About 100,000 Pakistanis have lost their citizenship as the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) has blocked their CNICs or refused to renew them because their status was suspect. These suspects have been made aliens and how have no proper recourse to access state services. The suspicion is that these people are Afghans, who have illegally gotten the CNIC’s, however, many of them argue that they are not refugees and have never been. This has drastically cruel impacts on the people listed as aliens. They cannot sell or buy any property, or do business and their children cannot take exams. Most of these people belong to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan.
The state needs to acknowledge that many of the people that this policy applies to have ancestors that migrated to Pakistan decades ago from Afghanistan and from present day India. This should not be another case of Pakhtun’s being persecuted after the Peshawar attacks. The Pakhtun community is not just under scrutiny in KPK but in cities like Sialkot, Attock, Jhang and even Hyderabad. The point here is to not to challenge the state to grant citizenship to the Afghan refugees, but to stand up for the rights of the Pakhtun if they are discriminated against on the basis of their Afghan lineage.
Pakistan has always been a safe-haven for Muslims of all ethnicities and sects under the Two Nation Theory of yore that we still celebrate today. We cannot allow ourselves to become so pragmatic and so obsessive about our identity and security, that lives of Pakistanis are destroyed. There is no simple way to solve the problem of terrorism, and none of what has happened in the last seventeen years has been because of the Afghan or the Pakhtun community. We are literally all decedents of people who were not Pakistani; Indians, migrants, Afghans, Persians, Central Asians, Mongolians... we cannot now start kicking people out and forcefully turning them into refugees and IDPs. The state has to sort out its strategy for a dignified and civil repatriation to Afghanistan of Afghans, as well as a naturalisation program for descendants and immigrants. We cannot change our lineages, but the state can change its security and welfare policies.