strategic convergence, contributing to Pakistan’s renewed international visibility and to the growing diplomatic profile of General Munir. But Pakistan’s history suggests that dependence on American strategic patronage can be slippery. Washington’s interest in Islamabad has repeatedly expanded and contracted according to immediate geopolitical requirements.
There is also a deeper irony in the US-Pakistan relationship: Washington has repeatedly attempted to use Pakistan for strategic ends while discovering that Pakistan’s security establishment has its own objectives. The aftermath of September 11, 2001, offers one of the starkest examples. Pakistan’s then ISI chief, Lieutenant General Mahmood Ahmed, happened to be in Washington when 9/11 happened. The George W. Bush administration subsequently demanded that General Pervez Musharraf pressure Taliban leader Mullah Omar to surrender Osama bin Laden or face the consequences of an American intervention in Afghanistan. General Mahmood was dispatched to Kandahar, accompanied by Pakistani clerics, ostensibly to persuade the Taliban leadership.
But Kathy Gannon, then an Associated Press correspondent in Pakistan, offers a fascinating account in ‘I’ Is for Infidel: From Holy War to Holy Terror. She describes Mahmood as deeply sympathetic to Islamist militants and notes the extraordinary contradiction inherent in sending him “to negotiate with Mullah Omar”. Gannon writes, “General Ahmad… took the slow-talking leader aside and urged him to resist the United States. He told Mullah Omar not to give up bin Laden. General Ahmad travelled several times to Kandahar, and on each visit he gave Mullah Omar information about the likely next move by the United States.”
That episode encapsulates one of the enduring peculiarities of the US-Pakistan relationship. Washington has repeatedly needed Pakistan, and Pakistan has repeatedly exploited that need while pursuing policies that did not necessarily align with American objectives.
The renewed US-Pakistan engagement therefore gives Islamabad breathing space at a moment when the other two pillars of the traditional 3As are under strain. American patronage, however, has historically been transactional. Should Washington’s strategic calculations change again, Islamabad could find itself in an unprecedented situation — as dangerous as, if not more dangerous than, the one it faced in 1971.
Sindh played an important role in the making of Pakistan. Today, with the province rising in protest, the unmaking of the Pakistan project may seem very much real. The “Jelly State” (a term used by MJ Akbar) of Pakistan is surely overstretched. And if it doesn’t take the necessary corrective measures, it might implode. This time into more than two segments. And not many people would mourn its demise.