Politics of quantifying people and 2017's census of Pakistan

Pakistan is also one of the postcolonial multilingual, multicultural, and multireligious states. Different cultural collectivities struggle for the preservation of their social identity and procurement of their fair share in the economic and political resources of the state. Numbers provide these ethnic groups the knowledge about their own strength relative to other ethnic groups and accordingly make demands. In Pakistan decennial census is conducted to know the exact number and nature of its demography and accordingly make policies. Pakistan since 1947 till date has conducted six censuses in total and all are mired in controversy concerning the counting of competing ethnicities. This article using case study method and taking 2017's census as a case investigates the fundamental question that why the state of Pakistan keeps an uncertainty around the numbers and why the competing ethnic groups never trust the process of counting numbers and calls it a manipulated process?