Pakistan, with a straight face and straight-backed seriousness, has appointed itself as the mediator of peace between the US and Iran as if history were a costume cupboard and it could simply slip into the robes of a cardboard vishwaguru. Tehran didn’t turn up, denying negotiations with America which Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Army Chief Gen. Asim Munir are mooting as geopolitical resurgence. Islamabad announced gravitas; Iran replied with ghosting. Worse, it hardened the blow saying India was okay as a mediator. Islamabad is indeed a ‘dalal’ sans buyers, confused about itself, and its quest for identity a tale of pathos and bathos.
In 1947, the bacon-loving Muhammad Ali Jinnah envisioned a state that was Muslim in identity but not medieval in personality. He promoted law over zeal, citizenship over sect; Pakistan as republic and not a pulpit. In 1977, Zia-ul-Haq did not just seize power in as much as he redefined the state. The state sought legitimacy not through democracy, but through religion. The courts bent, the classrooms complied and the public square shrank. The Cold War turned Pakistan into a frontline state. The Afghan jihad, funded by the US and Saudi Arabia, transformed the country into a logistical and ideological hub of militancy. This was a rented relevance with subsidised significance. Now, economic instability—recurring IMF bailouts, currency depreciation, debt stress—undermines state capacity along with insurgencies in Balochistan and tensions along the Afghan border. Philosophically, Pakistan sits at an unresolved crossroads: it is not secular, but not fully theocratic. It’s not a dictatorship, and yet is not a free democracy. It is not purely ideological either, yet deeply shaped by ideology. This is not just position confusion; it is structural ambiguity. Ambiguity, over time, hardens into identity. Perhaps the more uncomfortable question is this: what if Pakistan’s “identity crisis” is not a temporary phase but its defining condition? A state born from negation (“not India”), sustained by institutions that outgrew its founding vision, and pulled between competing futures it cannot fully commit to. In that sense, the search for identity may itself be the identity. Not a vishwaguru, not a failed state, nor a stable republic but something more precarious: a nation permanently in negotiation with itself, projecting fake confidence abroad while quietly unsure of what it is at home.
Now insert the most acrobatic contradiction of all—the moral high ground of Kashmir. Pakistan yells “autonomy” and “self-determination” and the “sacred rights of Kashmiri Muslims.” What Zia incubated as “strategic depth” had since then metastasised into domestic doctrine. Minorities were not just sidelined; Ahmadiyas are constitutionally excommunicated or bombed, blasphemy accusations invite death sentences, while Hindu and Christian girls are abducted and forcibly converted with numbing regularity. How can a state that cannot mediate between its own contradictions arbitrate between warring nations? It cannot reconcile Rawalpindi and Parliament, but will reconcile Washington and Tehran? It cannot broker peace in Balochistan, but will broker détente in the Middle East? This is diplomacy of delusion or statesmanship by sloganeering. The external pattern persists: patron to patron, pivot to patron—first as Washington’s willing ward, now Beijing’s belt-and-road beneficiary; occasionally both, but rarely autonomous. China funds, the West hugs and kicks and the Gulf recalculates. Nietzsche warned about masks that grow into faces. Pakistan has worn so many: Islamic fortress, American ally, Chinese corridor, and democratic republic, so much so the mask has become the method. And India—whether by design or default—remains the gravitational reference point it cannot escape, which raises the most uncomfortable truth that Pakistan is not just searching for identity; it is trapped in a negative one. Defined not by what it is, but by what it is not.
To paraphrase the philosopher Hegel, identity emerges through the recognition of being acknowledged by others as what you claim to be. Hence the Iran episode is not an anomaly. It is the CT-Scan of an establishment that postures, pivots, and proclaims its own importance while caught in a loop of borrowed bravado and brittle belief. In its unending quest for meaning, Pakistan is mistaking mimicry for mastery which has reduced a serious search for self into a sustained spectacle of self-parody. Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the legendary poet whom Zia banned, wrote the nazm “Yeh daagh daagh ujaalaa, yeh shab-gaziida sahar; Woh intizaar tha jiska, yeh woh sahar to nahin; Yeh woh sahar to nahin jis ki aarzu lekar; Chale the yaar ki mil-jaayegi kahin na kahin.” (This stain-covered daybreak, this night-bitten dawn; This is not that dawn of which there was expectation; This is not that dawn with longing for which; The friends set out, convinced that somewhere they would be met with.) No one. Nowhere. Not yet.