Dr. Masood Tariq
Independent Political Theorist
Karachi, Pakistan
drmasoodtariq@gmail.com
Date: January 6, 2026
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Abstract
This paper analyses the political endurance and disproportionate influence of the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia originating from the United Provinces (UP) and Central Provinces (CP) in post-Partition Pakistan. Despite lacking territorial rootedness, demographic weight, or indigenous legitimacy within Pakistan’s provinces, this migrant elite successfully embedded itself at the centre of state power after 1947. The study argues that this outcome was not accidental but the result of a sustained and adaptive divide-and-rule strategy that systematically inhibited the consolidation of indigenous political power among Punjabis, Sindhis, Pashtuns, Baloch, and Bengalis.
Covering the period from 1947 to 2025, the paper traces a recurring pattern of political intervention: the dismissal or neutralisation of provincial governments, the capture and federalisation of key urban centres (most notably Karachi), the engineering of cross-ethnic alliances, the imposition of linguistic hierarchy, and the instrumental use of political movements from the Muhajir Punjabi Pathan Muttahida Mahaz (MPPM) to the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM), and later Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) as mechanisms of controlled confrontation.
Drawing on postcolonial elite theory, urban political sociology, and South Asian historiography, the paper contends that while these strategies ensured the long-term survival of the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia as a political intermediary class, they simultaneously produced deep structural fragmentation within Pakistan’s federal system, eroding social cohesion, provincial autonomy, and national integration.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction: The Cleverness of Weakness
2. The First Divisions (1947–1951): Excluding Pashtuns, Silencing Sindh
3. Karachi as the First Laboratory of Divide and Rule
4. The 1969 Experiment: Muhajir Punjabi Pathan Muttahida Mahaz (MPPM)
5. Institutionalising Confrontation: From MPPM to MQM
6. The Punjabi Case: Linguistic Displacement Without Violence
7. From MQM to PTI: Replicating the Model in Punjab
8. The Structural Logic of Divide and Rule
9. Conclusion: Cleverness Without Wisdom
10. References
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1. Introduction: The Cleverness of Weakness
In the political history of Pakistan, no social group has exercised influence so disproportionate to its demographic size as the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia originating from the United Provinces and Central Provinces (UP–CP) of British India. Numerically small and territorially uprooted after 1947, this group nonetheless succeeded in occupying a commanding position within the state’s political, bureaucratic, and ideological structures. Their dominance presents a historical paradox: how did a migrant elite, lacking demographic weight and indigenous territorial roots, manage to shape the trajectory of a postcolonial state composed overwhelmingly of established nations?
Unlike Pakistan’s indigenous nations, Punjabis with agrarian depth and military manpower; Sindhis with millennia-old civilisational continuity; Baloch with territorial autonomy and tribal cohesion; Pashtuns with entrenched tribal-military structures; and Bengalis with sheer demographic majority, the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia entered Pakistan as a deterritorialised elite (Jalal 1985; Mamdani 1996). They possessed no province of their own, no ancestral countryside, no indigenous shrine networks, and no organic social base within the new state. Their cultural memory remained anchored in North Indian urban centres such as Delhi, Lucknow, Aligarh, and Agra rather than in Lahore, Multan, Hyderabad (Sindh), Peshawar, Quetta, or Dhaka.
This absence of soil fundamentally shaped their political behaviour. Lacking the material foundations that traditionally underpin postcolonial power. Land, numbers, and indigeneity, the Ashrafia could not rule through majoritarian politics or territorial dominance. Instead, their survival depended on a different logic: manipulation rather than mobilisation, institutional capture rather than popular legitimacy, and strategic fragmentation rather than national integration.
This paper conceptualises that logic as the cleverness of weakness. Weakness here does not denote passivity or marginality; rather, it refers to a structural condition that incentivised strategic ingenuity. The Urdu-speaking Ashrafia converted vulnerability into leverage by embedding themselves within the state apparatus and by ensuring that no single indigenous nation could consolidate enough political, cultural, or demographic power to challenge their centrality. Their influence rested not on leading mass movements, but on making themselves indispensable intermediaries between centre and provinces, between military and civilian authority, and between competing ethnic blocs.
The central thesis advanced here is that from 1947 onward, the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia pursued a consistent and adaptive divide-and-rule strategy. At times overt and coercive, at other times subtle and institutional, this strategy operated through multiple mechanisms: the dismissal of provincial governments, the manipulation of language policy, the engineering of urban demography, the monopolisation of bureaucracy and media, and the manufacturing of shifting political alliances. These tactics did not aim to build a stable national consensus; rather, they aimed to prevent indigenous cohesion while preserving elite continuity.
This paper traces the evolution of this strategy historically, analytically, and comparatively. It situates the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia’s political conduct within broader theories of postcolonial elite rule, deterritorialised power, and bureaucratic dominance, while grounding the analysis firmly in Pakistan’s lived political experience. In doing so, it seeks to explain not only how the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia survived, but how their survival strategy reshaped and ultimately fractured the political and social foundations of Pakistan itself.
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2. The First Divisions (1947–1951): Excluding Pashtuns, Silencing Sindh
The earliest expression of the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia’s political strategy appeared immediately after independence. The new state of Pakistan was structurally imbalanced from its inception: political authority was concentrated in the hands of a small, Urdu-speaking migrant elite, while demographic and territorial power lay overwhelmingly with indigenous nations. Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s first Prime Minister and himself a product of the UP landed-bureaucratic milieu, was acutely aware of this imbalance (Afzal 1969).
Confronted with the impossibility of ruling through numbers or territorial legitimacy, the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia-led centre adopted a strategy of pre-emptive fragmentation. Rather than forging federal accommodation with provincial leaderships, it moved swiftly to neutralise autonomous political forces in the peripheries. The cases of the North-West Frontier Province and Sindh illustrate how this logic was operationalised between 1947 and 1951.
2.1 Pashtuns and the Frontier
In the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), the Khudai Khidmatgar movement led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan represented a deeply rooted, mass-based Pashtun political force. Unlike the Muslim League, which had limited organisational presence in the Frontier before 1947, the Khudai Khidmatgars commanded widespread popular legitimacy through decades of anti-colonial mobilisation and social reform.
Rather than accommodating this indigenous leadership within a federal framework, the central government opted for confrontation. Within days of Pakistan’s creation, the elected provincial ministry was dismissed. Pashtun leaders were arrested, the Khudai Khidmatgar organisation was banned, and its members were subjected to prolonged repression (Banerjee 2000).
The earlier referendum of July 1947 had already denied Pashtuns the option of independence or meaningful autonomy, offering only a binary choice between India and Pakistan. Post-independence repression thus completed the cycle: political choice was followed by political punishment.
This episode established a foundational principle of the new state: indigenous autonomy would be redefined as disloyalty, while central authority controlled by a non-indigenous elite would be insulated from popular accountability. The Frontier was pacified not through consent but through coercion, setting a precedent that would later be replicated in Balochistan and, ultimately, in East Pakistan.
2.2 Sindh and the Removal of Karachi
In Sindh, the confrontation took a different but equally consequential form. Chief Minister Ayub Khuhro recognised that the proposed federal separation of Karachi would fundamentally alter Sindh’s demographic, economic, and political balance. Karachi was not merely a city; it was Sindh’s primary port, revenue base, and urban centre. Its removal would reduce Sindh to a peripheral, largely rural province while transferring immense economic and administrative power to the centre.
Khuhro’s resistance was therefore not parochial obstructionism but a defence of provincial sovereignty. His dismissal in 1948 demonstrated the limits of provincial consent in the new federation (Talbot 2009). The decision to detach Karachi was taken unilaterally by a centre dominated by Urdu-speaking migrants, with little regard for Sindhi political opinion.
The separation of Karachi was not merely an administrative adjustment; it was a foundational act of urban capture. By federalising the city, the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia created a political enclave detached from indigenous society and accountable only to the central state. Karachi became a substitute homeland, a territorial anchor for a deterritorialised elite, where demographic engineering, bureaucratic concentration, and cultural dominance could proceed without negotiation with Sindh.
Together, the repression of Pashtun autonomy in the Frontier and the silencing of Sindh through Karachi’s removal reveal a coherent early strategy. The Urdu-speaking Ashrafia-led centre did not seek to integrate indigenous nations into a shared political order; instead, it sought to weaken them individually, ensuring that no province could emerge as a unified counterweight to central authority. These first divisions laid the institutional and psychological foundations for Pakistan’s enduring centre–periphery conflict.
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3. Karachi as the First Laboratory of Divide and Rule
Karachi emerged as the first and most consequential laboratory of Urdu-speaking Ashrafia political experimentation in Pakistan. Unlike the provinces, where indigenous societies retained demographic depth and historical continuity, Karachi offered a rare opportunity: a port city emptied of much of its pre-Partition population and placed directly under federal control. This combination made it uniquely suited for social engineering, institutional capture, and the rehearsal of a broader national strategy.
Evacuee property laws became the primary instrument of this transformation. Properties abandoned by departing Sindhi Hindus were formally vested in the state but, in practice, were overwhelmingly allocated to Urdu-speaking migrants rather than to local Sindhis or long-term residents of the city (Gazdar 2007). Allocation was mediated through bureaucratic networks dominated by the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia, converting displacement into capital and administrative privilege into permanent urban ownership.
Simultaneously, new residential colonies, PIB Colony, Nazimabad, Liaquatabad, were not merely housing schemes but deliberately designed linguistic and cultural enclaves. These spaces reproduced North Indian social norms, educational preferences, and political loyalties while remaining largely insulated from Sindh’s rural and urban society. Urban planning thus functioned as political architecture: separation was normalised, and coexistence was rendered unnecessary.
Karachi offered the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia three interlocking strategic assets:
1. Economic Control
Karachi housed Pakistan’s sole major port, customs infrastructure, banking sector, and early industrial base. Control over these institutions ensured access to revenue flows disproportionate to demographic strength. Economic centrality translated into bargaining power over provinces dependent on federal transfers and trade access.
2. Narrative Control
The city became the hub of newspapers, publishing houses, and radio broadcasting. Urdu, already privileged as the national language, dominated public discourse from Karachi outward. This allowed the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia to frame national identity, define loyalty, and delegitimise dissenting voices whether Bengali, Sindhi, Pashtun, or Baloch as parochial or subversive.
3. Administrative Control
As the federal capital until 1959, Karachi concentrated ministries, diplomatic missions, and senior bureaucratic appointments. State power was thus spatially and socially concentrated within a city already engineered to favour a specific elite. Administrative proximity replaced electoral legitimacy as the primary route to influence.
Within this framework, ethnic roles were carefully distributed. Sindhis were marginalised from urban authority in their own province. Punjabis, despite later dominance in the military, were initially kept largely rural and agrarian, distant from the commanding heights of the urban state. Pashtuns and Baloch were incorporated primarily as labour, dock workers, transporters, security guards, present in the city but excluded from decision-making. Each group was present, but none was permitted to consolidate political control.
Karachi thus functioned as a fortress-city: demographically engineered, institutionally insulated, and politically detached from its provincial environment. From this base, the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia could manage national politics indirectly, mediating between provinces, arbitrating conflicts, and sustaining central dominance, without ever confronting indigenous majorities on equal democratic terms. What was tested in Karachi would later be replicated, with varying degrees of success, across the rest of Pakistan.
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4. The 1969 Experiment: Muhajir Punjabi Pathan Muttahida Mahaz (MPPM)
By the late 1960s, the political equilibrium carefully maintained by the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia began to show signs of strain. Sindhi nationalism re-emerged with renewed confidence, driven by demands for cultural recognition, linguistic rights, and provincial autonomy. Language, long marginalised in urban Sindh, became the focal point of this resurgence. For the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia, whose political leverage rested less on numbers than on symbolic and institutional dominance, this posed an existential challenge.
Urdu functioned not merely as a medium of communication but as the central ideological asset of the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia: the language of the state, bureaucracy, higher education, and national identity. Any challenge to its exclusivity, particularly within Sindh, threatened to unravel the cultural hierarchy that sustained their influence. The Sindhi Language Bill, introduced in the Sindh Assembly and passed in 1972, therefore represented far more than a provincial legislative act; it symbolised a reassertion of indigenous sovereignty over cultural space.
The response was pre-emptive and strategic. In 1969, the Muhajir Punjabi Pathan Muttahida Mahaz (MPPM) was formed under the leadership of Nawab Muzaffar Hussain. Publicly framed as a broad, inter-ethnic front committed to national unity, the MPPM was in reality structurally Muhajir-led, ideologically Urdu-centred, and tactically designed to fragment Sindhi mobilisation. Punjabis and Pashtuns were incorporated not as equal partners but as demographic ballast, useful for street power, numerical optics, and the appearance of cross-ethnic consensus.
The timing of the MPPM’s emergence is significant. Its formation preceded the Sindhi Language Bill but anticipated its political consequences. The alliance functioned as a latent mobilisation mechanism, activated when linguistic legislation provided the necessary trigger. When the Bill was passed, Karachi and other urban centres descended into ethnic violence. Sindhi schools, bookshops, and cultural symbols were attacked; Sindhi language advocacy was reframed as separatism; and demands for parity were portrayed as threats to national cohesion (Shaikh 2009).
Crucially, Punjabis and Pashtuns, many themselves recent migrants to urban Sindh, were mobilised against Sindhis under the banner of “national unity” and “Islamic brotherhood.” This manoeuvre achieved two objectives simultaneously. First, it isolated Sindhis politically within their own province. Second, it deflected attention away from the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia’s own hegemonic position by recasting the conflict as one between “provincialism” and “nationhood.”
The MPPM experiment demonstrated the operational effectiveness of divide-and-rule politics in an urban, multi-ethnic setting. Cultural assertion was converted into ethnic confrontation; legislative reform was transformed into street violence; and a minority elite successfully repositioned itself as the guardian of national integrity. Though the MPPM itself was short-lived, its underlying logic, cross-ethnic mobilisation under Muhajir leadership to neutralise indigenous claims would be refined and re-emerge in subsequent political formations.
In this sense, MPPM was not an aberration but a prototype. It revealed how a deterritorialised elite could survive and even dominate by ensuring that indigenous movements never confronted the state as a unified bloc, but instead collided with one another in carefully managed conflict.
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5. Institutionalising Confrontation: From MPPM to MQM
The emergence of the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) in the early 1980s marked a decisive shift from episodic coalition-building to the permanent institutionalisation of confrontation. Whereas the Muhajir Punjabi Pathan Muttahida Mahaz (MPPM) had operated as a tactical alliance activated during moments of crisis, MQM transformed ethnic mobilisation into a standing political structure. It was no longer an ad hoc response to Sindhi assertion but a continuous mechanism of urban dominance.
MQM differed from its predecessor in three critical respects. First, it abandoned the pretence of supra-ethnic unity and openly articulated a Muhajir identity rooted in migration, dispossession, and linguistic distinction. Second, it advanced explicit territorial demands, most notably the proposal for an “Urban Sindh” or “Karachi–Hyderabad” province, which would have formally detached Pakistan’s principal urban centres from Sindh’s indigenous political control. Third, it normalised organised violence as a tool of political negotiation, employing militant wings to control neighbourhoods, enforce strikes, and discipline both rivals and supporters (Verkaaik 2004).
From the perspective of the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia, MQM’s value lay not in stability but in managed instability. Persistent urban conflict served several strategic purposes. It justified repeated federal intervention in Sindh under the pretext of restoring order, thereby weakening provincial autonomy. It ensured that no Sindhi-led political formation could consolidate uncontested authority over Karachi, Pakistan’s economic and administrative heart. And it entrenched the Muhajir leadership as indispensable intermediaries: without their cooperation, the city remained ungovernable.
Karachi thus became a theatre of calibrated chaos. Cycles of violence between MQM and the Pakistan Peoples Party, between MQM and Pashtun groups, and periodically between MQM and the state itself kept political outcomes negotiable but never resolvable. Each confrontation ended not in the defeat of the Muhajir leadership but in renewed bargaining with the centre. As Verkaaik (2004) observes, MQM’s confrontational politics simultaneously challenged and reproduced state power, extracting concessions while reaffirming the necessity of central arbitration.
Importantly, the costs of this strategy were externalised. Sindhis bore the loss of effective control over their capital; Pashtuns and Baloch absorbed much of the street-level violence; ordinary residents endured economic disruption and insecurity. The Urdu-speaking Ashrafia elite, by contrast, remained largely insulated, operating through political cadres, bureaucratic networks, and media influence rather than direct exposure to coercion.
In this sense, MQM represented the maturation of a long-standing political logic. Confrontation was no longer a temporary tactic but a structural condition of governance in urban Sindh. Disorder did not threaten Ashrafia dominance; it sustained it. Karachi burned, but authority remained fragmented, provincial sovereignty diluted, and national power accessible only through Muhajir mediation.
MQM thus completed the transition from divide-and-rule to rule through division, a model that would later be adapted, in different forms, beyond Sindh itself.
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6. The Punjabi Case: Linguistic Displacement Without Violence
In Punjab, the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia did not require overt ethnic confrontation or organised urban violence to neutralise indigenous consolidation. Demographic majority, territorial depth, and historical self-confidence made such a strategy both unnecessary and potentially counterproductive. Instead, domination was achieved through linguistic hegemony, a subtler but ultimately more durable instrument of control.
Urdu was systematically elevated as the language of refinement, modernity, and state authority, while Punjabi, spoken by the majority of Pakistan’s population was relegated to the realm of rusticity, informality, and cultural inferiority. Educational policy, administrative practice, and media representation reinforced this hierarchy. Punjabi was excluded from formal schooling, marginalised in official communication, and absent from elite cultural production, whereas Urdu became the gatekeeping language of upward mobility and bureaucratic access (Rahman 1996).
This linguistic ordering had profound political consequences. By disconnecting Punjabis from their mother tongue, the state disrupted the natural relationship between language and collective consciousness. Punjabi identity was not suppressed through coercion but dissolved through neglect and internalised shame. Unlike Sindhi or Bengali, Punjabi never crystallised into a mass linguistic movement because its speakers were encouraged to view linguistic self-assertion as parochial, even disloyal. Mastery of Urdu and increasingly English became the pathway to social advancement, while attachment to Punjabi was treated as an obstacle to progress.
The success of this strategy lay in its invisibility. Cultural displacement replaced physical confrontation. No riots were required, no bans imposed, no military operations conducted. The outcome, however, was structurally similar to more overt forms of repression: the prevention of indigenous consolidation. Punjabis remained numerically dominant yet culturally fragmented, politically powerful yet symbolically muted. Their language, stripped of institutional support, ceased to function as a vehicle for collective mobilisation.
This form of domination was particularly effective because it operated through consent rather than coercion. Punjabi elites themselves internalised the linguistic hierarchy, reproducing it within families, schools, and urban culture. In Lahore, the supposed heart of Punjabi civilisation, Urdu increasingly became the language of aspiration, while Punjabi survived largely in informal or performative contexts. As a result, Punjabi political identity remained diffuse, lacking the cultural infrastructure that had sustained Sindhi or Bengali resistance.
In this sense, Punjab represents the most refined application of Urdu-speaking Ashrafia political cleverness. Where confrontation risked backlash, erasure achieved compliance. Linguistic displacement accomplished what violence could not: it neutralised a majority without provoking rebellion.
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7. From MQM to PTI: Replicating the Model in Punjab
With the organisational and political decline of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (Mohajir Qaumi Movement) (MQM) from 2016, the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia required a new political vehicle through which its long-standing strategy of urban leverage and confrontation could be sustained. This role was increasingly assumed by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). While PTI formally presented itself as a national, reformist movement and was publicly led by Imran Khan, a Punjabi-Pathan by lineage, its urban organisational backbone in Punjab exhibited striking structural continuities with earlier Muhajir-led alliances, particularly the Muhajir Punjabi Pathan Muttahida Mahaz (MPPM) of 1969 and, later, MQM in Sindh.
As in earlier phases, the emphasis was not on rural mobilisation or electoral depth but on urban concentration, media visibility, and sustained confrontation. PTI’s strongest bases emerged in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, and other major urban centres—spaces historically shaped by bureaucratic, military, and media influence. These cities functioned in a manner analogous to Karachi in earlier decades: as platforms from which a numerically limited but institutionally embedded elite could exert disproportionate political pressure.
The tactical repertoire closely resembled that of the MPPM and MQM periods. Large-scale street mobilisation, prolonged sit-ins, symbolic occupation of public space, and deliberate institutional paralysis became defining features of PTI politics from 2016 to 2025. Existing Punjabi political leadership was consistently delegitimised as corrupt, dynastic, or unrepresentative, while urban protest was framed as moral resistance rather than political competition. This narrative strategy echoed earlier Muhajir discourses in Sindh, where confrontation was justified as a defence of national integrity or urban rights while effectively fragmenting indigenous political authority.
Crucially, this phase marked a geographical transfer of the divide-and-rule model. Whereas earlier Urdu-speaking Ashrafia strategies had focused on Sindh, first through the MPPM and later through MQM, the PTI phase shifted the arena of confrontation to Punjab itself. Punjabis were no longer merely administratively managed or linguistically displaced; they were now drawn into sustained urban unrest that disrupted provincial governance and prevented the consolidation of stable indigenous leadership. In this sense, PTI functioned as a new Mahaz, not ethnically explicit, but structurally familiar.
As Siddiqa (2023) notes, PTI’s confrontational politics increasingly relied on urban spectacle rather than institutional negotiation, producing cycles of crisis that necessitated intervention by unelected centres of power. This dynamic once again rendered intermediary elites indispensable while weakening representative provincial authority. The Urdu-speaking Ashrafia, though rarely visible as a distinct political bloc, retained relevance by embedding itself within the organisational, media, and bureaucratic ecosystems that sustained this mode of politics.
Thus, the transition from MQM to PTI did not represent a rupture but an adaptation. The form changed from ethnic party to populist movement, but the underlying logic remained consistent: urban capture, alliance-building across selected groups, delegitimisation of indigenous leadership, and the strategic use of confrontation to convert numerical weakness into political leverage.
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8. The Structural Logic of Divide and Rule
When examined across Pakistan’s post-Partition history, the political behaviour of the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia reveals a consistent and repeatable structural logic rather than a series of ad hoc responses. This logic operated through a limited but highly effective repertoire of strategies designed to convert demographic weakness into sustained political relevance.
First, the dismissal or neutralisation of provincial governments served as an initial and recurring mechanism of control. From the removal of the Khudai Khidmatgar ministry in the North-West Frontier Province, to the dismissal of Sindh’s elected leadership over resistance to Karachi’s separation, and the dissolution of the Punjab Assembly in 1949, provincial autonomy was repeatedly subordinated to central authority. These actions were not isolated constitutional crises but part of a broader pattern through which indigenous political organisation was delegitimised early, framed variously as parochial, disloyal, or administratively incompetent. By repeatedly invoking emergency powers, gubernatorial authority, and bureaucratic discretion, the centre asserted supremacy over provinces regardless of their demographic weight or historical legitimacy. Decision-making thus remained concentrated at the federal core, where the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia exercised disproportionate influence through control of the bureaucracy, legal interpretation, and political narrative. The dismissal of Punjab’s legislature is particularly revealing: even the province that supplied the state’s military and administrative backbone was not exempt from central intervention when autonomous political consolidation appeared possible. This pattern established a lasting precedent, provincial governments existed at the pleasure of the centre, while real power flowed through unelected institutions and Urdu-speaking Ashrafia’s urban bureaucratic enclaves rather than through representative, territorially rooted politics.
Second, urban capture functioned as the spatial foundation of this strategy. Rather than contesting power in rural or provincial arenas where indigenous nations held numerical and cultural dominance, the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia focused on cities, Karachi first, and later other administrative and media hubs. Control over ports, bureaucracies, universities, courts, and newsrooms allowed a minority elite to shape policy and narrative without confronting demographic realities.
Third, the deliberate construction of manufactured alliances enabled the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia to mask its minority status. Coalitions such as the Muhajir Punjabi Pathan Muttahida Mahaz, and later broader urban alliances, were presented as multi-ethnic platforms while remaining structurally Muhajir-led. These alliances were tactical rather than organic, designed to isolate specific indigenous groups, most notably Sindhis at one stage and Punjabis at another by drawing other communities into temporary opposition.
Fourth, controlled confrontation became a central political tool. Periodic urban unrest, language riots, street protests, and institutional paralysis were not anomalies but instruments. Confrontation created crises that necessitated federal intervention, reinforced the indispensability of intermediary elites, and prevented the emergence of stable, province-based political authority. Disorder, when carefully managed, preserved bargaining power.
Finally, linguistic hegemony provided the ideological glue binding these strategies together. Urdu functioned simultaneously as cultural capital, administrative gatekeeper, and symbol of national legitimacy. By elevating Urdu while marginalising indigenous languages, the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia entrenched its own cultural advantage and transformed language into a mechanism of exclusion that operated without overt coercion.
Taken together, these elements formed a durable system. Each phase ensured the political survival of the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia while systematically fragmenting indigenous cohesion. No single indigenous nation was allowed to consolidate power without being counterbalanced, distracted, or delegitimised. Divide and rule thus became not merely a tactic but a governing structure, one that stabilised elite dominance at the cost of Pakistan’s federal integrity and social trust.
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9. Conclusion: Cleverness Without Wisdom
The political history of Pakistan demonstrates that the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia mastered a distinctive mode of elite survival: governance without territory, dominance without numbers, and influence without indigenous legitimacy. Through institutional penetration, urban capture, linguistic hierarchy, and the strategic management of conflict, this deterritorialised elite converted structural weakness into political leverage.
Yet the long-term consequences of this strategy reveal its fundamental limitation. Cleverness sustained elite continuity, but it did so by preventing the emergence of a shared political community. Provincial autonomy was repeatedly undermined, indigenous identities were fragmented rather than integrated, and linguistic and ethnic hierarchies were normalised as instruments of governance. What emerged was not a cohesive federation but a state permanently negotiating its own internal fractures.
Pakistan’s enduring crises, centre–province conflict, linguistic alienation, ethnic mistrust, and repeated breakdowns of representative politics, cannot be understood as isolated failures or historical accidents. They are the cumulative outcome of a governing logic that prioritised Urdu-speaking Ashrafia survival over national consolidation. The Urdu-speaking Ashrafia endured, but the social contract eroded. The state survived, but its constituent nations were weakened.
This study does not deny the political ingenuity of the Urdu-speaking Ashrafia; rather, it questions its wisdom. Political cleverness may preserve power in the short term, but without rooted legitimacy and integrative vision, it produces a fragile polity. Pakistan’s experience suggests that a state built on managed division ultimately pays the price of perpetual instability.
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References
Afzal, M. R. (1969). Political Parties in Pakistan, 1947–1958. Islamabad: National Institute of Historical and Cultural Research.
Banerjee, M. (2000). The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition and Memory in the North West Frontier. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gazdar, H. (2007). “Karachi’s Informal Economy.” Economic and Political Weekly, 42(32), 3245–3252.
Jalal, A. (1985). The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mamdani, M. (1996). Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rahman, T. (1996). Language and Politics in Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press.
Shaikh, F. (2009). Making Sense of Pakistan. London: Hurst & Company.
Talbot, I. (2009). Pakistan: A Modern History. London: Hurst & Company.
Verkaaik, O. (2004). Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Siddiqa, A. (2023). Authoritarianism and the State in Pakistan. Lahore: Fiction House.
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Author Biography
Dr. Masood Tariq is a Karachi-based politician and political theorist. He formerly served as Senior Vice President of the Pakistan Muslim Students Federation (PMSF) Sindh, Councillor of the Municipal Corporation Hyderabad, Advisor to the Chief Minister of Sindh, and Member of the Sindh Cabinet.
His research explores South Asian geopolitics, postcolonial state formation, regional nationalism, and inter-ethnic politics, with a focus on the Punjabi question and Cold War strategic alignments.
He also writes on Pakistan’s socio-political and economic structures, analysing their structural causes and proposing policy-oriented solutions aligned with historical research and contemporary strategy.
His work aims to bridge historical scholarship and strategic analysis to inform policymaking across South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East.
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