ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to investigate the relationship between ethnicity, nationalism and sub-nationalism within Pakistan, with specific reference to the politics of Baluchistan from 1947 until 1988. In response to the absence of popular sentiments over the creation of Pakistan, the newly established Pakistani state devised two clear strategies in attempting to deal with Baluchi aspirations after 1947. The first strategy assumed, erroneously — that there was a clear, a priori, Baluchi culture to which the state could appeal and which it could accommodate politically. The second strategy assumed that an imposed territorial religious nationalism could provide a consensual framework which eschewed any reference to ethnicity at all. By proving a provincial arena within which the cultural prerequisites of Baluchi identity could be developed it would enhance a territorial notion of Pakistan. The demand for Pakistan was first seriously articulated at Lahore in 1940, at a convention of the Muslim League.
