ABSTRACT
The original crisis of Partition has not been resolved by the creation of nation-states. Similar to 1789 for the French, Partition remains the moment of the Indian (and Pakistani) nation-state’s birth through violent rupture with itself. Partition was also about two specific incisions. The first was a territorial incision that emerged from a political conflict over the ownership of a state – a conflict about who ought to acquire the moral and legitimate authority over the population and colonized territory left behind by the British Raj. Second, the creation of Pakistan was a cleavage not simply of the subcontinent but also of the Indian Muslim community. As I will discuss in later chapters, the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971 made it complex to trace a consistent narrative for Muslims of national identity based on religion alone. Both India and Bangladesh had to deal with the ambiguous and often problematic co-existence of secular politics and religious loyalty. Pakistan has always been able to maintain its Islamic identity as the core of its statehood and national identity, though in recent years this has pushed the country to the brink of becoming a ‘fragile’ or even ‘failed’ state.
