Pakistan is formally the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, a nation in South Asia. It is the globe’s fifth-most heavily populated nation, with a population of nearly 227 million, as well as has the world’s second-largest Muslim populace.

Pakistan is the 33rd-largest country by location, covering 881,913 square kilometres (340,509 square miles). It has a 1,046-kilometre (650-mile) coastline along the Arabian Sea as well as Gulf of Oman in the south, as well as is surrounded by India to the eastern, Afghanistan to the west, Iran to the southwest, and China to the northeast. It is separated directly from Tajikistan by Afghanistan’s Wakhan Hallway in the north, and also shares a maritime border with Oman.

Pakistan is the site of several old cultures, including the 8,500-year-old Neolithic website of Mehrgarh in Balochistan, as well as the Indus Valley Civilisation of the Bronze Age, one of the most considerable of the civilisations of the Afro-Eurasia.

The area that makes up the contemporary state of Pakistan was the realm of multiple empires and also dynasties, consisting of the Achaemenid; briefly that of Alexander the Great; the Seleucid, the Maurya, the Kushan, the Gupta; the Umayyad Caliphate in its southern areas, the Hindu Shahi, the Ghaznavids, the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, the Durranis, the Sikh Realm, British East India Company policy, and most lately, the British Indian Empire from 1858 to 1947.

Stimulated by the Pakistan Movement, which looked for a homeland for the Muslims of British India, and also political election victories in 1946 by the All-India Muslim Organization, Pakistan acquired freedom in 1947 after the Dividers of the British Indian Empire, which awarded separate statehood to its Muslim-majority areas and was accompanied by an exceptional mass movement and also loss of life. Originally an Ascendancy of the British Commonwealth, Pakistan officially composed its constitution in 1956, and emerged as a stated Islamic republic.

In 1971, the exclave of East Pakistan seceded as the new country of Bangladesh after a nine-month-long civil war. In the adhering to 4 decades, Pakistan has been ruled by federal governments whose summaries, although complicated, typically alternated between civilian and army, democratic as well as authoritarian, reasonably nonreligious and Islamist. Pakistan chose a noncombatant government in 2008, as well as in 2010 took on a parliamentary system with periodic political elections.