Growing up in the UK, I vividly remember that despite having moved here in the 1960s, my grandparents never truly felt settled. Home was never Britain. Home was back in Pakistan – a place their hearts never really left.
This is a common experience in the diaspora; whether it’s elders longing to return or successive generations that feel caught between cultures. There is an unspoken truth that – “Pakistan hamara watan hai” and that our domicile in other places was an unfortunate consequence shaped by historical circumstances.
Nothing has quite intensified this feeling in recent years than with the rising animosity towards immigrant communities and minorities in the West. Islamophobia and racial undertones that have always been present, now more explicit and socially acceptable, forces many to question what it means to have a sense of belonging and have a homeland.
For the Pakistani diaspora it has been a self-fulfilling prophecy, one that our elders always warned of – that belonging in the West would always be conditional. Today, current generations are realizing the weight of those words and the importance of having a homeland of your own.
It may come as a surprise for some readers in Pakistan, where having a homeland can sometimes be taken for granted. But for those living abroad in countries where their identity and place in society is regularly questioned, up for discussion and made conditional on assimilation – the importance of having a homeland, a place to belong, to be rooted – cannot be understated.
That said Pakistan may be a homeland for many but it has not always lived up to its potential or promise. It has at many junctures, smothered and stifled the aspirations of generations of Pakistanis, leaving many disillusioned.
Two contrasting perspectives exist – the necessity of having a homeland and the frustration when it’s not as hoped. Both equally valid but drawn from different lived experiences and contexts. Yet an underlying love for the motherland permeates both outlooks especially when Pakistan is itself under attack.
Unusually Pakistanis rarely encounter diaspora perspectives or lived experiences directly and the rare opportunity when they do, it’s usually filtered through Western right-wing media outlets following the Indian disinformation strategy.
So what does the Pakistani diaspora actually think about Pakistan? Are they out of touch with the reality on the ground? What do they make of Pakistan’s internal dynamics, its fraught relationships vis a vis India and its future outlook?
To answer that we have to first remember that many elders in the Pakistani diaspora are living survivors and witnesses of the events that led to the creation of Pakistan. Whilst this generation is slowly passing on in Pakistan, many within the diaspora are still with us. Many still recall the horrors inflicted on them during partition and the monumental perseverance of those who sacrificed at great personal cost for a Muslim homeland, Jinnah being a notable figure among them.
Such sacrifices have never been forgotten in the diaspora. Nor the reasons why they were made.
Many in the diaspora carry the spirit of those post-independence years when optimism, idealism and zeal defined the nation. That spirit, preserved in a time capsule, travelled abroad with the first major waves of immigration out of Pakistan.
In pursuing socioeconomic opportunities for their children, Pakistanis found themselves facing suspicion and hostility in a foreign land.
This was the era of Enoch Powell’s notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech, where a UK shadow state secretary of defence, likened commonwealth immigration to the river Tiber foaming with blood, echoing Virgil’s grim prophecy – ‘I see wars, horrible wars, and the Tiber foaming with much blood’.
In this incendiary climate, Pakistani and Indian migrants often reconnected. Friendships and new bonds were formed, in solidarity to confront shared struggles, offering some degree of healing for the past. But it is easy to forgive and difficult to forget.
These warm connections did not alter how many viewed themselves as a fundamentally different community, in essence reaffirming the two nation theory and the conviction, given their experience in the West, that contributing to Pakistan’s future was a responsibility.
That responsibility has trickled down to some, across generations and geographies, in many forms; billions in cumulative FDI, remittances that have sustained Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves and the fraught stability of the country, charitable giving and providing avenues of migration for Pakistanis.
Beyond this much needed advocacy, political and economic, that the diaspora around the world helps facilitate – like for example the GSP+ status that Pakistan was able to secure, for preferential trade access in the EU, that the UK advocated for and that Sajjad Karim, a British Pakistani MEP was instrumental in. Advocacy is a significant resource that is still very underutilized by Pakistan.
This is in spite of the negative experiences many in the diaspora have with Pakistan. Engagement with Pakistan is rarely smooth for the overseas Pakistani. We all have tales of property being illegally appropriated, theft, documents being forged, verbal abuse, corruption at all levels and the discriminatory economic opportunism that the diaspora are also subjected to.
In the famous words of Einstein “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.” So why does the diaspora keep engaging with Pakistan in spite of these experiences?
Because many of us are the spiritual descendants of that post-independence zeal – still convinced Pakistan and her people have potential. Some of you may have given up on that promise but many of us abroad have not.
Simply put – no home is perfect, and no family is perfect. Perfection is always a work in progress.
The alternative is far worse. Without a homeland, an anchor to root us, there are no protections afforded in an anarchical international system, as displaced and occupied peoples – like those in Palestine, Kashmir or elsewhere can attest to. The existence of Pakistan is itself a form of protection – for those within its borders and for Pakistanis abroad.
Of course the average aunty and uncle in the diaspora are not necessarily versed in the finer details of offensive realism or the political realities in Pakistan but their lived experiences in countries where they are never fully accepted as belonging, leads to the same logical conclusion – that Pakistan is essential. The weight of history is a testament to this.
The diaspora’s perspective of belonging is relevant to Pakistanis, especially now, in a politically turbulent period when multiple actors, both state and non-state aligned, are quite literally tearing at the seams of Pakistan.
It’s now been 78 years since independence, both Pakistanis at home and abroad in the diaspora are celebrating the same milestone. Like any family road trip there have been squabbles, tantrums, bust-ups and warm fuzzy memories too. The road has been long and “we aren’t there yet” which is precisely why Pakistan cannot be written off. Its story is still being written!
