Can Pakistan live on a Borrowed Revolution?

The most pitiable creature I know is not the beggar who asks for bread but the gentleman who must borrow a personality. He dresses in another man’s taste, speaks in another man’s phrases and mistakes imitation for refinement. He is everywhere respectable and nowhere original. Nations occasionally acquire the same unfortunate habit. Their politics become echoes, their ideals reflections, and their revolutions little more than borrowed costumes.

There was a time when borrowing was the necessity of poverty. We borrowed machines because we had no factories, medicines because we had no laboratories, and books because we had no presses. Such borrowing was neither shameful nor unusual; indeed, civilisation itself advances through exchange. The Greeks borrowed from Egypt, the Arabs preserved and enlarged the inheritance of Greece, Europe rediscovered Aristotle through Muslim Spain, and Japan modernised by learning from the West without surrendering its soul. Borrowing knowledge is the beginning of wisdom.

Borrowing identity is the beginning of decline.

There is another form of borrowing that no customs official can intercept and no tariff can discourage. It enters silently through the imagination. A society begins by borrowing opinions, then aspirations, then indignation. Before long, it borrows its heroes, its villains, its vocabulary and, eventually, its revolutions. It ceases to ask, “What does our history require?” and instead asks, “Whose history should we imitate?”

That, I fear, is the predicament into which much of Pakistan’s public discourse has drifted.

During the past several weeks, social media has been flooded with admiration for the recent political resistance witnessed across the border in India. Video clips have travelled faster than thoughtful analysis. Slogans have crossed the Wagah frontier with greater ease than ideas. Among countless young Pakistanis one question has become almost fashionable, Why can’t Pakistan have a movement like this?

The question is understandable.

It is also profoundly revealing.

Hidden within it is an assumption that our political future must resemble somebody else’s present; that history unfolds according to a universal script; that every nation matures by repeating the experience of another. It is an assumption born not of confidence but of intellectual dependency.

The tragedy, therefore, is not that Pakistanis admire another people’s courage. Every decent society can appreciate courage wherever it appears. The tragedy is that many have become convinced that courage itself must now be imported.

We seem increasingly unable to recognise our own political inheritance unless it first receives foreign approval.

This habit is hardly confined to politics. It has become the defining condition of our intellectual life. We borrow theories from European universities before examining our own social realities. We borrow ideological fashions from America before asking whether they illuminate Pakistani society. We borrow debates from social media and mistake them for scholarship. We consume outrage manufactured elsewhere and wear it as though it were tailored for our own circumstances.

We have become, in the deepest sense of the phrase, tenants in the house of our own imagination.

The irony is painful.

No civilisation lacking confidence in itself has ever become creative. Creation begins where imitation ends. Shakespeare borrowed stories but produced Hamlet. Iqbal studied Nietzsche and Bergson yet remained unmistakably Iqbal. Muhammad Ali Jinnah mastered the constitutional traditions of Britain but transformed them into a political movement rooted in the aspirations of Indian Muslims. Great minds borrow raw material; they do not borrow finished identities.

The same principle governs nations.

Civilisations borrow in order to create.

Declining societies borrow in order to imitate.

Perhaps nowhere is this confusion more visible than in our understanding of resistance.

Resistance has become one of the most romantic words in modern political vocabulary. It evokes images of heroic crowds, defiant slogans, dramatic confrontations and triumphant victories. Social media, with its appetite for spectacle, has transformed resistance into a global performance. Every protest becomes a cinematic narrative; every confrontation seeks an audience; every slogan aspires to immortality through a hashtag.

But history is not written in hashtags.

Nor are nations transformed by theatrical moments alone.

The anthropologist Leila Abu-Lughod offered an important warning nearly three decades ago in her influential essay The Romance of Resistance. She argued that scholars often romanticise resistance as though every act of opposition were inherently emancipatory. Such a view, she suggested, ignores the complex relationships of power, culture and history within which resistance acquires meaning. Acts of dissent cannot be detached from the societies that produce them. They are rooted in particular institutions, historical memories and cultural conditions.

Her insight deserves careful attention today.

To ask why Pakistan does not produce resistance identical to India’s is rather like asking why the Indus refuses to flow like the Ganges. Rivers obey their own geography. Nations obey their own history.

Every meaningful political movement is shaped by its unique historical circumstances. The French Revolution emerged from fiscal collapse and aristocratic privilege. The American Revolution arose from disputes over representation and imperial authority. South Africa’s democratic transition was forged in the struggle against apartheid. None of these experiences can simply be photocopied for another society.

History does not distribute identical examinations to different nations.

Each country answers its own questions.

Yet we continue searching for borrowed answers.

Perhaps this is because borrowed revolutions are emotionally satisfying. They spare us the difficult labour of self-examination. It is always easier to admire another nation’s struggle than to confront the unfinished responsibilities of our own. Admiration demands nothing. Citizenship demands everything.

That distinction has become blurred in contemporary Pakistan.

Our public imagination has fallen in love with the romance of beginning anew. Every few years another movement captures our attention. We invest it with almost mythical expectations. We hope it will accomplish what institutions, constitutions and patient political reform have failed to achieve. We long for redemption through spectacle.

But mature nations are not built upon permanent excitement.

They are built upon permanent institutions.

Hannah Arendt observed in On Revolution that the enduring achievement of successful revolutions lies not in the destruction of an old order but in the establishment of a durable constitutional one. The measure of a revolution is therefore not the noise it creates but the institutions it leaves behind.

Measured by that standard, Pakistan’s history appears very different from the one commonly narrated on social media.

For Pakistan is not a nation deprived of revolutions.

It is a nation afflicted by historical amnesia.

We remember the slogans of others while forgetting the constitutional milestones of our own. We celebrate borrowed heroes while neglecting those who transformed our own political landscape. We behave like the heir to a great library who spends his days borrowing books from neighbours because he has forgotten the shelves inside his own house.

The greatest crisis facing Pakistan today is therefore not political.

It is a crisis of memory.

And until a nation remembers what it has already achieved, it will forever search for its future in the borrowed dreams of others.

The French historian Ernest Renan remarked in his celebrated 1882 lecture, What Is a Nation?, that a nation is built as much upon “the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories” as upon the desire to live together in the future. Memory, in Renan’s formulation, is not antiquarian nostalgia; it is political capital. A society that forgets the struggles through which it became itself gradually loses confidence in the institutions those struggles produced.

Pakistan’s present mood invites precisely such reflection.

For several years, our public discourse has increasingly behaved as though history began yesterday. Every political crisis is treated as unprecedented, every protest as entirely novel, every generation as uniquely burdened. This historical short-sightedness is reinforced by digital media, whose memory seldom extends beyond the latest viral clip. What trends on a Monday is forgotten by Friday. Nations, however, cannot afford such amnesia. They are not sustained by algorithms but by accumulated memory.

Walter Benjamin, writing in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, warned against what he called a complacent understanding of history that merely celebrates one dramatic event after another while overlooking the deeper struggles embedded within them. Although Benjamin’s philosophical concerns were very different from Pakistan’s contemporary politics, his caution remains relevant. If we remember only spectacles and neglect institutions, we inherit excitement without wisdom.

This, perhaps, explains why Pakistanis increasingly ask why they cannot have another nation’s movement while seldom asking what became of the movements they themselves created.

The answer is uncomfortable.

Pakistan has never lacked revolutionary moments.

It has often lacked revolutionary memory.

Our first great transformation was the creation of Pakistan itself.

The Pakistan Movement was not a spontaneous uprising. It was among the twentieth century’s most remarkable constitutional and political mobilisations. Under Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s leadership, a constitutional lawyer rather than a military commander, a dispersed political aspiration was translated into a sovereign state. Negotiation, electoral politics, legal advocacy, public organisation and constitutional argument proved capable of altering the political geography of South Asia.

There is an important lesson in that history.

Not every revolution announces itself through barricades.

Some are accomplished through constitutional imagination.

To describe 1947 merely as independence is to understate its magnitude. It represented a profound reordering of political sovereignty, territorial authority and collective identity. It was, in every meaningful sense, a foundational political revolution.

Yet nations do not live indefinitely upon founding moments.

They must continually redefine the constitutional relationship between citizen and state.

Pakistan attempted precisely that in 1973.

The Constitution of 1973 remains one of the rare moments in our history when deeply divided political forces chose consensus over confrontation. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto provided the political leadership that made the constitutional process possible, but the document itself was not the property of a single party. It emerged through negotiation among government and opposition alike and was adopted unanimously by the National Assembly. That broad parliamentary consensus is precisely what gives the Constitution its enduring legitimacy.

Constitutions are among history’s least dramatic revolutions.

They unfold not upon battlefields but across committee tables, parliamentary debates and legal drafts. They rarely produce unforgettable photographs, yet they determine how power shall be acquired, exercised and restrained long after the crowds have dispersed.

Hannah Arendt argued that the distinctive achievement of the American Revolution lay less in the struggle against Britain than in the successful establishment of constitutional institutions capable of preserving political freedom. Whether or not one accepts her comparison with the French Revolution, her broader insight remains compelling—the highest purpose of a revolution is institution-building.

By that measure, the Constitution of 1973 deserves to be remembered not merely as a legal document but as one of Pakistan’s genuine revolutionary achievements.

Unfortunately, we have treated it less as a living covenant than as a ceremonial relic.

The pattern repeated itself a quarter of a century later in a different sphere.

In May 1998, Pakistan conducted its nuclear tests at Chagai. The event is often discussed exclusively in military or strategic terms, yet it also represented a profound transformation of Pakistan’s place within the regional balance of power. The intellectual origins of that programme stretched back decades. Following the trauma of 1971, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto made the strategic decision to pursue a nuclear capability. Over subsequent governments, hundreds of scientists, engineers, administrators and military planners contributed to that effort. Munir Ahmad Khan, Abdul Qadeer Khan and numerous less celebrated researchers became part of a long national enterprise. In 1998, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ultimately took the decision to authorise the nuclear tests despite substantial international pressure and the prospect of economic sanctions.

History rarely belongs to individuals alone.

It belongs to generations.

To reduce Pakistan’s nuclear capability either to one political leader or to one scientist is to misunderstand how states accomplish strategic transformations. Chagai was the culmination of decades of institutional continuity across changing governments.

It altered not merely Pakistan’s military posture but its strategic identity.

That, too, was a revolution—quiet in preparation, decisive in consequence.

Yet once again we commemorated the event annually while neglecting the larger lesson it embodied that national achievements of enduring significance are seldom completed within a single government, a single movement or a single generation.

They require continuity.

Continuity, however, has never been Pakistan’s strongest political virtue.

It is precisely this absence of continuity that would soon provoke another constitutional struggle—one not for the creation of a new state or a new strategic capability, but for the restoration of constitutional order itself.

If the Constitution of 1973 demonstrated Pakistan’s capacity to create consensus, the Lawyers’ Movement reminded the nation that constitutions do not defend themselves. They survive only when citizens are willing to defend the principles they embody.

When Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry was suspended in March 2007, few anticipated that the event would evolve into one of the most significant constitutional movements in Pakistan’s history. What began as a dispute over judicial independence gradually expanded into a broader national conversation about constitutionalism, the rule of law and the limits of executive authority.

History often surprises us by choosing unexpected protagonists.

In England, the struggle for constitutional liberty was shaped not only by kings but by parliamentarians and jurists. In the United States, lawyers occupied a disproportionate place among the architects of the republic. Pakistan, too, discovered that black coats could sometimes exercise greater moral influence than uniforms.

The Lawyers’ Movement was never the achievement of a single individual. It belonged to thousands of lawyers, bar associations, judges, journalists, students, political workers and ordinary citizens who sustained public pressure over many months. Among its most visible and articulate leaders was Aitzaz Ahsan, whose constitutional advocacy gave the movement intellectual coherence and national visibility. Yet its enduring significance lay precisely in its collective character. It demonstrated that constitutional politics could mobilise society without abandoning constitutional methods.

That distinction deserves emphasis.

Too often we equate resistance with disorder. The Lawyers’ Movement suggested another possibility of resistance in defence of institutions rather than resistance against institutions. It was not a rejection of constitutional order but a demand for its restoration.

The movement contributed to the democratic transition of 2008, but its constitutional legacy reached further. In 2010, Parliament enacted the Eighteenth Amendment, perhaps the most substantial constitutional reform since 1973. The amendment repealed many provisions introduced under military rule, restored significant parliamentary authority, strengthened provincial autonomy through the federal structure and reaffirmed the constitutional balance originally envisioned in 1973.

Once again, history resists simplistic narratives.

The Eighteenth Amendment was enacted under the Pakistan People’s Party government led by President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani, but its legitimacy rested upon something larger than partisan success. It was crafted through the Parliamentary Committee on Constitutional Reforms under Senator Raza Rabbani and ultimately passed with overwhelming support across party lines. Government and opposition alike recognised that constitutional stability demanded political compromise.

Consensus, though less dramatic than confrontation, is often the higher form of statesmanship.

That is why I regard the Eighteenth Amendment not merely as legislation but as a constitutional revolution. It fundamentally redefined the distribution of power within the federation while reaffirming parliamentary democracy as the preferred framework of governance.

How curious, then, that these revolutions rarely appear in contemporary political conversations.

We speak endlessly about the revolution yet to come while remaining strangely indifferent to those already accomplished.

This selective memory reveals something deeper than historical ignorance.

It reveals a misunderstanding of revolution itself.

A revolution is not simply the moment when crowds occupy a street.

It is the moment when the relationship between citizens, institutions and power is permanently transformed.

Measured against that definition, Pakistan has experienced several revolutions within a single lifetime. The creation of the state transformed sovereignty. The Constitution transformed legitimacy. Nuclear deterrence transformed strategic equilibrium. The Lawyers’ Movement and the Eighteenth Amendment transformed constitutional politics.

The question, therefore, is not whether Pakistan has had revolutions.

The question is why Pakistan has failed to cultivate a culture that protects the fruits of those revolutions.

Edmund Burke’s reflections on the French Revolution remain instructive in this respect. Burke feared not reform itself but the destruction of institutions without regard for continuity. His argument has often been simplified into a defence of tradition, but its deeper insight concerns political inheritance. Institutions are accumulated achievements. They embody the experience, compromises and hard-earned wisdom of generations. To destroy them casually is easier than to rebuild them.

Pakistan’s recurring dilemma has not been an absence of transformative moments. It has been an inability to convert transformative moments into enduring political habits.

We are fascinated by beginnings.

We tire quickly of maintenance.

A constitution is celebrated on the day it is signed but neglected during the decades that follow. A democratic victory excites public imagination until routine governance replaces political drama. Strategic achievements inspire national pride until they become ordinary facts of statecraft. We inherit institutions as though they were permanent monuments, forgetting that institutions resemble gardens far more than statues. They survive only through continuous cultivation.

It is here that our obsession with borrowed revolutions becomes particularly dangerous.

Every new foreign movement appears exciting because it is still unfinished. Every domestic achievement appears ordinary because we already possess it. Novelty triumphs over memory. Spectacle triumphs over substance.

The ancient Greeks told of the River Lethe, whose waters caused souls to forget their past before beginning another existence. Modern societies have discovered a digital equivalent. Endless streams of information wash away historical memory with astonishing speed. Yesterday’s constitutional struggle disappears beneath today’s trending video. A generation raised upon permanent novelty begins to believe that nothing of significance occurred before its own lifetime.

A nation that drinks too deeply from Lethe eventually loses more than memory.

It loses perspective.

And a people without perspective soon become vulnerable to the oldest temptation in politics—the illusion that salvation always lies somewhere else.

That illusion is precisely what Pakistan must now overcome.

The temptation to borrow another nation’s destiny is not unique to Pakistan. History offers many examples of societies that mistook imitation for progress. Yet the nations that eventually flourished were seldom those that copied most faithfully; they were those that adapted most intelligently.

The Meiji leaders of Japan studied Europe with extraordinary diligence. Missions travelled across the continent, examining constitutions, universities, railways and industries. Yet Japan did not become a second Britain or a smaller Germany. It absorbed foreign knowledge while preserving a distinctly Japanese political and cultural identity. Likewise, post-war Germany rebuilt itself through democratic institutions borrowed in part from Western constitutional traditions, but it anchored those institutions within its own historical reckoning. South Korea embraced global markets without surrendering its language or civilisational confidence. The lesson is remarkably consistent that successful nations borrow techniques, not identities.

Pakistan must learn the same distinction.

Our predicament is not that we look outward. Every healthy civilisation does. The problem arises when looking outward becomes a substitute for looking inward. We have become more familiar with foreign political metaphors than with our own constitutional journey. We debate the revolutions of Paris, Moscow and Tehran with impressive confidence while remaining uncertain about the constitutional debates that shaped our own republic.

A nation that cannot narrate its own story will inevitably begin living inside someone else’s.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once observed that every writer creates his own precursors. Nations do something similar. They choose which memories to elevate and which to neglect. Through that choice they define the story they tell themselves about who they are.

Pakistan, unfortunately, has often narrated itself through crises rather than achievements.

Our textbooks devote far more attention to conflict than to institution-building. Public discourse celebrates personalities more readily than processes. We remember speeches more vividly than constitutions. We commemorate victories while overlooking the painstaking labour required to preserve them.

This imbalance has consequences.

Citizens begin to expect politics to consist entirely of extraordinary moments. Elections, legislation, judicial reform, local government, administrative competence and constitutional continuity appear dull by comparison. Yet these unglamorous routines are precisely what distinguish durable states from fragile ones.

Thomas Carlyle famously wrote that history is the biography of great men. Modern historians have rightly complicated that view. History is also the biography of institutions. Courts, universities, legislatures, civil services and constitutions possess histories of their own. They mature, weaken or recover according to how successive generations treat them.

The maturity of a nation, therefore, is measured less by its capacity to produce moments of outrage than by its capacity to preserve institutions after the outrage has subsided.

This is where Pakistan stands today.

Our challenge is no longer to prove that we can mobilise. We have repeatedly demonstrated that capacity. The challenge is to prove that we can institutionalise. Can we strengthen constitutional culture rather than merely invoke it? Can we value parliamentary deliberation even when it produces compromise instead of victory? Can we protect judicial independence without transforming judges into political symbols? Can we debate fiercely while accepting that political opponents remain constitutional participants rather than existential enemies?

These questions are less dramatic than revolutionary slogans.

They are also more important.

There is another transformation, however, that deserves attention.

Pakistan was created through an ideological movement. The demand for a separate homeland rested upon political ideas concerning representation, identity and constitutional safeguards. That ideological foundation remains an integral part of the country’s origin. Yet no nation remains frozen at the moment of its birth. As states mature, they inevitably discover deeper layers of historical belonging.

The territory that constitutes Pakistan today has witnessed the rise and fall of extraordinary civilisations. The cities of the Indus Valley flourished millennia before many of the world’s classical empires. Gandhara became a meeting place of Greek, Persian, Central Asian and South Asian traditions. Buddhist monasteries, Hindu kingdoms, Islamic sultanates, Sikh rule and the colonial period each left enduring marks upon the landscape. None of these histories diminishes Pakistan’s founding ideals. Rather, they enrich the civilisational inheritance available to its citizens.

Confident nations do not fear the complexity of their past.

They embrace it.

To acknowledge the antiquity of the Indus Valley or the cosmopolitan legacy of Gandhara is not to weaken Pakistan’s ideological foundations. It is to recognise that nations often stand upon several historical layers simultaneously. France is both the heir of Gaul and the French Revolution. Britain is both medieval and modern. Egypt belongs equally to the Pharaohs and the contemporary republic. Civilisations accumulate; they do not erase themselves.

Pakistan can draw strength from the ideals that inspired 1947 while also recognising the civilisational depth of the land on which the republic stands.

Such confidence carries practical implications.

A nation secure in its own history is less tempted by borrowed identities. It studies other societies without envying them. It welcomes ideas without surrendering judgment. It admires foreign achievements without questioning its own legitimacy.

That is the difference between imitation and confidence.

The former seeks approval.

The latter seeks understanding.

Perhaps this is the revolution that remains unfinished—not another upheaval in the streets, but a revolution in civic temperament. A revolution that prizes constitutional fidelity over constitutional convenience, institutional continuity over perpetual disruption, historical literacy over selective memory and national self-confidence over borrowed political theatre.

This revolution requires no barricades.

It requires classrooms that teach constitutional history honestly. Universities that cultivate original scholarship rather than fashionable repetition. Newspapers that reward thoughtful disagreement instead of manufactured outrage. Political parties that strengthen internal democracy. Citizens who recognise that constitutional government is sustained not by occasional heroism but by everyday responsibility.

Such work rarely becomes viral.

History, however, suggests that it is this quieter labour that ultimately endures.

There is an old story in Greek mythology about Janus, the god with two faces. One looked towards the past; the other towards the future. Neither face was sufficient by itself. A nation that looked only backwards would become imprisoned by nostalgia. A nation that looked only forwards would lose the wisdom that memory provides. Civilisation required both.

Pakistan today stands before a similar choice.

One path leads towards perpetual dissatisfaction—a politics permanently searching for the next movement, the next slogan, the next borrowed revolution that promises instant redemption. The other leads towards a quieter but more demanding destination of constitutional confidence, institutional maturity and historical self-knowledge.

The first path is emotionally gratifying.

The second is historically productive.

The temptation to romanticise revolution is understandable. Revolutions possess drama. They produce unforgettable images, stirring speeches and larger-than-life personalities. Constitutions, by contrast, appear tedious. Institutions rarely trend. Parliamentary committees seldom inspire poetry. Yet when the applause fades and the banners are folded away, it is constitutions—not slogans—that determine whether liberty survives.

This is precisely why Leila Abu-Lughod’s warning remains so valuable. Resistance should never be treated as a romantic abstraction detached from its social and historical context. To admire resistance without understanding the conditions that produced it is to mistake appearance for reality. Every nation must answer its own historical questions. There is no universal script for political maturity.

Pakistan’s question is not whether it can produce another movement.

History has already answered that.

The Pakistan Movement answered it.

The Constitution of 1973 answered it.

The strategic resolve demonstrated in 1998 answered it.

The Lawyers’ Movement and the constitutional reforms that followed answered it once more.

Our challenge is different.

Can we preserve what earlier generations struggled to build?

Can we improve institutions without destroying public trust in them?

Can we disagree without reducing politics to permanent warfare?

Can we cultivate citizens rather than merely spectators?

These questions may lack the excitement of revolutionary rhetoric, but they possess something far more valuable—the possibility of endurance.

The Irish statesman Edmund Burke wrote that society is a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are yet to be born. Whether one agrees with every aspect of Burke’s philosophy is beside the point. His central insight deserves careful reflection. Each generation inherits institutions that it did not create and bears responsibility for improving rather than squandering them. Constitutional government is not a gift received once and for all; it is a trust renewed by every generation.

That trust cannot survive upon borrowed memories.

Nor can it flourish upon borrowed grievances.

Least of all can it endure upon borrowed revolutions.

If Pakistan is to play a constructive role in South Asia and the wider world, it will not do so by becoming an imitation of another nation. Its contribution will arise from something more difficult and more original. It would demonstrate that a diverse federal republic can strengthen constitutional governance, deepen democratic culture, invest in knowledge, protect its strategic stability and pursue regional peace without abandoning its own historical identity.

Peace, after all, is not the absence of strength.

It is strength disciplined by wisdom.

A nation secure in itself does not require perpetual enemies to sustain its confidence. It does not measure its worth by the turbulence of its politics or the volume of its slogans. It draws confidence from institutions that function, laws that command respect, universities that produce knowledge, and citizens who understand both the privileges and obligations of freedom.

That is the revolution still awaiting completion.

Not a revolution against the state, but a revolution in the quality of the state.

Not a revolution against the Constitution, but a revolution in constitutional fidelity.

Not a revolution of borrowed passions, but one of original purpose.

We often ask what history will remember about our generation. Perhaps the better question is what our generation chooses to remember about its history. Memory is not merely an archive of the past; it is the compass of the future. A nation that forgets its own constitutional milestones will forever search for borrowed landmarks. A nation that neglects their own achievements will inevitably exaggerate those of others.

The most pitiable creature, then, remains the gentleman who borrows a personality. He may appear fashionable for a season, but he never discovers who he is. Nations are no different. They may borrow technology, learn from foreign institutions and exchange ideas across continents. Indeed, they should. But they cannot borrow memory. They cannot borrow identity. They cannot borrow destiny.

Those must be earned.

Pakistan’s future will not be secured by living on borrowed existence. It will be secured by recovering the confidence to inhabit its own history, to improve its own institutions, to honour its own constitutional inheritance and to imagine its own future.

For only a nation that remembers itself can truly renew itself.

The writer is a PhD scholar in English Literature, a Lawyer, and an International Relations analyst.