The recent creation of the Pakistani Students Association has become a source of tension within the Pakistani and South Asian communities on campus.
While the founders of the PSA feel that an organization specifically devoted to Pakistani issues is necessary, the existing South Asian Society is worried about a potential fracturing of the South Asian community.
“The PSA is being created because there is an active Pakistani community on campus big enough to organize into a group but small enough to be a minority,” PSA member Salik Ishtiaq (SFS ‘07) said.
Ishtiaq explained that the main goal of the PSA is to improve education about Pakistan on campus. Among other things, the PSA will try to encourage influential Pakistanis, including representatives from the Pakistani Embassy, to lecture at Georgetown, Ishtiaq said. Another goal of the PSA is to create a South Asian certificate program in the School of Foreign Service.
But members of the South Asian Society, the campus organization best known for its annual Rangila dance performance, are concerned that the new organization could interfere with the SAS’ mission of unifying the South Asian community.
“At first, I’m not going to lie, I was very, very disappointed because one of the great things about SAS is that is brings together South Asians,” SAS Secretary Aneesh Deshpande (SFS ‘08) said. “The board of SAS was very apprehensive.”
According to Deshpande, South Asian students on many other college campuses are sharply divided along national lines. Deshpande said the SAS works hard to avoid this segregation by making an effort to emphasize the Georgetown South Asian community’s shared heritage.
“We want to foster a common South Asian identity at Georgetown,” he said. “We’re all immigrants or our parents were immigrants so we have the same political and social baggage.”
Deshpande acknowledged that distinctions do exist among South Asian students from different countries. Most Pakistani students, for example, are Muslims, so they spend time together while breaking their fast every night during the holy month of Ramadan.
But many students feel that national and regional identification are not mutually exclusive. “I have noticed that Pakistani college students tend to have a fairly strong Pakistani identity,” Nimrah Karim (CAS ‘07), an international student from Karachi, Pakistan, said. “But I feel that amongst Pakistanis and Pakistani-Americans alike, there is also a huge affinity to the region of South Asia as a whole.”
“The best course for us to take is to mitigate the potential division within the South Asian community by working with the PSA,” Deshpande said. “It’s not as much a dividing factor as it would have been if SAS weren’t so strong.”
He estimated that the majority of PSA members will remain involved in SAS.
