The Muslim genome: postcolonial nation-building through genomics in Pakistan

Abstract

National genome projects are often celebrated as assertions of genomic sovereignty, with limited critique of their potential as instruments of biopolitical control and extraction by the state. This paper extends analyses of genomics and nationalism by examining how genomics is mobilized in service of an authoritarian nation-state and ideology in Pakistan. Since independence, Pakistan has sought to unify and centralize the state under a militarized project of Islamic nationalism. I demonstrate how the Pakistani genome was scientifically characterized along key contours of statist ideology to naturalize an imagined religious-nationalist-genetic community. Further, I discuss how genomics attempted to resolve two major tensions in statist narratives: the nation’s immense ethnocultural diversity under a homogenous national identity, and a territorial disjuncture between its geographical “homeland” and ideological “heartland”. Thus, I situate Pakistan’s genomics effort in the history of ideological collaboration between state and intellectual elites, and challenge the inherently emancipatory assumptions of national genomics initiatives.

Keywords:

• Genomics
• Pakistan
• Islam
• nationalism
• India

Introduction

This historical achievement has made him the first Pakistani and the first Muslim in the world history with a complete genomic mapping. (Ppi 2011, emphasis added)

On July 1, 2011, scientists at University of Karachi, one of Pakistan’s largest public-sector research universities, held a press conference to announce that the complete genome map of the first Pakistani individual (designated PK1) had been identified. They declared that “Pakistan had officially entered into the world of genome mapping”, as “the world’s sixth country and the first Muslim state” to map the sequence of a citizen, “after the United States, China, United Kingdom, Japan, and India” (Ppi 2011; Yusuf 2011). This map, they explained, will help understand “the over all genetic makeup of Pakistanis which now hold a unique genetic pattern as a nation” (Yusuf 2011, emphasis added). It also unlocked new avenues of research by revealing a “multitude of Pakistan-specific sites which can now be used in the design of large-scale studies that are better suited for the Pakistani population” (Express 2011). But more importantly, as one of the lead scientists remarked “emotionally”: “It is also a source of immense national pride” (Ppi 2011). Calling this effort the “Pak Genome Project”, the scientists emphasized the need for a national genomics center to enhance research on genetic disease and launch a nation-wide sequencing effort.

In the past two decades, multiple countries have launched national genome profiling programs under the framework of “genomic sovereignty”, a policy agenda allowing nation-states to establish a “room of their own” for genomics, assert protective ownership of their population’s “unique” genetic information, and harness its medical and economic potential (Séguin et al. 2008b). Genomic sovereignty has been celebrated as a tool of national empowerment for countries facing a global “genomic divide” – i.e. as the developed world enters a new era of targeted and personalized genomic medicine, developing countries may be “left behind” in addressing their own genetic vulnerabilities to disease, and also risk losing the associated economic opportunities to international companies mining their data for proprietary products. Such anxieties over new axes of (neo)colonial exploitation and dependance through genetic data, knowledge, and technology have animated national genomics initiatives across the postcolonial world from Mexico to India (Hardy, Séguin, Singer, et al. 2008; Séguin et al. 2008a).

However, genomic sovereignty policies have also faced strong criticism, not least on the grounds that “there are no scientifically sound ways to delimit the genetic ‘uniqueness’ of national populations” (Schwartz-Marín and Arellano-Méndez 2012). Additionally, national genomics requires the demarcation of a “national population” both historically and geographically, and in so doing, intervenes in questions of national identity, ancestry, belonging, and citizenship with significant political stakes. Drawing upon Benedict Anderson’s (1983) conceptualization of nationhood as an imagined community based on shared productive forces, mass media, and cultural practices, STS scholars have shown that genetic technologies carrying the epistemic authority of “DNA as the definitive marker of human similarity and difference” are shaping new “imagined genetic communities” to replace traditional relations of belonging (Simpson 2000). Thus, while mapping disease risks and population health, national genomics programs also serve to essentialize national identity and “naturalize the borders of the nation state”. They are exercises in genetic “branding” of national populations which reinforce and consolidate the nation while also staking nationalist claims to its latent “biovalue” (Benjamin 2009; Mitchell and Waldby 2010). For instance, while the genomics program in Mexico curated the population’s genetic diversity for genomic medicine, it was also claimed as an effort to locate the genetic basis of the nation’s unifying postcolonial identity of Mestizaje (Schwartz-Marín and Silva-Zolezzi 2010).

While significant scholarship has critiqued genomics programs for essentializing and “reifying” national and other social identities, less attention has focused on their entanglements with the state itself. This paper extends analyses of the relationship between genomics and nationalism by examining how national genomics may be mobilized in service of the nation-state along with the ideologies, hierarchies, and exclusions embedded therein. I examine the intersection of a genomics project in Pakistan with its postcolonial nation-building program where a statist project to unify the nation under a singular religious-nationalist identity has historically been in tension with its diverse, regionally distributed, ethnocultural populations spanning multiple national borders.

Pakistan was carved out of British colonial India (by colonial officials) on the eve of Indian independence in 1947 based on the demand by Indian Muslims of a separate homeland. However, the peripheral Muslim-majority regions granted to Pakistan lacked crucial territories in north/central India which had been the ideological, political and cultural centers of Muslim nationalism. In contrast, the regions that became Pakistan were not as well-integrated into the Muslim nationalism project and also held strong currents of ethnic, sub-national political movements. The postcolonial nation-building project has sought to unify the nation under a single homogenizing Muslim-nationalist identity (which remains in tension with its diverse ethnocultural identities), and to legitimize its current territorial borders while retaining links with a cultural, and historical heartland that lies outside its formal territory.

Through a critical analysis of the scientific methods and discursive public framing of the effort, this paper demonstrates how an “imagined genetic community” based on a common religious-nationalist identity is shaped in service of a relatively new nation-state still seeking to legitimise its biopolitical integrity. Here genomics is not merely recruited to identify a shared national genetic pattern, but strategically employed to support key elements of the state’s ideological and biopolitical narratives – the conflation of Pakistani and Muslim identity, the “inherent” distinction of Pakistanis from Indians, and ancestral links to the gloried past of Islamic civilizations. Crucially, I also show how genomics intervenes in the two key tensions at the heart of Pakistan’s nationalist ideology: (i) the subsumption of local ethnocultural identities under a universal Muslim identity while retaining a national-cultural distinction in the Muslim world; and (ii) the territorial dislocation of the nation’s cultural and ideological heartland outside of its current national borders (the homeland). Thus, this paper also draws attention to the roles of scientific/intellectual elites located at the nexus of postcolonial and nationalist knowledge production.

While genomics projects have supported statist narratives in other contexts, the PK1 effort is unique in seeking to locate a religious-nationalist identity in biology, and in its alignment with a statist project of majoritarian religious-nationalism. In contrast, then, to the notion that genomic sovereignty is an inherently emancipatory and liberatory claim by virtue of postcolonial states/scientists establishing a “lab of their own” (Benjamin 2009), the case of Pakistan reveals its potential for reinforcing nativist and exclusionary nationalist ideologies that entrench and enhance state power. Moreover, the framework of genomic sovereignty masks the (colonial) legacies which remain embedded within structures of state and knowledge production in postcolonial contexts, whereby intellectual elites may be co-opted in statist projects that are oppressive towards the local/subject population.

Pakistan – a “Muslim homeland”

The slogan of Islam was used to mobilize Muslims in British-colonial India for the demand of an independent homeland to safeguard their interests. While Islam has been a feature of anti-colonial struggles in other contexts, the case of Pakistan is unique where Islam has not only served as a religious and political identity, but also the scaffolding for a national ideological and cultural project to unify a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual polity¹ (Toor 2011; Zaman 2018). In 1947, the end of British colonial rule was followed by a bloody Partition of the Indian subcontinent into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Pakistan was carved out in two geographical wings (by a British bureaucrat) from Muslim-majority provinces at the subcontinent’s peripheries – West Pakistan (modern-day Pakistan) and East Pakistan (Bangladesh post-1971 civil war) – separated by 1,200 miles of Indian territory. Partition triggered mass migration of Muslims across the subcontinent into Pakistan, and mass out-migration of Hindus, in an ill-planned transfer of power from the British resulting in thousands of people killed and millions displaced in both countries.

The nascent Pakistani state faced a dual crisis of legitimacy and representation. Its geographically distant wings were also separated by significant ethnocultural differences: East Pakistan comprised primarily the Bengali population, and West Pakistan a set of ethnically and linguistically diverse provinces, with strong currents of sub-nationalism and even separatism. Significantly, what became the geographical territory of Pakistan did not include those regions where the demand for Pakistan had originated and was the strongest: the heartland of Muslim political and cultural heritage in north-central India, the seat of the former Mughal empire, and home to the bulk of the Urdu-speaking Muslim bourgeoisie and professional classes (Alavi 1988). It is these elites and professional classes who had driven the demand for Pakistan and assumed the new state’s leadership, but they had neither political roots within its territory, nor significant ethnic, linguistic, or cultural identity with its masses. As the migrant north Indian Muslim elites assumed national leadership, they also sought dominance over local political leaders, including those from feudal, tribal, or ethnic political formations (Ahmed 1998). Indeed, power sharing with popular local democratic (and anti-colonial) political movements was out of the question.² Instead, the ruling elite soon incorporated higher ranks of the bureaucracy and military, trained in respective colonial services, to entrench a highly centralized state under a powerful military-bureaucratic apparatus³ (Alavi 1983; 1988).

In recognition of these instabilities, the state shaped a deliberate national ideology and historical narrative based in Islam to secure legitimacy, develop a coherent basis of national unity, and attempt what the prominent historian Ayesha Jalal has called “squaring the circle of Pakistan’s ideological and geographical origins” (Jalal 1995). Pakistan was presented not just “as a geographical entity but as an ideology which reflects a unique civilisation and culture” (Rabbani and Sayyid 1992). In line with the “Two Nation Theory”, which posits subcontinental Hindus and Muslims as two distinct nations, the state’s historical “master narrative” sought to shape an “essential distinctiveness” and coherent historical trajectory of Muslims “from the Stone Age to the end of British rule” in India (Qasmi 2019). It asserted the importance of the eastern and western peripheries of the subcontinent (i.e. postcolonial Pakistan) as sites of ancient human population mixing independent of the remaining Indian landmass. Moreover, it reinforced the notion that the subcontinent’s Muslims are “inherently” distinct from Hindus, erasing their substantially shared histories and ethnic and cultural bonds. Instead, it purported a common historical struggle of the Muslims against Hindu domination and “assimilation” to justify the demand and creation of Pakistan as a Muslim homeland (Jalal 1995; Qasmi 2019). In short, it asserted a distinct and organic geopolitical and biopolitical identity for Pakistan.

At the same time, the narrative sought to paper over the vast ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity within Pakistani Muslims with a homogenized and decontextualized Islamic identity (Jalal 1995). It is no coincidence that the implicit cultural idiom of this identity drew broadly from the Muslim nationalist heartland. Urdu was imposed as (and remains) the only national language over local ethnic languages; Islamic commemorations were recognized as national holidays over traditional and syncretic festivals; notable figures in “Islamic” Arab and Central Asian history were celebrated as national heroes over indigenous leaders including those who resisted colonial aggressions. This national ideology has been promoted through official histories, textbooks, and state media, with the projection of state institutions, especially the military, as guardians of the Islamic homeland (Aziz 1993; Nayyar and Salim 2005).

The impact of this project has been catastrophic. Widening economic disparities between the center and peripheries have further intensified ethnic nationalist movements demanding political and cultural freedom, self-determination, economic redistribution, and de-militarization. These have been met with increasing violence from the state. In 1971, the struggle by the Bengali majority in East Pakistan – crystallized in their demands for greater sovereignty and the recognition of Bengali as an official language along with Urdu – culminated in brutal state crackdowns (Alavi 1971). The ensuing civil war led to the violent separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan. To date, thousands of activists from other progressive nationalist movements have been jailed, tortured, killed, or forcibly disappeared by the state. As discussed later, the national ideological project has relied on mutually beneficial relationships with scientific knowledge production. However, despite its biopolitical overtones, its intersection with biological and genomic science has not been deeply explored and is the subject of this study.

Postcolonial national genomics and genomic sovereignty

In the past two decades, multiple postcolonial nations have pursued genome profiling, aiming to identify population-specific gene markers associated with disease susceptibility or resistance, and drive the innovation of tailored genetic therapies. Advocates of such “public health genomics” have applauded state-led efforts in countries like India, Thailand, Mexico and South Africa while encouraging others to follow suit (Hardy, Séguin, Ramesar, et al. 2008; Séguin et al. 2008b). Even though large genomics and pharmacogenomics programs risk drawing away funds from under-resourced health systems, they are justified by invoking both the notion of genomic sovereignty and the potential of genomics in fueling local “knowledge-based economies”, prophesying a new era of medical and economic prosperity, technological prowess, and national prestige (Hardy, Séguin, Singer, et al. 2008; Taylor-Alexander and Schwartz-Marín 2013). They also claim that genomics will help developing countries address growing burdens of chronic disease but overlook the near-absence of clear and consistent gene associations for most chronic illnesses.

Simultaneously, national genomics programs have been leveraged to support existing narratives of national identity and nation-building. In 2004, Mexico established the first postcolonial genomics project to advance the claim of genomic sovereignty. It was explicitly undergirded by the dominant national ideology of Mestizaje, which understands the Mexican nation as a blended ethnic-cultural mixture of European and Indigenous populations (Schwartz-Marín and Silva-Zolezzi 2010). This hybridity, it argued, constituted a unique Mexican genome (a unique admixture of distinct racial stocks), which must now be protected from neocolonial exploitation as a national resource (Séguin et al. 2008a). Thus, the genome project was inextricably linked to the dominant framing of Mexican national identity (and its articulation of race and indigeneity) which was re-inscribed via biology. Relatedly, STS scholars have critiqued postcolonial genomics for uncritically employing social categories like race and ethnicity, which have been shaped through colonial regimes of knowledge production and social stratification of the colonized. Schwartz-Marín and Restrepo (2013) term this process “biocoloniality”, while challenging “the very idea that genetic patrimonies belong to nation-states or ethno-racial groups” as a “genetically reified understanding of human diversity”.

Another axis of critique on national genomics programs has focused on the cynical exploitation of genomic sovereignty to lay claim to native genetic variation and its latent “biovalue”. This refers to new modes through which human bodies (and genetic information) are made economically productive. Genomic programs seek to “brand” populations by curating distinct patterns of genetic variation between existing sociocultural groups to define unique members of the “global genetic atlas” or “niche biomedical markets” (Benjamin 2009; Tupasela 2017). These processes further threaten to exploit national minorities and indigenous populations, who may be recruited for valuable data on the nation but rarely benefit from resulting products (Benjamin 2009). In India, ethnographic studies have documented how national genomic profiling was tied to the curation of genetic distinctions between ethnolinguistic populations to make them more “bioavailable” for international clinical trials (Egorova 2013; Sunder Rajan 2006; 2010). However, while exploitation of genomic sovereignty for economic gain has been explored, its use for other cynical purposes like nativist or majoritarian ideologies, or state violence and control has received less attention.

Furthermore, in spite of the emancipatory and anti-colonial rhetoric surrounding genomic sovereignty, the case of India shows that local state/bureaucratic regimes and scientific institutions, in fact, facilitated international clinical trials and their exploitation and extraction from native populations. Such examples not only highlight the risks of taking national genomic sovereignty claims at face-value, but also draw attention to the fact that colonial legacies of violence, extraction, and control remain embedded in the structures of knowledge production in postcolonial societies. National intellectual elites are located in asymmetric relations of power with native subjects, as knowledge production is co-opted to legitimize the ideologies and structures of oppression. Historian Elise Burton (2021) has shown how scientific intellectuals in postcolonial Middle Eastern countries worked to classify native populations for “Western” scientific investigation, without themselves being part of these communities, in practices of “internal colonialism”.

While tensions between genomics and nationhood, race, ethnicity, and indigeneity have been examined extensively in Latin American contexts, emerging research in South Asia is also exploring intersections with other social identities. Here genomics has been mobilized to assert or refute different religious and caste identities in a context of intensifying religious polarization, where the naturalization of these categories carries significant political stakes. The “scientization” of Hindu-nationalist ideologies in India has revived the search for an Aryan racial heritage in the genomes of upper-caste Indians, and boosted efforts to essentialize and “pathologise” caste identity (Egorova 2009; 2010; Subramaniam 2019). Simultaneously, genomic analyses predictably fail to align neatly with ethnic, caste, and religious boundaries in these contexts of significant population intermixing, often throwing up complicated and uncomfortable results. Genomic analysis in the Indian-occupied territory of Kashmir, for example, revealed that Hindu populations shared greater genetic closeness with local Muslims than with their caste-members in other parts of India – a finding revealed with much consternation by the scientists (Mudur 2008). A careful analysis is thus demanded of genomics as a vehicle (and potential foil) of majoritarian nationalism in South Asia.

Methods

This paper situates the genome mapping of PK1 in the context of Pakistan’s statist religious-nationalist program. My methodology relies on discourse analysis of mainstream media records on the genomics effort to examine how the scientific and political significance of PK1 was articulated in the context of Pakistani nationalism. I analyse all publicly available material – news reports, profiles, interviews, and magazine articles – from leading media sources in English and Urdu published since 2011 following the PK1 announcement. I also analyse available annual performance reports (2017–2020) from the Genome Research Centre established at University of Karachi in the aftermath of the announcement. In addition, I examine the (only) scientific paper on the PK1 sequence, published in the Journal of Human Genetics (Azim et al. 2013), to critically assess the scientific questions and methods which guided the genomic analysis while asking how these analytical devices may (implicitly or explicitly) be shaped by the biopolitical contours of Pakistani nationalism. In analysing the two main categories of sources, academic and popular, I pay attention to differences in the framing or articulation of the PK1 genetic identity for different audiences – the global-scientific audience versus the national-popular – to analyse how the scientists understand their roles vis a vis the two groups.

My analysis follows three prongs: First, I show how the genomic characterization and discursive framing of PK1 aligns with key contours of the statist religious-nationalist project, to help shape an organic and distinct historical, geographical, and biopolitical identity for Pakistan. Second, I demonstrate that the genomics effort attempts to harmonize two key tensions in the national ideology: (i) that between internal population diversity and a unified national identity through the idea of a “melting pot”; and (ii) that between a territorial “homeland” and a dislocated ideological/cultural “heartland” through the deliberate choice of the individual designated PK1. Third, I explore the modes of strategic collaboration between state and scientific actors towards mutually beneficial relationships on the terrain of genomics.

Results and Discussion – PK1 at the nexus of science, state and society

The sequencing of PK1 was led by the University of Karachi’s Panjwani Centre for Molecular Medicine and Drug Research (PCMD) in collaboration with China’s Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI). The cost of 40,000 USD was jointly funded; machines at BGI were used for sequencing while technical and research analyses were performed by PCMD scientists (Yusuf 2011). In describing their motivations, PCMD scientists echoed the discourse of public health genomics – i.e. identifying genetic predispositions to disease specific to the Pakistani population, and advancing predictive, preventative medicine, including pharmacogenomics.

At the same time, the PK1 effort was framed in explicitly nationalist terms, by describing it, for example, as the genome of “the first Pakistani and the first Muslim” (Ppi 2011), and the representation of Pakistan’s “unique genetic pattern as a nation” (Yusuf 2011). One news report similarly described it as “just like opening the software or book of life of a nation” (Yusuf 2011). The scientists also heralded the moment as one of great triumph for the Islamic world, as Pakistan joined the most technologically advanced nations on the global scientific stage:

The achievement places Pakistan in the ranks of the few countries – US, UK, China, Japan, and India – which have successfully sequenced the human genome … This also makes Pakistan the first country in the Muslim world to map the genome of the first Muslim man (Express 2011)

Similarly, the leading national Urdu-language news daily (Roznama Jang) reported the event with the headline, “Jinyati mansoobay ki kaamyaabi qaumi fakhr hai” (The success of the genome project is a matter of national pride).⁴ It further stated: “Aisay daur mein jab Pakistan tareekh kay naazuk tareen daur se guzar raha hai hamaray saainsdaanon ka ye kaarnama qaum kay liye musarrat ka baais hai” (“At a time when Pakistan is going through the most difficult period in its history, this achievement by our scientists brings joy to the nation”).⁵ (Jang 2011)

These expressions of triumph and pride were coupled with an assertion of scientific expertise to dispel the implication that Pakistan otherwise lagged behind in technological development. As one of the lead scientists remarked: “This is not to say that Pakistan is a novice in the field [of genomics]. It has already submitted the genome of the mango chloroplast and date palm chloroplast to the international database” (Ppi 2011).

While these statements reflect the postcolonial anxieties and ambitions embedded in scientific prestige projects at large (e.g. see Ong 2010), the repeated conflation of Pakistani and Muslim identities is also revealing in Pakistan’s national context. While 97% of the population identifies as Muslim, Pakistan also contains sizeable populations of Hindu, Christian, Zoroastrian, and other faiths. However, these minorities are erased from official renderings of Pakistani history as a Muslim homeland and face significant legal and social discrimination. Linking the Pakistani and Muslim genome thus takes a step further in solidifying the dominant state-sponsored religious-nationalist ideology and re-inscribing it in biology. The following sections further explore how this ideology is encountered and enacted via genomics.

The imagined religious-national-genetic community

Pakistan’s statist ideology brands the nation as an inherently distinct Muslim unity in the subcontinent with an independent historical evolution since antiquity and an organic link to its current geographic territory. This section demonstrates how the PK1 genomics effort strategically curated a new genetic identity aligned with statist ideology on three major themes: biological uniqueness, geographical links, and genealogical pasts.

A central theme in the scientific analysis of the PK1 genome involved its comparison with the genome of an Indian individual. Of over 3 million SNPs (single points of variation in the genomic sequence) identified in PK1, more than 1.8 million (i.e. 56% of PK1 SNPs) were found to be shared with the Indian genome. Interestingly, where the scientific paper on PK1 (Azim et al. 2013) focuses on the value of these “Pak-Indian shared SNPs” for international databases – and goes so far as to conclude a close relationship between them – what is highlighted for the national public is their mutual difference or “uniqueness”. In their press conference, scientists described the PK1 genome as containing “200,000 specific sites unique to the Pakistani human and 80,000 sites common with the Indian human” (Ppi 2011, emphasis added). Notwithstanding the false assumption that a single individual can represent an entire population (national or otherwise), the terms “Pakistani human” and “Indian human” themselves reflect an understanding of these identities as essential and inherent. By substantiating a purported inherent distinction between Pakistanis and Indians through the genetic code, the PK1 effort publicly aligned itself with a central tenet of the state’s ideology.

Interestingly, the selected Indian was a recently published genome sequence (Kitzman et al. 2011) of a Gujarati-Indian individual from Houston, Texas (sampled by the International HapMap Project), as opposed to whole-genome or sequence variation data curated by Indian scientific institutions (Narang et al. 2010; Patowary et al. 2012). Azim et al. (2013) explained that this genome was chosen because Gujaratis (an ethnic group from western India) “have Ancestral North Indian (ANI) origin” similar to Pakistanis. However, it is possible that greater genetic closeness may have been observed by comparing PK1 to a range of individuals from north-central India.

The PK1 effort also corroborated a distinct territorial/geographical identity for Pakistanis by pointing to a different route taken by ancient human migrations to modern-day Pakistan versus the rest of South Asia. The PK1 study laid its foundation by indicating support for prior research that “Pakistan is located along the southern migration route”, which is believed to contribute more significantly to East/South-East Asian populations, as opposed to other South Asian populations located along the “northern route” (Azim et al. 2013). It further argued that Pakistan is “situated at the crossroads of Indian Subcontinent, Central Asia and the Middle East”, and most Pakistanis have “an ancestral north Indian origin, genetically close to Middle Easterners, Central Asians and Europeans”. A source cited to support these ideas reveals the assumptions underlying the shaping of Pakistani genomic identity: “A History of the Peoples of Pakistan: Towards Independence” (Hussain 1997) is a historical text which “recounts the history of the Pakistan area from the perspective of present-day Pakistan. [It] positions the Land of the Indus centrally, emphasizing its importance to developing civilizations which spread throughout the subcontinent. [It] also reveals the Pakistan area as an integral part of the Muslim world … ” (Hussain 1997, emphasis added). Together, this evidence was mobilized by the genome project to support the idea of present-day Pakistani territory being an organic distinction from the rest of South Asia since antiquity, as an area that uniquely connects, geographically and genealogically, both north India and the Muslim world.

Lastly, a key theme in the scientific analysis of PK1 was the identification of ancestral population origins. Genome variation patterns in PK1 were analysed in light of international studies which classify human populations into three major genetic groups: Africans, Eurasians, and East Asians. The scientific study (Azim et al. 2013) stated that: “The amount of variation … we found in the PK1 genome is comparable to European genome (CEU)”. This was further highlighted at the public press conference by one of the scientists stating: “[The PK1] genome shows that Pakistanis are more similar to Europeans than Chinese and Africans” – picked by a leading media outlet The Express Tribune as the tagline for their news report on the event (Ppi 2011). Similarly, an Urdu-language news daily quotes: “  … [PK1] kay jinyati naqshay say yay dilchasp inkishaaf hua kay in ka irtiqaai daur Europe se shuru hua tha” (“[PK1’s] genetic sequence reveals interestingly that his evolutionary journey began from Europe”)⁶ (Jang 2011). These enthusiastic claims of shared ancestry with Europeans, and related disavowal of African and East Asian ancestries, reflect the colonial aspirations and anxieties persistent in Pakistan’s postcolonial nationalism (Mallick 2021).

The assertion of Pakistanis’ genetic affinity with Europeans also reveals the epistemic power of existing, colonially defined, human ancestry classifications. While post-colonial scientists must adopt these epistemological frameworks to place their work within existing scientific paradigms, their adoption in turn lends further legitimacy to these categories. As such, colonial epistemologies continue to structure postcolonial scientific work while reproducing themselves and maintaining the social and scientific hierarchies on which they are based.

The association of PK1 with European genomes also signifies genetic closeness with Central Asian and Middle Eastern populations, reinforcing genealogical links with regions associated historically with “Islamic civilization”. Tellingly, a lead scientist in the PK1 effort described Pakistan as a “mix of a lot of races” or a “melting pot” of populations from Central Asia and the Middle East: “ie a mix of Mughals, Turks, Pashtuns, Afghans, Arabs, etcetera” (Express 2011). Notably missing from this list are populations which are also Muslim but from subcontinental territory, such as Sindhis, Kashmiris, or Gujaratis. While these have also contributed significantly to the Pakistani national population, they are neglected in official constructions of history due to their substantial historical overlap with Hindu communities. These assertions reflect further alignment of the genomic effort with statist ideology which draws distinct genealogical and cultural links between the subcontinent’s Muslim population and a glorified Islamic civilizational past, extending from the birthplace of Islam in Arabia through later centers of Muslim rule in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Mughal empire in north India.

In fact, many official renderings of history in school textbooks trace the birth of Pakistan not from the 1947 Partition, but the first conquest of present-day Pakistani territory by the Islamic Caliphate in 712 AD (Jalal 1995). A military expedition led by Arab commander Muhammad ibn al-Qasim conquered the kingdom of Raja Dahir in the southern coastal region of Sindh, establishing Sindh as a province of the caliphate. The Islamic conquest of Sindh has been memorialized as a foundational event in the official national imaginary, lending coherence to the territory of Pakistan, not as an arbitrary construction but an ancient homeland of Islam in the subcontinent. This has lended itself to the disavowal of local, indigenous (nominally Hindu) pasts and genealogies, in favor of Islamic identities.

As others have shown, the genetic branding of a nation involves the “strategic calibration” of existing sociopolitical categories with scientific/genetic distinctions, in order to shape niche populations and markets that are bio-economically productive (Benjamin 2009; Tupasela 2017). However, as Tupasela (2017) has argued, the “branding of populations represents not just novel ways of creating difference, but also provides new ways in which master narratives of population history are created”. The PK1 effort reveals the strategic calibration of a genomic identity, not just towards the twin purposes of “mapping” and “marketing” (Benjamin 2009) pools of genetic diversity, but also in service of a religious-nationalist project driven by a relatively recent nation-state still consolidating its ideological and territorial borders. In fact, Burton's (2021) characterization of Middle Eastern states created after World War I bears striking resonances to the Pakistani context. These new nation states needed to build legitimating national narratives to “establish the autochthony of its ethnic majority within arbitrary territorial boundaries”. They sought to reconcile their ethnolingusitic diversity under a unifying national ideology “strongly informed by race science, aiming to reconfigure patterns of group identification along ethnic lines”. Pakistan’s cultivation of a distinct, inherent and nationally unifying identity rooted in Islam can relatedly be viewed as an effort to build a new “ethnic identity”, now reinforced by the genetic effort.

The national subject and its contradictions

Pakistan’s religious-nationalist project driven by the centralized and militarized state remains highly contested. While the project has faced strong political challenges throughout its history, there also exist major contradictions at its heart which remain to be resolved. Here I explore how the genomics effort navigates two key tensions in Pakistan’s religious-nationalist ideology.

The first tension arises from the imposition of a homogenizing Islamic nationalist identity on a highly heterogenous population overlapping multiple territorial borders. The statist ideology portrays Muslims of India as an essential unity – subsuming diverse regional, cultural and linguistic ties into a universal Islamic identity – but simultaneously seeks to retain a distinct national-cultural identity in the Islamic world. Thus, it recognizes the validity of cultural distinctions within the global Islamic community, but not within Muslims in the subcontinent. This dichotomy is crystallized in the words of a prominent state-aligned historian, Prof. Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi, who declared that the Muslims of India are “a well-defined group within the brotherhood of Islam,” because their “habitat … affected their tastes and manners, but with which they refused to identify so completely as to lose their distinctive qualities” (Qasmi 2019). In reality, the Islamic nationalist project has been strongly contested by the nation’s diverse ethnolinguistic populations, where questions of identity have dovetailed with issues of political and economic marginalization. Demands for cultural freedom, secularism, national self-determination, greater economic sovereignty, and even separatism have intensified in resistance to the ideological and militarized dominance of the centralized state.

Present-day Pakistan encompasses four provinces (Balochistan, Punjab, Sindh and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa) and two territories (including Kashmir) roughly demarcated along major ethnic lines. Several population groups are shared with neighboring countries – e.g. the Baloch with Iran; Pashtuns with Afghanistan; Punjabis, Sindhis, and Kashmiris with India – across national borders, which were arbitrarily drawn by colonial officers and remained relatively porous with significant population intermixing until recent history. Moreover, ethnic identities often cut across other identities like religion and caste, such that populations which may now have solidified as “Punjabi-Muslim” or “Punjabi-Hindu” have in fact long coexisted in pre-Partition (undivided) Punjab for centuries with significant cultural and genealogical links. In this context, the task of defining an inherent biological distinction of the Pakistani population, rooted in a shared religious identity and confined within current territory – and locating this “uniqueness” in the genome – becomes extremely complicated, if not impossible.

The PK1 effort (and its proposal for a national genomics effort) sought to reconcile this ethnically differentiated diversity of Pakistan with its ideological commitment to a single unifying national genomic identity (i.e. the unique Pakistani genome). While the scientists’ public statements acknowledged that Pakistan “is a mix of several ethnicities” (Ppi 2011), they nevertheless articulated these populations as components of a single, representative biological whole. In the PK1 press conference, for example, they noted that the single PK1 sequence may not be representative of all Pakistanis. However, rather than proposing the curation of various regional genetic profiles, they suggested that a more accurate composite can be created – i.e. “an average genome of Pakistan”, a single genome that is a more “exact representation of a Pakistani” (Ppi 2011). It is under this framework that they called for government support to launch a national genome profiling effort which would sample and profile individuals across the country to curate the average genome “by making a pool of all the characteristics, i.e. the differences and similarities of all the people living in the country” (Ppi 2011). In short, as one of the scientists explained in an interview with a leading English-language newspaper, the goal is to “build a consensus of Pakistan-specific genomic information … by gathering samples from the different provinces” (Inpaper Magazine (DAWN) 2011).

The second major tension in Pakistan’s national ideology and master-narrative is the territorial disjuncture between the nation’s “homeland” in its current borders, and an ideological “heartland” located beyond, in north-central India. As discussed above, modern-day Pakistan was carved from underdeveloped, peripheral provinces in north-western British India, which despite being Muslim-majority regions, lacked significant grassroots support for the Muslim nationalist project and its primarily north-Indian leadership in the All-India Muslim League. On the other hand, the new state did not include key regions in north-central India which were the traditional centers of Muslim intellectual, political, and cultural activity in the subcontinent, and the seat of the former Mughal empire and Muslim aristocracy. While being Muslim-minority regions overall, it was here that the Muslims were most strongly mobilized for the demand of a separate Pakistan, and where the bulk of Muslim nationalist leadership was located. Pakistan’s nation-building program thus faced a contradiction – establishing the legitimacy of the state’s separation from India and consolidating the nation within its territorial borders, while also retaining a claim to its ideological and cultural heritage in now-Indian territory.

I contend that the PK1 effort negotiated this contradiction through the individual chosen as PK1 – the prominent scientist and later government official, Professor Atta-ur-Rahman. Rahman has been a professor of chemistry (now emeritus) at University of Karachi since 1977 and served on multiple national scientific bodies. But what made him an ideal candidate for the representative Pakistani national genome, PK1, was not just his stature as a scientist-administrator but also his background as a Muslim, upper-class, male individual with dual ancestral links to the homeland and heartland.

As noted by a feature profile on him in a prominent Urdu-language media outlet (Express News), Rahman was born in Delhi (present-day India) before Partition in 1942, to a prominent Muslim family (Rahman n.d.; Memon and Memon 2017). His paternal grandfather, Sir Abdur Rehman, served as vice-chancellor of the University of Delhi (1930–1934) and of Punjab University in Lahore, and later as Senior Justice on the first Supreme Court bench in independent Pakistan (Memon and Memon 2017). While being well-established in the Muslim milieu of north-central India, however, the family also traces its longer ancestral roots to the area of Multan in southern Punjab, present-day Pakistan. Thus, by selecting Rahman as the representative Pakistani genome, the genomic project avoided the choice between an individual “native” to the territory of Pakistan versus that north-central India – Rahman’s ancestry conveniently allowed the geographical, cultural, and historical strands of Pakistani identity to be united.

Indeed, this understanding is reflected by a news report commenting on the choice of Rahman as PK1: “he is not only the most prominent scientific figure in Pakistan but one whose ancestors spent almost three centuries in Multan and then moved a hundred years back to Delhi” (Ppi 2011). In a media interview, one of the lead scientists involved in the PK1 project took care to dispel the notion that Rahman was selected for his privileged status: “It wasn’t a matter of his being a VIP or anything like that as there is no difference in the DNA of a VIP and an ordinary person” (Inpaper Magazine (DAWN) 2011). Instead, he explained that Rahman was persuaded by the scientists to be recruited as PK1 because “he was an ideal candidate”: “Scientifically speaking, we wanted someone who was an indigenous individual of Pakistan. You know, someone whose family has been living here for a very long time. Having lived in Multan for 400 years, Dr. Atta’s lineage was ideal … ” (Inpaper Magazine (DAWN) 2011) In short, the choice of Rahman as the genomic representation of Pakistan reflects both the implicit assumptions of Pakistani nationalism and an attempted resolution of its contradictions. It is a strategic scientific choice which further positions the genomic effort in favorable alignment with the nation-building program.

Scientists and nation-state science

The Pakistani state has relied deeply on direct and indirect support from its intelligentsia – the perceived impartiality and objectivity of scientific knowledge has been critical for lending legitimacy and authority to the national ideological project. Quickly following independence, the state appointed national committees and leading historians trained in “scientific” methods of historical investigation to promote “the writing of history through the lens of “Islamic ideology”” for school textbooks and popular dissemination (Qasmi 2019). Similarly, the nuclear technology and weapons program became a key vehicle of Pakistani-Islamic nationalism, portrayed as a symbol of national pride, prestige, strategic and military strength (Mian 2012). These narratives echoed in popular culture with slogans like the “Islamic bomb” (Dadi 2012). Indeed, as the first Islamic country to develop nuclear capability, the Pakistani state has leveraged its technoscientific prowess to assert leadership and influence in the Islamic world. A security analyst and former brigadier-general in the Pakistani army Feroz Khan (2012) illustrates how the nuclear program was entwined with nationalism, identity, and “mythmaking”:

The perception that Pakistan is a victim of discrimination – that the world is opposed uniquely to an “Islamic bomb” – became a source of pride. Of the Muslim polities, only Pakistan has managed to cross the nuclear threshold. This nuclear accomplishment gave Pakistan certain pre-eminence in the Islamic world … [which], in Pakistani thought, harkened back to past civilizational glory, to the time when the Mughal Empire shared the global stage.

With the genomic age creating new avenues of technoscientific power, prestige, and economic activity, genomic science offers new opportunities for collaboration between state and science. The close alignment between the PK1 effort and Pakistan’s statist nationalism is one example of the development of symbiotic relationships between scientific and state institutions through mutual interest in consolidating the postcolonial nation-state and nation-building program. It is important to note that such alignments of intellectual and ideological projects are not merely cynical, exploitative, or opportunist. In fact, the religious-nationalist understanding of Pakistan’s history (and global role) is consistent with the common ideological worldviews and political interests of sections of the dominant classes and intelligentsia. Critical historiographies have shown how scholars leading the charge of shaping the official historical narrative in post-Partition Pakistan shared the cultural and ideological milieu of north India with the ruling elite (Qasmi 2019). They “genuinely believed in the distinctness of the Muslim community, its religio-cultural exclusivity, and the inevitability of Pakistan,”. They did not “follow official dictates” but their work was “ideological in content, and hence, co-opted for statist purposes”. As the state historian Prof. I. H. Qureshi remarked in his presidential address to the 1961 Pakistan History Conference: “[It is important to] instill a sense of a common past among a people if it is to be molded into a well-integrated nation with loyalties seated within the deepest recesses of the heart” (Qasmi 2019).

While the state may selectively patronize or co-opt techno-scientific projects which align with and/or advance its political and economic interests, scientists may also position their work more favorably within the national political and ideological context. For example, the PK1 scientists employed nationalist and religious discourses when addressing the national popular audience but not an international scientific one. References in the public press announcement to the “unique genetic pattern of the nation” or the unique “Pakistani human”, were not mentioned in scientific literature. The scientific publication of PK1 highlighted its significance as the sequence of the first Pakistani individual but does not mention its religious affiliation. Similarly, public discourse highlighted the idea of “genomic uniqueness” between Pakistanis and Indians, while the scientific publication pointed to regions of shared genomic variation between PK1 and the “Indian” genome (which would be useful for future scientific and pharmacogenomic studies). Indeed, for the international genomic landscape, the PK1 effort is interested in scientifically branding the Pakistani population in ways that are politically non-controversial. Conversely for the local context, it highlights the political and strategic value for the nation – its medical and economic benefits; value for national technoscientific prestige; opportunity for regional influence and leadership; and support for national ideological and historical narratives alongside its potential to address their internal dissonances. In turn, this was linked to drawing government attention towards a national genomics center “established at the PCMD premises because of the knowledge and infrastructure that exists [there]”, and funding a nation-wide (and highly resource-intensive) national genomic profiling initiative (Yusuf 2011).

The figure of Prof. Rahman (the individual, PK1) offers further insights as an example of evolving strategic and mutually beneficial relationships between Pakistani state and science. Rahman is among the country’s most established scientist-administrators and known for his closeness to the “state establishment” (colloquially, the powerful military-bureaucratic apparatus and allied oligarchy). An octogenarian Cambridge-educated chemist, he has been a professor at University of Karachi since 1977, and former director of the International Centre for Chemical and Biological Sciences (ICCBS), the institute which comprises the PCMD (Curriculum Vitae, Rahman n.d.). Since 2008, he holds the (curiously-titled) position of “Patron-in-Chief” of ICCBS while serving other roles in the public and private sector (ICCBS n.d.; Rahman n.d.). Over his career, he has served on multiple national scientific bodies, including as President of the prestigious Pakistani Academy of Sciences, and has been honored with the Nishan-e-Imtiaz (Order of Excellence), the state’s highest civilian decoration (“Pakistan Academy of Sciences: Atta Ur Rahman” 2015).

Rahman was also at the leading edge of Pakistan’s science diplomacy initiatives to exercise influence in the Islamic world and beyond – most notably as Coordinator-General of the Ministerial Standing Committee for Scientific and Technological Cooperation of the international Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) for 16 years (1996–2012) and as President, Network of Academies of Science of OIC Countries (NASIC). However, Rahman has also drawn strong criticism for his longstanding collaboration with the establishment, including his roles as Federal Minister of Science and Technology, and later of Education, under the military dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf (1999–2008). Here Rahman received considerable latitude and authority to refashion (and neoliberalise) Pakistan’s university ecosystem through the creation of an independent regulatory body, the Higher Education Commission (HEC). Most recently, he was appointed Chair of Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Task Force on Science and Technology (2018–2022) in a government so openly aligned with the establishment that it called itself the “hybrid regime”.

Numerous allegations and news reports, including those by respected (though anti-establishment) scientists, of Rahman’s involvement in systematic financial corruption and academic malpractise have not severely impacted his position and stature (Hoodbhoy 2021; Nadeem 2022; Tariq 2022). He continues, for example, to write biweekly opinion columns in the most highly-circulated newspapers in both English (The News International) and Urdu (Roznama Jang).⁷ In fact, an independent audit of the ICCBS/PCMD institutes requested by HEC was blocked in 2021 by a letter directly from the Prime Minister’s office stating that the performance of the institutes “operating under the supervision of Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman” was “outstanding” and therefore exempt from the HEC’s requirements of progress reports and financial accountability (Hoodbhoy 2021).

When the serving HEC chairman questioned this exemption, he was hastily dismissed by a presidential ordinance (Hoodbhoy 2021). At the center of the controversy was Rahman, believed to be benefiting from his closeness to power centers (especially as serving Chair of the PM Task Force). In the ensuing legal battle, the Islamabad High Court Chief Justice directed the prime minister to prevent Rahman’s interference in the HEC and ensure an “independent, transparent and fair audit and evaluation of the institutes/centers wherein the chairman [of] PM’s Task Force has an interest and which have received substantial funding from the public exchequer” (Pakistan Today 2022). Nevertheless, despite the courts reinstating the dismissed HEC chairman, he was maneuvered out of his role and the blocked audit remains pending even after a change of government in 2022. In short, Rahman’s professional record reflects his position as a scientist closely aligned with the state apparatus and supportive of its nationalist interests, while cementing his position, power, and privileges as a national intellectual.

A national genomics center (the Jamil-ur-Rahman Genome Research Centre) was indeed founded at PCMD/ICCBS in 2016 – funded partially by Rahman and named after his father. While the Center’s annual performance reports mention that “efforts are underway” to study genomes from different population groups across the country, along with the “genetic burden” of various diseases, and “development of prognosis and diagnostic tools”, no further updates have been provided in the public domain on the Pak Genome Project (ICCBS n.d.).

Recent scholarship has dissected the dual hierarchies shaping the position of postcolonial scientists in colonially ordered structures of knowledge production, globally and locally. While postcolonial scientists face the dominance of (colonially established) scientific institutions and practices in the global north, they also occupy dominant positions as intellectual elites within native societies through their control over knowledge production, links with global science, and, often, their closeness with the state. Historian Elise Burton’s analysis of Middle Eastern science in the post-WWI period accurately describes their relations of “internal colonialism” vis a vis local populations. National scientific elites exercised their authority to speak on behalf of native communities (to which they did not belong) and shape them as research subjects. Crucially, they “represented state hegemony while investigating “exotic” socioculturally marginalized populations in the service of national and international agendas of biomedical research” (Burton 2021).

In short, even as local intellectual elites wrested control of science from Western scientists, they “transform[ed]” it to suit nationalist ideology and perform what Burton calls “nation-state science” (drawing from Mattson 2014), often in collaboration with or aspiration to “Western science”. Accordingly and in contrast to the noisy rhetoric echoing in the realms of genomic sovereignty, I contend that the emancipatory and liberatory contents of postcolonial scientific initiatives must be clearly examined. The scientists involved in the PK1 effort are located in a similar dual position – in the national context, they are aligned with state interests, securing patronage and privilege as national intellectuals, while in a globalized science, they are positioned as interlocutors to their native populations which are branded as novel entities to harness their biovalue. In both cases, the native subject populations are shaped and exploited as novel and unique resources while the agendas mediating their exploitation are obscured in the rhetoric of scientific and national progress.

Conclusions

High-profile technoscience initiatives are often mobilized by postcolonial states as symbols of national prestige and progress – evidence that the nation has “made it” on the global stage. Allied to nationalist efforts, they serve as vehicles to “overcome past humiliations and to restore national identity and political ambition” (Ong 2010; Taylor-Alexander and Schwartz-Marín 2013). They mediate between a haunted past and prophesies of a glorious future. In this sense, they are celebrated as exemplars of national emancipation, liberation, and decolonization. However, just as utopian dreams of the “nuclear age” were linked to the expansion of US imperial military and cultural power across the postcolonial world, and the rapid expansion of biometric techno-infrastructures is enmeshed within the securitization and surveillance of surplus populations in the global south; so the Promethean promises attached to the dawn of a “genomic age” must be evaluated within the wider logics of capital and coercion that structure the world today.

This paper draws attention to the patterns of extraction and control embedded in national genomics initiatives driven by postcolonial state and scientific elites, mediating past legacies of colonial violence and ongoing imperatives of imperial and globalized capital. I trace how the PK1 genomics effort in Pakistan sought to shape a new imagined religious-national-genetic community in line with the state’s hegemonic and coercive national-ideological project. I discuss how the scientific analysis and discursive framing of the PK1 genome was strategically aligned with the state’s religious-nationalist ideology to reinforce a national identity that is at once Pakistani and Muslim; multi-ethnic yet nationally homogenous; culturally distinct yet universally Islamic; and geographically Pakistani yet connected to a dislocated ideological heartland. I also analyse how scientific actors located at the intersection of postcolonial and nationalist knowledge production strategically position their work to mobilize its political and ideological value for a national audience, and its scientific and bioeconomic value for the international scientific landscape. In so doing, I seek to challenge the assumed emancipatory and liberatory goals of national genomic sovereignty initiatives by pointing to their role in reinforcing hegemonic nationalist ideologies.

The political stakes of the PK1 genomic effort in Pakistan couldn’t be clearer. Engaging in nation-state science and enabling scientific “evidence” to be coopted for the reinforcement of a majoritarian and exclusionary religious-nationalist identity by a coercive and militarized state further marginalizes those at the fringes of the national body politic and facing the sharpest edge of its boundaries – minority ethnic and religious communities and those struggling for secular, democratic, progressive and inclusive political possibilities.

Acknowledgements

I thank Hadia Akhtar Khan, Ayyaz Mallick, and Ernesto Schwartz-Marin for invaluable engagement and feedback, and Arif Naveed for the first push. A version of this paper was presented at the 2022 Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) conference in Mexico.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It is pertinent to note that Pakistan was not established as theocratic state led by religious orthodoxy – in fact, prominent religious institutions in colonial India publicly condemned the “Pakistan movement” as an attempt to divide the universal Muslim ummah. The demand for Pakistan has been more accurately described by Hamza Alavi (1988) as “Muslim nationalism” as opposed to “Islamic nationalism”. And as Ali Usman Qasmi (2010) has discussed elsewhere, the north Indian Muslim elite was inspired by ideas of Islamic Modernism developing since the late 19th century, which advocated for the reinvigoration of rationalist interpretation and independent reasoning of Islamic texts in line with Western enlightenment ideals, explicitly against orthodox authority and reified tradition.

2 It comes as no surprise that a direct federal general election was not held in Pakistan until 1970, i.e. 23 years after independence, following which these underlying political crises precipitated a brutal civil war and the independence of Bangladesh (1971). In the intervening years, the country saw two military dictatorships and a bureaucratic coup d'etat (1958–1970).

3 Pakistan currently holds the 6th largest military in the world (by number of active personnel) which also operates a vast, global, and largely unaccountable economic empire subsidized by government funds. It also operates with virtual immunity in “engineering” the political landscape within the country, including manipulating election results and forging political parties and coalitions in their favour, while exercising violence to surveil, suppress, and silence opposition to its extraordinary power or economic interests.

4 Translation my own.

5 Translation my own.

6 Translation my own.

7 These columns are available in online archives at The News International (https://www.thenews.com.pk/writer/atta-ur-rahman) and Roznama Jang (https://jang.com.pk/writer/dr-atta-ur-rahman).