Being a Minority is a Fate No One Wants: Can Nationalism Be Really Inclusive?
No community chooses to be a minority, and few conditions of collective life carry as much inherited vulnerability as standing outside the majority's language, faith, or ethnicity within a nation-state that claims to speak in that majority's name. The assertion that being a minority is a fate no one wants is, in this sense, an observation rather than an exaggeration, borne out by histories of displacement, discrimination, and, in the gravest cases, extermination. Yet the question that follows, whether nationalism can ever be genuinely inclusive, cannot be answered with the same bleak certainty. Nationalism is neither a single fixed doctrine nor an inevitable engine of exclusion; it is a political technology that can be built around shared blood, shared faith, or shared citizenship, and its treatment of minorities depends heavily on which of these foundations a state chooses. The anxiety embedded in the claim that minority status is a fate no one wants is not misplaced, since nationalism built on a single ethnic, linguistic, or religious identity has repeatedly turned into an instrument of majoritarian exclusion; nevertheless, nationalism is not inherently exclusionary, and where it is deliberately reconstructed as a civic bond of shared citizenship rather than shared blood or belief, it can accommodate, and even be strengthened by, its minorities, a possibility that Pakistan itself has only partially realised. The essay that follows examines both faces of nationalism before turning to the reforms capable of tilting the balance toward the inclusive one.
Ethnic and religious nationalism, wherever it has taken root, has tended to convert the abstract idea of the nation into a possession of the majority group alone, leaving minorities as guests within a house they did not build and cannot fully claim. Myanmar's treatment of its Rohingya population illustrates this pattern with brutal clarity. Under the country's 1982 Citizenship Law, the Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group concentrated in Rakhine State, were excluded from the list of one hundred and thirty-five officially recognised national races, rendering the majority of them stateless in the country of their birth. Following a military crackdown in 2017, described by United Nations investigators as bearing the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing, more than seven hundred thousand Rohingya fled across the border into Bangladesh, according to figures compiled by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, where many remain in camps years later. The Rohingya case demonstrates how a nationalism defined by ethnicity and religion can strip a long-settled population of legal personhood itself, transforming minority status from a social disadvantage into an existential one. This grim pattern finds its most extreme historical expression not in statelessness but in outright annihilation.
The Rwandan genocide of 1994 stands as the starkest warning of where exclusionary nationalism can ultimately lead when combined with state power and organised propaganda. Following decades in which colonial and post-colonial governments had hardened Hutu and Tutsi into rigid, quasi-racial categories, extremist Hutu nationalist ideology, propagated through radio broadcasts and political networks under the banner of Hutu Power, culminated in the killing of an estimated eight hundred thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutu within approximately one hundred days. The genocide was not a spontaneous eruption of ancient hatred, as it was sometimes portrayed at the time, but the deliberate outcome of a nationalism that had defined the nation as belonging exclusively to one ethnic community and had cast the other as an internal enemy to be eliminated. Rwanda's experience demonstrates, in its most horrifying form, the logical endpoint of nationalism that treats minority presence as a threat to national purity rather than a feature of national life. Against this backdrop, Pakistan's own record, though far less extreme, reveals a comparable structural tendency to define the nation in terms that leave its minorities perpetually provisional.
Pakistan's constitutional and legal architecture has, at critical junctures, defined national belonging in terms that have narrowed rather than widened the circle of full citizenship, most visibly in the treatment of the Ahmadi community. The Second Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1974, declared Ahmadis to be non-Muslim for constitutional and legal purposes, a determination later reinforced by Ordinance XX of 1984, which criminalised Ahmadis referring to their faith in Islamic terms or identifying their places of worship as mosques. This legal architecture placed an entire community outside the boundary of the religious identity around which the state had increasingly come to define Pakistani nationhood, regardless of how that community understood itself. The consequence has been a persistent legal vulnerability that extends well beyond constitutional text into everyday life, including targeted violence against Ahmadi places of worship and restrictions on political participation, since electoral rules have historically required Ahmadis to register on a separate voters list if they wished to be counted as non-Muslim. This case illustrates precisely the danger the thesis identifies: when the nation is defined by a specific interpretation of religious identity, those outside that interpretation become permanently exceptional, however loyal their citizenship in every other respect.
A similar, if less constitutionally explicit, marginalisation has affected Pakistan's smaller religious communities, particularly Hindus and Christians, whose combined share of the national population is now estimated at only three to four percent, down from a considerably higher proportion at independence in 1947, when the territory that became Pakistan included large Hindu populations in Bengal. The vulnerability of these communities to Pakistan's blasphemy laws, particularly Section 295-C of the Penal Code, which prescribes death for insulting the Prophet Muhammad, has been repeatedly demonstrated, most visibly in August 2023, when a mob in Jaranwala, Punjab, responding to a blasphemy allegation against two Christian brothers, burned more than twenty churches and dozens of Christian homes in a single day. Such episodes reveal a pattern in which accusation alone, whether or not substantiated in court, can trigger collective punishment against an entire community, leaving religious minorities acutely conscious of their exposure in ways the Muslim majority rarely experiences. This second Pakistani case reinforces the broader argument that nationalism anchored in a specific religious identity tends, even without formal legal exclusion, to leave minorities structurally insecure, a conclusion that invites a deeper theoretical challenge before the essay turns to genuine counter-examples.
A serious body of political theory holds that the exclusion documented above is not an unfortunate distortion of nationalism but a structural feature of it, an argument that any honest essay must confront directly. Ernest Gellner, in his influential account of nationalism, argued that modern nations are not natural, pre-existing communities but constructions engineered to fit the administrative and cultural requirements of the industrial state, a process that necessarily draws boundaries around who belongs and who does not. Benedict Anderson's equally influential description of nations as "imagined communities" makes a related point: because a nation is imagined precisely as a bounded and sovereign community, its members can only conceive of themselves as a nation by simultaneously conceiving of others as outside it. If nationalism is, by its very logic, a boundary-drawing exercise, then the marginalisation of minorities documented in Myanmar, Rwanda, and Pakistan appears less like an aberration and more like nationalism functioning exactly as designed. This challenge is formidable, yet it rests on collapsing all forms of nationalism into a single type, a collapse that the historical record does not support.
The historian Hans Kohn offered, as early as 1944, an influential distinction between what he termed civic or Western nationalism, which defines the nation through voluntary political membership and shared constitutional commitment, and ethnic or Eastern nationalism, which defines it through shared descent, language, or religion; this distinction supplies the basis for a rebuttal rather than a rejection of the exclusionary thesis. Switzerland offers a striking demonstration that civic nationalism can function in practice rather than merely in theory. A country with four official languages, German, French, Italian, and Romansh, and a population divided among Protestant, Catholic, and increasingly secular and Muslim traditions, Switzerland has sustained a stable and widely shared national identity for well over a century without requiring linguistic or religious uniformity, relying instead on federalism, cantonal autonomy, and direct democratic participation to bind its communities to the state rather than to one another's ethnicity. Swiss national identity, famously described as a "nation of will" rather than a nation of blood, demonstrates that shared citizenship and shared institutions can generate the emotional cohesion that ethnic nationalists insist only common ancestry can provide. Switzerland alone, however, might be dismissed as a small and unusually prosperous exception, which makes a second and more dramatic case especially important.
South Africa's transition from apartheid offers a still more demanding test of civic nationalism, since it required a deeply divided and historically violent society, rather than a settled and wealthy one, to construct an inclusive national identity almost from scratch. The interim and final Constitutions of 1993 and 1996, drafted under Nelson Mandela's leadership following decades of racial segregation enforced by law, explicitly rejected any single ethnic or racial definition of South African nationhood in favour of a constitutional order grounded in equal citizenship, an extensive bill of rights, and formal recognition of eleven official languages. Archbishop Desmond Tutu's description of the resulting polity as the "Rainbow Nation" captured an aspiration that, while imperfectly realised amid continuing economic inequality, nonetheless produced a relatively peaceful transfer of power and the avoidance of the large-scale sectarian violence many observers had feared. South Africa's experience shows that even a society scarred by decades of state-enforced racial exclusion can consciously choose, through constitutional design and political leadership, to redefine nationhood around shared citizenship rather than shared identity, directly answering Gellner and Anderson's structural pessimism with a counter-example built from harder circumstances than Switzerland's. What determines whether a nation follows the exclusionary path of Myanmar and Rwanda or the inclusive path of Switzerland and South Africa, therefore, becomes the central practical question.
The clearest determinant of which face nationalism assumes lies in constitutional design, specifically whether citizenship is defined by allegiance to shared institutions or by membership in a particular identity group. Constitutions that make religion, ethnicity, or language a precondition of full national belonging, as Pakistan's constitutional treatment of religious identity has done at points in its history, structurally guarantee that minorities remain conditional citizens, however generous the state's stated intentions toward them. By contrast, constitutions that make citizenship itself, rather than identity, the basis of national membership, as South Africa's 1996 Constitution does explicitly, create a legal architecture in which minority status carries no automatic political disadvantage. This distinction is not merely academic, since constitutional text shapes the legal claims minorities can bring, the protections courts are empowered to enforce, and the vocabulary in which national belonging is publicly discussed. Constitutional design therefore functions as the first and most consequential lever available to any state seeking to move its nationalism toward the inclusive end of the spectrum, though a constitution alone cannot guarantee outcomes without functioning institutions to enforce it.
An independent judiciary and a credible commitment to the rule of law form the second decisive condition, since even the most inclusive constitutional text is only as strong as the institutions willing to enforce it against a resistant majority. Courts capable of striking down discriminatory legislation, prosecuting mob violence against minorities, and protecting religious and linguistic freedoms provide the practical mechanism through which constitutional promises become lived experience rather than aspiration. Where judiciaries are weak, politically captured, or reluctant to confront popular sentiment, as has often been the case in blasphemy-related prosecutions in Pakistan, minorities are left dependent on the goodwill of the majority rather than on enforceable rights, a precarious position regardless of what the constitution formally guarantees. The presence or absence of robust judicial protection therefore functions as the hinge between constitutional design on paper and inclusive nationalism in practice, converting formal equality into substantive security or leaving it as an unfulfilled promise.