Arguments about Pakistani history are usually arguments about content — what a textbook says, what a serial implies. That is the wrong level. Content is made by institutions, and those are of two kinds. Some transmit: they carry a version of the past to millions who will never check it. Others preserve: they hold the documents a version can be checked against, where nobody looks. Pakistan has built the first kind far more thoroughly.

The syllabusWhat the textbook studies found

The school curriculum is the only historical account almost every citizen receives, and it is a state product. Since the Eighteenth Amendment of 2010 curriculum and textbooks are provincial subjects, run through provincial authorities and textbook boards. The first version of the past most people meet is written, approved and printed under public authority.

Two studies define what is known about it. In The Murder of History: A Critique of History Textbooks Used in Pakistan, published by Vanguard Books in Lahore in 1993, K. K. Aziz examined sixty-six social studies, Pakistan studies and history textbooks used from class one to class fourteen, annotating each for errors of fact, emphasis and interpretation, and for omissions. A decade on, the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad published The Subtle Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan, edited by A. H. Nayyar and Ahmad Salim, in 2003. It covered classes one to twelve in four subjects and grouped its findings: insensitivity to religious diversity, historical omission and distortion, material denigrating other communities, and glorification of war.

Rubina Saigol's work adds what an audit misses. In Knowledge and Identity: Articulation of Gender in Educational Discourse in Pakistan, published by ASR in 1995, and later in The Pakistan Project, she treats the syllabus not as a container of true and false statements but as a machine for producing a citizen — loyalties and roles taught alongside the dates. Correcting an error is editing. Changing what a syllabus is for is another task entirely.

The screenWhat may be stopped, and what gets shown

The machinery around film is negative: it decides what may not be shown. Public exhibition requires a certificate under the Motion Pictures Ordinance, 1979, and the tests are broad — whether a film is against the glory of Islam or the integrity, security or defence of Pakistan, or affects public order, decency or morality. The Central Board of Film Censors once certified for the whole country; after the Eighteenth Amendment its writ narrowed and Punjab and Sindh set up boards of their own.

Broadcasting went the other way and stayed federal. The Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority Ordinance, 2002, amended in 2007, licenses broadcast and distribution services, requires a code of conduct for programmes, and lets the Authority prohibit a broadcast, suspend a licence or fine. One gap is worth noticing: the Ordinance preserves the position of the state's own broadcasters, providing that the Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation continues under its 1973 Act. The instrument built to regulate broadcasters is not the one governing the broadcaster the state owns.

Which makes one episode instructive. In 2020 the state television service aired an Urdu dub of the Turkish drama Dirilïş Ertuğrul, as Ertugrul Ghazi, from the first day of Ramazan; Dawn reported on 21 April 2020 that the broadcaster had taken the dubbing on at the Prime Minister's request. It worked as transmission: The News reported on 18 May 2020, under a month in, that the channel had passed two hundred million views. This is a case study, not a model. The largest single act of state-promoted historical storytelling of the period carried a thirteenth-century Anatolian story rather than a Pakistani one. It shows what the transmission machinery can do, and what it was pointed at.

A censor board can stop a story. A state broadcaster can start one. Neither of them can prove one.

The fileWhat archives and commissions do differently

Preservation is a separate function with its own law. The National Archives Act, 1993 (Act VI of 1993) makes the National Archives custodian of public records and requires departments to transfer non-current records to it. The National Archives of Pakistan states that the Act sets twenty years from a record's creation as the access period, with an exception for national security. Twenty years is also the figure in the Right of Access to Information Act, 2017, whose section 16 provides that the exemptions "shall cease to apply after every twenty years and that record of public bodies shall be made public."

Commissions of inquiry do something narrower and harder: they build a record of one event while the witnesses are alive. The Pakistan Commissions of Inquiry Act, 2017 (Act IX of 2017, assented 27 March 2017) lets the federal government constitute a commission into any definite matter of public importance, gives it the powers of a civil court, and requires by section 15 that its report be made public within thirty days of submission. That duty is recent: the Act repealed the Commissions of Inquiry Act of 1956, under which the country's major inquiries were held.

The Hamoodur Rahman Commission shows why it was needed. Appointed on 26 December 1971 to inquire into the events of that year and chaired by the Chief Justice of Pakistan, it submitted its main report on 12 July 1972 after examining 213 witnesses, and completed a supplementary report at the end of 1974, after prisoners of war returned, drawing on 72 more. Then it stopped: the report was classified and stayed classified for most of three decades.

What happened next needs care. Writing in Pakistan Horizon in June 2019 and again in a letter to Dawn on 3 December 2022, Masuma Hasan, Cabinet Secretary at the time, records that excerpts of the supplementary report appeared in the Indian magazine India Today in mid-August 2000 and were reprinted in Dawn; that declassification was authorised on 20 December 2000; and that the report was released on 30 December 2000, entire but for passages on relations with foreign states. She wrote to correct the widespread claim that it was never officially released. Other published accounts conflict on how many copies were made and on how much of the main report reached the public. The Institute prints the account of the officer who was there, and flags the rest unsettled.

Nor was the pattern isolated. A commission of inquiry into the events of May 2011 at Abbottabad submitted its report in January 2013. It was never officially published; a copy was published by Al Jazeera on 8 July 2013.

The argumentWhy 1971 is a records problem first

The asymmetry is plain. A syllabus reaches every child; a serial reaches tens of millions in a season; an archive reaches a few hundred researchers, and a commission report reaches nobody if it is unpublished. The transmitting institutions are large and politically attended to; the preserving ones are small and easily overridden.

That imbalance has a predictable result. When several accounts of one event circulate and the documents that could arbitrate between them are unavailable, the dispute cannot be resolved — only won by whoever transmits harder. This is why the argument about 1971 keeps restarting. It is not first a failure of film or curriculum. It is that for twenty-eight years the record built for exactly this purpose, by a commission examining hundreds of witnesses while memories were fresh, was not available to the people whose history it was.

Records preserve. Culture transmits. Neither can do the other's job, and a country with only the second gets competing myths.

The practical conclusion is unglamorous. Curriculum is worth arguing about, and so is what the state broadcasts. But a country can settle its arguments only when the files behind them can be read: when transfer to the archive happens, when the twenty-year rule holds, and when a report is published because a statute says so.