During my Masters, when I first met a classmate from Tharparkar, he shared a story about how his parents thought he was leaving for a foreign country, while in reality, he was just moving to the federal capital.

The essence of his story was lost on me until I visited Tharparkar myself for ethnographic fieldwork. Located near the India-Pakistan border, Tharparkar is one of the most densely populated deserts in the world and hosts the largest population of Hindus in Pakistan.

The Thari identity

In yesteryears, the remoteness of the desert and lack of accessibility meant that people had to depend on the environment and each other for survival. It also largely shielded it from the violence that came with the partition of the subcontinent, thereby sparing it from the hyper-nationalist religio-political narratives that followed.

As with many indigenous communities, over generations, this also created a strong connection with nature vis-à-vis the land, which came to be viewed as the loving mother who looks after the community. Over time, this symbiotic relationship transformed into a strong localised identity known as the ‘Thari’ identity, based on principles of mutual respect, brotherhood, and religious tolerance.

I witnessed this for myself during my stay in Mithi — a small town of Tharparkar — where I found a stark difference between the inclusive Thari identity as compared to the orthodox Muslim Pakistani identity, defined and shaped by the dominant religion. For example, irrespective of their religion, people in Tharparkar would greet each other with ‘saein kera haal ha’, which translates to ‘brother how are you’, rather than using standard religious greetings such as ‘Namaste’ or ‘Assalam-o-Alaikum’.

For its inhabitants, Tharparkar was an almost utopian space — safe, secluded and cordoned off in the desert away from mainstream Pakistani society.However, this changed with the discovery of massive deposits of coal in the desert, estimated to provide 175 billion tonnes of lignite coal, which could cater to Pakistan’s energy needs for up to 200 years.

This led to the development of the Thar Coal Block II power plant under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which aimed to extract 3.8 million tonnes of coal per annum and use it to generate power. In 2021, the project gained approval to extract 12.2m tonnes.

Following the discovery, a ‘coal rush’ resulted in expedited infrastructural development in Tharparkar. This rapid growth of the area had a multidimensional impact on the desert and its soul — the Thari identity.

The price of development

First, the environmental cost of unprecedented industrial growth resulted in the destruction of local, indigenous ecosystems developed over generations, forced evictions of local pastoralist communities from their lands, and increased policing and militarisation of the area. The pain of losing one’s ecological heritage can be seen in the words of an inhabitant of Tharparkar:

“Phog was a tree that was so crucial in the life of the people of Thar that I cannot even explain. It makes me sad because the ecology of Thar is fundamental to the life of the Thari people, and now because of the development of this area, Tharis have lost their connection with nature which is not good at any level.”

The markers of a nation include a shared name, myths, culture, customs, and a historic territory. Furthermore, the essence of nationhood in spatially distinct communities such as Thaparkar lies within the confines of the ‘ethnoscape’, which is a common ancestral connection with the landscape. The romanticisation of the idea of a ‘dharti’ [homeland] is propagated through songs, poetry, and cultural performances, which in turn cements the foundations of nationhood in indigenous communities.

Thus, in a distant place like Tharparkar, the reliance on indigenous knowledge structures and traditions used to provide the native population with a sense of belonging to their surroundings which in turn shaped their identity and reinforced the notion of ‘nativeness’. An example of this love for the land can be seen in the local folklore of a Thari girl called Marvi. Taught over generations in every Thari household is the story of Marvi’s resilience, who was held captive by the ruler (Umar). Marvi’s resistance and longing for her homeland was immortalised by Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai’s seminal work ‘Shah jo Risalo’.

The price of development that the people of Tharparkar paid was an unanticipated loss of the multi-generational bond with their ‘dharti’. This means that for them, losing indigenous flora and fauna was equivalent to saying goodbye to a loved one — in the process, losing fragments of their own identity and sense of self.

Secondly, with the roads arrived outsiders, who were reportedly surprised to see Hindu-Muslim harmony unlike the rest of Pakistan. During my time in Tharparkar, I celebrated the Hindu religious festival of Diwali. The whole town was engulfed in celebratory fireworks and festivities which was a surreal experience for me. As a ‘mainland’ Pakistani, I had only seen such celebrations in Bollywood movies.

Read more: Mithi — Where a Hindu fasts and a Muslim does not slaughter cows

Furthermore, the Thari identity embodies the notions of inclusivity, a sense of brotherhood based on the affiliation with the ethnoscape of Tharparkar, which offered a heightened sense of companionship as well as pride amongst the locals. Over time, however, the dominant religion started to appear more often in conversations along with the construction of orthodox religious institutions in the area, and within a few years, the divisive discourse of ‘us vs them’ seeped into the Thari way of life.

Read more: The truth about forced conversions in Thar

As described by a Hindu resident from Tharparkar, “I have seen in my life, this sudden change in the local culture of tolerance, which I think is linked to this infrastructure development. The outsiders have started to arrive here and sadly they will try to destroy our culture, our secularity, and our brotherhood by bringing their fundamentalist ideologies and it has already started.”

To burn or not to burn?

While many residents of Tharparkar look at the coal projects with a wary eye, I also want to urge my readers to think about the other side of the story. As I am writing this piece, the country is in economic shambles, having been on the brink of default for months. Putting the issue of Chinese loan debt traps aside, for a developing country like Pakistan struggling with an energy crisis, the discovery of massive deposits of coal is a lifeline.

The Thar-Coal project has also had a positive impact, which during my recent visit to the coal fields, the general manager of a ‘coal-focused’ foundation was quite keen on highlighting, without acknowledging ‘the bad and ugly’ sides of the said project.

The facts are that this coal will generate electricity; at the same time, it will also emit greenhouse gases and it has already brought about a monumental change in the Thari way of life.

Despite contributing less than 1pc of all global greenhouse gas emissions, Pakistan is on the receiving end of the effects of climate change fuelled by the hyper-consumption culture catered for by the profit-driven agenda of massive global conglomerates.

Should we go ahead and extract coal, burn it for a century and contribute to finishing off our dying planet? Ideally, we should not. But environmental catastrophes, political instability, the war on terror, institutionalised corruption and military dictatorships have left us in this mess where Pakistanis are not afforded with an option to say no.

“Thar will become Dubai” — that was the dream sold to the people of Tharparkar. Economically impoverished people believed in this ‘too good to be true’ idea, or rather were strong-armed into accepting the fate by state and non-state actors. Without realising where it would lead them, and before they could understand, the identity they were so proud of, the desert that had sustained them for centuries, the camaraderie they cherished, was all gone. Thar became the Pakistani desert that lost its soul.

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