People and Places
At the time of independence, both East and
West Pakistan were predominantly
rural and agrarian societies, but after
the Green Revolution—marked
by increased mechanized agriculture and
high yield seeds—and industrialization
centered in big cities, rural and tribal
people began to flock to the cities.
After 1971, despite the separation of its
eastern wing as the new state of Bangladesh,
Pakistan experienced several new
demographic trends including the
movement of labor overseas, especially to
the Gulf States such as Saudi Arabia,
the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait,
and Oman. In the wake of intense
urbanization and as a result of
geopolitical developments in Afghanistan and
Iran during the 1980s, Pakistan received
millions of refugees. People could
enjoy comparatively better living
standards and some improved health facilities.
As a consequence, the country’s population
increased through the 1980s
and 1990s. In 1947, the present-day
territories of Pakistan had about 37 million
inhabitants, including the huge population
influx in 1947 from across India.
By early 2007, Pakistan’s population was
estimated at 160 million, resulting in
added pressure on land and resources.
About 65 percent of these people are
young and eager to work and achieve better
living standards. Given the limited
resources and opportunities, however, they
are confronted with serious roadblocks. In addition, the country’s major expense
has been on a costly defense
establishment, resulting in part because
of its thorny relationship with
India and also because the country has
been mostly ruled by the military,
preventing any major changes in national
budgetary allocations earmarked
for the development sector. Greater demand
for better education, competition
over jobs, professionalization of urban
population groups, remittances
from expatriates, and a vocal civil
society have allowed greater national integration,
although ethnoregional and ideological
tensions abound and often
converge with thorny regional political
events. Pakistan has survived through
various chasms and crisis in its more than
six decades of recent history, and,
with a vocal media and alert civic groups
seeking peace within and without,
its populace might gradually move forward
to create a better welfare system.
Pakistanis are, by majority, descendants
of the people who have inhabited
the Indus Basin for thousands of years.
They are certainly an Indo-European
stock of people who interacted with other
ethnic communities such as Persians,
Arabs, Afghans, and Turks and in the
process evolved a synthesized
identity that combines these pluralistic
traditions. Islam has been an important
factor in the collective lives of these
people for many centuries, especially
because of a long period of Muslim rule
and demand for Muslim statehood.
This religious identification has
strengthened Pakistani blood relationship
with the west Asian co-religionists. It is
true that many of the early ruling and
religious Muslim elite came into the
northwestern subcontinent from Muslim
societies to the north and west, but their
interaction with the local south Asian
families and cultures underwrote their
steady assimilation into a cooperative
Indo-Muslim culture. Even though Pakistan
received about 8 to 10 million
Muslim refugees from India in 1947 while
the Hindus and Sikhs left Pakistan
for their new home across the borders,
these newcomers also shared a common
ethnocultural consciousness with the
people already living in the young
country.
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