ABSTRACT
Pakistan began life as a fragile nation-state. Formed by the partition of the subcontinent, the new country was a geographical oddity to begin with. Comprising two wings that were separated by over a thousand miles of hostile Indian territory, partition had given Jinnah what he had dreaded most, ‘a mutilated and moth-eaten Pakistan’. Its westem wing comprized the erstwhile British provinces of the North-West Frontier Province, Sind, Baluchistan, and the western half of a divided Punjab, while its eastern wing was made up of a truncated Bengal. Consisting of territories that had long been the backwaters of colonial India, Pakistan, unlike its neighbour neither inherited a credible federal structure which had the necessary wherewithal to tackle the many challenges facing the new state, nor did it possess a political machinery sophisticated and extensive enough to integrate the ethnic and regional diversities of the new nation.
