When you think of Pakistan, the seams of political theory have to be stretched to make sense of the state-citizen relationship. People have rights by virtue of being members of a particular country. These rights are guaranteed through a set of rules by consensus, forged in the representative and legislative bodies. However, in post-colonial states such as Pakistan, the very concept of citizenship is ambivalent and imperfect. This is because the structure of the state does not seem to have enough correspondence with legislative bodies and processes. Thus the mechanisms of the state structure are extra- if not supra-legislative and, therefore, decidedly not representative.

The structures of the state in most of the Third World were formed under a colonial dispensation and have been sustained in the post-colonial era. Because of that continuity, the rights and the obligations of the ‘individual’ have not undergone a qualitative change. In that sense, independence could only effect a change in the faces in charge. The bureaucratic and military establishments remain strongly embedded in the ethos of the British period in which the master and the slave was clearly distinguished.

Furthermore, independence was proclaimed just after the Second World War, without first establishing a new set of rights and obligations for the people, who were to have a new and relatively elevated status of citizens of an independent country. Thus, in independent countries like Pakistan, the ‘citizen’ can hardly be distinguished from the ‘subject’ ipso facto.

State functionaries are being trained and instructed to see their fellow citizens through the same prism, originally meant for the colonial official. The colonial state used to engage with the masses from a distance because it had no sense of ownership towards the people living as their subjects. The personnel of the colonial administration were fewer in number and had to manage the vast multitude of what they referred to as ‘natives’, who were viewed by them with a great deal of suspicion. The ‘natives’ were considered as recalcitrant mischief-mongers. The administrative elite, in cahoots with the landed (political) aristocracy and the Army top brass, formed a ruling oligarchy. These oligarchs very conveniently stepped into the shoes of the colonial masters and exhibited the same mode of behaviour, even after the colonial yoke was ostensibly shed and the era of ‘independence’ had commenced.

The citizen in Pakistan is, therefore, a citizen in name only. The state’s institutions exercise their brutal authority and divest commoners of their citizenship. One may argue that our political theorists must coin a new category to better describe the status held by the great mass of the population of this country, which of course is not of a citizen -- perhaps it should be subject-citizen.

One must also not lose sight of the status accorded to the minorities in our country. Are they full citizens? This phenomenon of citizenship without being a citizen (as is current in the West) is not unique only to Pakistan. It is ubiquitous in the entire post-colonial world. In most of these countries the continuity between the two eras, slavery and freedom, is quite seamless, a fact that holds in the case of several other post-colonial countries.

One thing peculiar to the Pakistani narrative is the marked exclusion of a number of anti-British historical characters. Even Tipu Sultan and his father Hyder Ali are conspicuously absent from our national narrative. That exemplifies the colonial legacy and our embeddedness in it.

The citizens in the post-colonial era are a world apart from how ‘citizen’ as a category is understood and deployed in the Western polities. One may aver here that the concept of citizens and their rights and obligations is Western in its very essence. Usually this concept is traced back to Renaissance, attaining wider currency and acceptability through such events as the French Revolution and all the political upheavals that Europe went through during the 19^th Century.

During the middle ages, citizenship was mostly associated with cities and towns and specified only for the middle class. The association of a citizen with a particular country or state is consequence of the development of the modern era, when the authority of a king or queen had substantially eroded, and political representation through ballot became an established norm.

Importantly, the notion of citizenship was not entirely based on democratic practices. Even under dictatorships and totalitarian regimes -- such as those of Hitler, Franco and Stalin -- the notion stood its ground. A citizen remained a citizen and could not be reduced to a ‘subject’. The citizen, howsoever deprived or under-privileged, was nevertheless recognised as a citizen. All said and done, citizenship as a notion has universal acceptability, although at times with subtle and at other times very explicit variations.

One caveat may be about the relation of an individual with the state within the realm of Muslim political thought. What if Muslim Universalism (Ummah) is invoked as a category which runs counter to the very idea of a state? Then it will be quite interesting to think of a practical possibility of how an individual can become connected with an abstract idea (of Ummah) in an age with starkly different political realities. Probably Muslim political theory will have to come up with certain creative-mega solutions. In the classical political tradition of the Muslims the individual, by taking oath of allegiance to the Caliph/Sultan, established connection with the ruler and not with the state.

In a modern political situation, the duties or the obligations of a citizen are not at all addressed. More so, the divergence between the Muslim political ideas and practices is far too great. Can we bridge it or is it possible that we can do it without resorting to Western political theory? Hopefully, we will find answer to these questions.