Pakistan Quotes

“We should have realized it sooner, at least my father should have, that there was no coming back. Not in September when the riots died down, not in October when the subcontinent still lay in shock, not even in November as he had hoped and promised us. Lahore was now lost forever”
― Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory

“Jinnah told my father", he (Ardeshir Cowasjee) said, "that each government of Pakistan would be worse than the one that preceded it.”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“I have grown up listening to my grandparents’ stories about ‘the other side’ of the border. But, as a child, this other side didn’t quite register as Pakistan, or not-India, but rather as some mythic land devoid of geographic borders, ethnicity and nationality. In fact, through their stories, I imagined it as a land with mango orchards, joint families, village settlements, endless lengths of ancestral fields extending into the horizon, and quaint local bazaars teeming with excitement on festive days. As a result, the history of my grandparents’ early lives in what became Pakistan essentially came across as a very idyllic, somewhat rural, version of happiness.”
― Aanchal Malhotra

“Memorialization is not a passive practice but an active conversation.”
― Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory

“When we build a city, we take our grandest dreams as well as our deepest anxieties and set them in concrete for the next generation.”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“Migration is often accompanied by a feeling of unavoidable disorientation, and the circumstances of 1947 would have pronounced this feeling. In most cases, it would have created an involuntary distance between where one was born before the Partition and where one moved to after it, stretching out their identity sparsely over the expanse of this distance. As a result, somewhere in between the original city of their birth and the adopted city of residence, would lay their essence – strangely malleable.”
― Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory

“if a colonizer replaces language, clothes and names of a nation then what remains is a mere shadow of the colonizer.”
― Hassan Zia Ahmed

“If you come to Karachi for a few days you will hate it, but if you come to Karachi for forty days, you will love it and never want to leave.”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“Partition memory is particularly pliable. Within it, the act of forgetting, either inevitably or purposefully, seems to play as much a part as remembering itself.”
― Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory

“Karachi has been a destination for some of the most dramatic migrations of all.”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“Every time the train stopped at a station, we would all hold our breath, making sure not a single sound drifted out of the closed windows. We were hungry and our throats parched. From inside the train we heard voices travelling up and down the platform, saying, “Hindu paani,” and, from the other side, “Muslim paani.” Apart from land and population, even the water had now been divided”
― Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory

“If I considered the Partition an archeological site, and the many experiences of those who witnessed it as the site’s structural sedimentation, then the deeper I excavated, the more I found, and that too in innumerable renditions.”
― Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory

“it was too loud for hope
it was too silent for victory.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Synecdoche

“The notion that where one is from can be understood using what remains of that place opens up a highly sensitive and rich terrain that can help unpack belonging, especially if that place has now been rendered inaccessible by national borders.”
― Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory

“Bengali leader, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy (who served as Pakistan’s prime minister in 1956) had noted as early as March 1948 that Pakistan’s elite was predisposed to ‘raising the cry of “Pakistan in danger” for the purpose of arousing Muslim sentiments and binding them together’ to maintain its power.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“But insecurity remains the hallmark of Pakistan’s political and intellectual conversation. Even a comment about, say, Pakistan’s relatively low ranking among nations for book readership, is portrayed as an attack on the idea of Pakistan.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“Ironically, support for the idea of Pakistan was strongest in regions where
Muslims were a minority and Jinnah, as well as most of his principal lieutenants, belonged to areas that would not fall in Pakistan. To emerge as chief negotiator on behalf of Muslims, Jinnah and the All-India Muslim League had to prove their support in the Muslim majority provinces. ‘Such support’, Jalal points out, ‘could not have been won by too precise a political programme since the interests of Muslims in one part of India did not suit Muslims in others.’ Jinnah invoked religion as ‘a way of giving a semblance of unity and solidity to his divided Muslim constituents’.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“One can sympathize with the sentiment of Pakistanis who must constantly defend their country against criticism ranging from questioning of its very creation to its current policies. But it is equally important to understand that mere survival does not equate success and that progress often requires uninhibited introspection.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“There is no clear evidence that Pakistan was involved in the Taliban's inception per se, but it certainly featured in the Taliban's transformation from a movement of clerics from within the Jihad driven by their local agendas and supported by their peers to an organized political unit with countrywide objectives.”
― Fotini Christia, Alliance Formation in Civil Wars

“From 1947, the country had unwittingly conducted a vast human experiment: what would happen if a diverse place suddenly cleansed itself of many of its minorities, so that almost everyone was, on the surface, the same?

Now the results of the experiment were coming in.

Muslims, the single "nation" championed by their leaders just a few years before, proved to be strikingly diverse. They always had been. Now some looked within their numbers and began singling out new minorities to replace the ones they had lost.”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“1947, a found poem,
full of erasures in history
of India and Pakistan.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Synecdoche

“Is it possible to leave Karachi after living here for so long?”
― Steve Inskeep, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

“The problem with Pakistani politics is not only that the elite rule, but also that the masses want celebrities or influential people to represent them. This is a flawed mindset. By doing this, the people create the electables’, and discourage the growth of grassroots politics.”
― Reham Khan, Reham Khan

“In Taliban-controlled portions of Pakistan, “Polio vaccinations have been declared haram by the ulema, and the government campaign has subsequently stalled.” Like car insurance, vaccinations are a form of presumption. Only with the expulsion of the Taliban from the Swat Valley in the late summer of 2009 was the Pakistani government able to resume vaccinations.”
― Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis

“Pakistanis are a pious, warm and hospitable people,’ wrote Richard Leiby, a Washington Post reporter who spent a year and a half there, lamenting that the news from Pakistan did not reflect that. He noted, however, that the bad news about Pakistan was not untrue. In his view, ‘Just like average Americans’, the simple Pakistani people ‘pay the price of their leaders’ magnificent mistakes’.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“Seventy years after its birth, Pakistan is a volatile semi-authoritarian, national security state, which has failed to run itself consistently under constitutional order or rule of law. Examining the causes of Pakistan’s persistent dysfunction, including an inquiry into its foundational idea, is more important than building a ‘positive image’ through half-truths.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“According to Trump, ‘The Pakistani people have suffered greatly from terrorism and extremism. We recognize those contributions and those sacrifices. But Pakistan has also sheltered the same organizations that try every single day to kill our people. We have been paying Pakistan billions and billions of dollars at the same time they are housing the very terrorists that we are fighting. But that will have to change, and that will change immediately. No partnership can survive a country’s harboring of militants and terrorists who target US service members and officials. It is time for Pakistan to demonstrate its commitment to civilization, order and to peace.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“In Pakistan, a perception has been officially cultivated that anyone who offers facts, statistics or opinions that do not coincide with the national narrative does so at the behest of Pakistan’s many external enemies.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“A few weeks after the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright said that ‘Pakistan has everything that gives you an international migraine. It has nuclear weapons, it has terrorism, extremists, corruption, it’s very poor and it’s in a location that’s really, really important.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State

“During the 1960s, Nevard had only to deal with angry letters to his editor, Americans influenced by Pakistani civil servants, and stringers modifying their stories under official guidance. By 2006, the Times’ Carlotta Gall discovered that Pakistan’s security apparatus had become far more pugnacious. ‘After five days of reporting in and around Quetta, Pakistan, I had somehow irritated the secretive but powerful Directorate for Inter Service Intelligence, the ISI,’ she wrote in her book The Wrong Enemy, describing the day Pakistani agents raided her hotel room.”
― Husain Haqqani, Reimagining Pakistan: Transforming a Dysfunctional Nuclear State