Perforating the Land of the Pure
On Colonialism, Corruption, and Pakistan's Climate Crisis
Pak-istan.
Pak — pure. Istan — land of.
Pakistan. Land of the pure.
There is a unique, almost inexplicable sorrow reserved for witnessing your home die a slow death. You feel as though a part of you is dying. When the executioner reaches for his entire arsenal, the pain cuts deeper still; you cannot possibly fathom how to save what you love most. Your helplessness becomes all consuming, a weight that feels insurmountable. You’re forced to watch the land you love eat itself into nonexistence; you stand by as it transitions from a green so glorious that even the angels sing its praise, to a grey so ghostly that its grave looms over every crevice and street corner. Now you watch and weep, hazy sky choking you, the only clean water the tears you shed. Along with your homeland, slipping away too is your hope.
In many ways, my life has been a pattern of mourning Pakistan's slow unraveling — politically, socially, economically, environmentally. When I was eleven, I ran a blog called Peace on Earth. It carried all the gravitas a fifth-grader who'd just discovered Blogspot could muster, but I took it seriously. I've forgotten most of what I wrote, but I do remember my very first post: an entry about the 2010 floods that had swept across Pakistan. Fifteen years later, I’ve started a new blog, and once again, I’m writing about floods that have swept across Pakistan. The water still rises. The deaths still mount. In this series of continuities, sadly, the questions too remain unchanged.
Another memory, more recent, also lingers, stubbornly refusing to fade. It was September 2022, and I was at St Pancras in London when I saw a large Islamic Relief ad urging donations for Pakistan’s flood victims. I thought of how privileged I was in that moment, how devastatingly so. Though I'd lived in London for years, regularly contemplating the fact, the gruesome truth of the colonial reality struck me with fresh grief. I existed simultaneously in two places: the warmth of the luxury around me, and the icy sorrow of knowing it existed only because of an unspeakable crime. A crime that had never ended, merely shape-shifted, its consequences raging and rippling endlessly — one of which was sketched before me on that station wall.
Not a day passes now, it seems, without laments about climate changes’ imposed burdens. This past winter, I lost count of how many times I heard complaints that Islamabad's seasons "just aren't the same anymore." In October, we wore lawn — that gossamer fabric meant for summer's heat. Shopkeepers and street beggars asked me to echo their prayers for rain, for God's mercy. In Lahore, smog painted an already grey city charcoal, strangling everyone within reach. And yet these are the privileged complaints of the urban and mostly untouched. While I lament these changes, my mind and spirit immediately fall into deeper sorrow for the millions upon millions with no roof to shield them, for whom life itself has become a weapon, unafraid to wield itself. Where do we go from here, then? When does blue surrender to grey — has it already?
Pakistan contributes merely 0.88% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet ranks as the fifth most climate-vulnerable nation on Earth. More than just another footnote in the climate crisis, this is the merciless mathematics of a world where those who contributed least bear the heaviest burden.
This summer's floods tell the same devastating story. Over 800 people killed, thousands of homes destroyed, crops ruined, families displaced. Waters that should have brought life became instead the angel of death. Now, people already living in extreme poverty grapple with the harsh reality of displacement, a physical and mental anguish words fail to capture the magnitude of. Livelihoods erased in a moment, schools swept away, children left alone and afraid, deprived of clean drinking water, and handed in its place illness and apathy.
When floods (‘monsoon on steroids’) tore through Pakistan in 2022, 33 million people were displaced. The number itself is so vast that it’s easy to read it, maybe widen your eyes, and move on. But pause for a moment and try to genuinely absorb that: 33 million people.
Statistics have a way of almost minimizing the sanctity of each life the numbers mean to represent, making them seem like something abstract instead of the simple, sacred truth they are. Millions of human beings, dreams, families — stories still meant to unfold, futures waiting to happen. Entire villages vanished, drowning people and facades of permanence. It was a horrible reminder of climate change’s cruel injustice, its complete lack of sympathy for those already suffering — as a hotspot, people in the region are already ‘15x more likely to die from climate impacts.’ For those who survived, not only was it physically traumatizing, but the mental anguish was, and remains, impossible to quantify:
“Families lost their homes, land, livestock and everything they had worked for…in many valleys, people were cut off for weeks, like islands in a vast lake, with no food or medicine reaching them. That is collective psychological torture.”
Those who have not healed (or been given the resources to) from the gravity of three summers ago are now forced to reckon with the fresh tragedy of this summer’s, living too with the fear and knowledge that this crisis is far from over. From north to south, all have been forcefully confronted by the beast of climate change.
Home to the most glaciers in the world outside of the polar region, rapidly rising temperatures means the rapid melting of snow — in ‘the third pole’, this inevitably means catastrophic flooding. Over the past three months, torrential rains, cloudbursts and flash floods have wreaked havoc across the northern regions of Gilgit Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, now going into Sindh, Punjab, and Balochistan, transforming beautiful landscapes into rivers of death. In the southern port city of Karachi, which serves as the country’s most populated urban center with a population of roughly 20 million, every monsoon season delivers the same script: waterlogged streets, power failures, sewage bubbling through broken drains. An urban drowning, performed annually without fail, returns like an unwelcome guest. This year has been no different.
But climate change doesn't merely bring water or heat to Pakistan, it acts as a magnifier, amplifying everything. It transforms corruption into catastrophe, poor planning into famine, negligence into mass graves. It presses against every fracture: poverty, population growth, water mismanagement, etc., until survival itself becomes provisional. When lack of preventive health measures, coupled with overcrowded and underfunded hospitals, are met with extreme heatwaves — people who could survive are given a death certificate before their time, and worse still, their deaths aren’t counted in the official records. With every drop of unwelcome rain or every added degree of heat comes a new kiss of death for an undeserving soul.
The Colonial Blueprint Beneath the Water
What’s crucial to acknowledge is that any discussion of Pakistan's "vulnerability" is incomplete without mentioning how much of this fragility was deliberately constructed before independence, through colonial infrastructure designed for extraction, not protection. Pakistan, like much of the Global South, suffers from climate colonialism — a calculated system that prioritized imperial wealth over indigenous welfare.
The footprints of British colonialism have left their streaks across every inch of the fabric forming Pakistan — and increasingly, it seems they are more bloody than they are muddy. The Indus River system — the country’s lifeline — was transformed by the British Raj not to nurture people but to enrich empire. Canals were cut to feed cotton, sugarcane, and wheat for British mills, not local mouths. Seasonal floodplains that communities had adapted to over centuries were recast into rigid, artificial agricultural zones. Pakistan inherited water systems designed by colonial standards and techniques, shaped more by British profit margins than Pakistani survival.
As Zarmina Khan explains:
“Pakistan's historical experience of colonialism has left the country with deeply entrenched patterns of resource extraction and environmental degradation. The British Empire’s focus on maximizing agricultural output in the Punjab region, for example, created a system of intensive irrigation that has contributed to long-term water shortages and increased flood risk. Today, these colonial-era infrastructure projects continue to exacerbate the effects of climate change, making Pakistan more vulnerable to extreme weather events.”
The colonial legacy extends beyond environmental mismanagement and stolen resources — though that theft was staggering. Think just of the fact that British colonization drained $45 trillion from the Indian subcontinent. Imagine an alternate reality where that wealth was never plundered…it is almost inconceivable. The subcontinent, now synonymous with poverty and inequality, can trace many of its wounds to this single, monstrous fact. Even the English word "loot" was taken from Sanskrit — the very language of extraction ‘borrowed’ from the colonized!
This legacy persists in systemic incompetence, perhaps best reflected in modern neocolonial "climate response" frameworks. Corruption, greed, and performative politics reduce climate preparedness to empty slogans. International aid and shiny packaged policies arrive, but not without the sidelining of local wisdom and community resilience. Those in power prefer thoughts, prayers, and tweets to their actual responsibility for the earth and people they claim to serve.
Institutions exist, of course, but on paper and in theatre. When storms come and bring everything down, the first to go is the facade of competence this house of cards puts on. Politicians with no qualification beyond inherited surnames conduct photo ops from boats in flooded streets, before distributing aid boxes stamped with their faces. Climate conferences unfold in luxury hotels, where the same people who would rejoice in the rain as a ‘gift’ make decisions for communities still underwater, still begging for air.
Climate disasters kill immediately, and thanks to the consequences of corruption, slowly too. Aside from the many unrecorded deaths from extreme heat, just when it comes to flooding, those not killed by drowning or crushed by collapsing homes die from water-borne illnesses, particularly children and the elderly. And it is not just humans and animals who are killed — climate change’s intensification of poverty and thus migration is leading to cultural erosion. Pakistan’s mountain languages, for instance, have been severely impacted by disaster-induced migration, as Fawad Ali explains:
“Over 30 ‘endangered’ languages are spoken in Pakistan’s mountainous northern regions. The terrain means that many of these languages are only spoken by very small populations, often in the low thousands. The terrain also makes these communities vulnerable to a number of climate-induced disasters.”
What a cruel irony. The climate disasters Pakistan is now regularly confronted with, shaped significantly by its colonial past, linger still with the odor of the empire’s endeavor. The British may have left, but the architecture of their exploitation remains. It is not them directly stripping people of their land, rights, and even language, but their lingering footprints remain embedded in Pakistan’s modern reality. The floods and droughts are not nature’s whims alone, but the echoes of an imperial design that outlived its designers.
Towards Renewal
Let us see beyond climate change as a headline and acknowledge it for what it really is: a hand that grips throats. It exerts its force through heatwaves that make cities unlivable, floods that sweep away homes, and droughts that strip fields bare. The question is no longer whether Pakistan can survive climate change. It is whether the world will allow it to survive. This framing must shift the burden from adaptation back to accountability — addressing root causes of vulnerability rather than expecting the victims to simply cope better. Climate justice requires recognizing that what Pakistan endures today is the compound interest on centuries of extraction, exploitation, and indifference. It would mean reparations, not ‘aid’. Technology transfer, not consultancy reports. Solidarity, not mere sympathy. A reckoning with the truth that the guilty must pay for their crimes, at last.
The floods that swallowed homes and washed away lives were not acts of God or nature gone rogue. They are the logical endpoint of a world that always placed profit over people, extraction over sustainability, and the comfort of the few over the survival of the many. Yet, they are not eternal. Hope persists and shall continue to do so; there are plenty of wonderful efforts being made across the country, truly dedicated to saving the land and the lives dependent on it. Activists like Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Jr lead movements like Bulhan Bachao, devoted to climate justice. Indigenous-led initiatives across the country work tirelessly to protect and preserve the land — in the recent devastation of floods across KPK, it was shepherds who warned people of the waters to come, not the government installed infrastructure. It was, and always is, the people who do what needs to be done. Let us recognize them and lend them our support, for it is through their resilience that the possibility of renewal flows.
Beyond the statistics and frameworks lies a human truth too devastating to quantify. To see the catastrophic aftermath, to recognize the grim familiarity of these headlines — it is a grief that defies measurement. The land of the pure is being undone before our eyes, perforated so it loses oxygen slowly, but never subtly. Pakistan, where the brave-hearted pilgrimage to stand in the shadow of K2's snow-adorned crown, to find solace in the serene embrace of the Margalla Hills guarding an evergreen capital. People from the world over sing odes to Hunza Valley, a piece of heaven left for Earth to enjoy. Poets struggle to capture Karachi’s fiery sunsets as they kiss the Arabian Sea, or Balochistan’s endless, blue-hued stretch toward the edge of the world. All the lives dependent on these landscapes, all who have nurtured this earth and called it home, hang in the balance.
The land of the pure deserves a future built on justice, not extraction; compassion, not the cruel calculus of carbon colonialism. A future where children are spared the trauma of a cycle they did not create. So let us acknowledge that charity, as well-meaning and essential as it is, is not climate justice — it is a bandage on a hemorrhaging wound. But this is not a terminal diagnosis. To believe it is beyond repair, that the patient is not worth saving, is to commit a final, unforgivable injustice.
The real question now is whether Pakistan will be abandoned again, or whether justice will finally flow back to where it was stolen from. In the rising water, hazy skies, and prayers for mercy, the answer waits to be written.
If you are able and willing, consider making a donation to help victims of Pakistan’s recent floods here.
References & Further Reading/Viewing
Blood and Water: The Indus River Basin in Modern History, David Gilmartin
Pakistan: Climate disasters increasing risks among children and older people
Pakistan slams 'crisis of injustice' as deadly flooding hits
A great documentary highlighting the climate emergency and its victims ⬇️
You may enjoy:
When the Earth Bears Witness
“Corruption has appeared on land and sea because of what the hands of people have earned.” (30:41)
colonialism never ended! we still operate the same way: extracting every last bit instead of building sustainable systems.
Incredible writing! Thanks for this