Anyway did I really say anything wrong? I mean what is exactly the difference between Pakistani and Indian Punjabis and Sindhis for instance?
There is no cultural difference other than religion. Besides the passport they carry. On all other fronts I would struggle to set them apart.
I don't know how that makes Pakistanis Indian or Indians Pakistanis.
I was very specific in my examples.
A Pakistani Punjabi & an Indian Punjabi are both the same ethnic people who've evolved into separate but similar cultural & quasi-linguistic groups; our culture, our festivals & even our use of the same language is fairly different than each other due to imprint that Islam left on our culture & our languages.
For example the Indian Punjabis celebrate the Besakhi festival & others such as that & its a big thing there - We don't have anything of the sort here.
This distinction wasn't really our creation that suddenly popped out of thin air because even the British differentiated between the three major religious groups living here because the differences virtually made them different sub-ethnic groups of a larger pan-Punjabi identity - there has been a separate mention of Punjabi Muslims, Punjabi Hindus & Sikhs as far back as one can remember !
Furthermore there really is no such thing as a Pakistani Punjabi because a Punjabi is someone who lives in the land called 'Punjab' or the 'Land of the 5 Rivers' which means that Punjab in itself is culturally, ethnically & linguistically extremely diverse !
Whereas a Punjabi from Lahore may have dramatic similarities with a Punjabi sitting in Chandigar (India) despite the differences that their different view points in life have brought, the Punjabi from the Saraiki belt, the Pukhtoon belt & the Baluch belt have next to nothing in common with an Indian Punjabi heck even the languages they speak are very different let alone the culture & the ethnicity.
The Pakistani Sindhis don't really have a pound for pound counterpart in India because the Indian Sindhi population is pretty low on numbers & isn't indigenous to any Province or State of India because there was only one Sindh - the one thats part of Pakistan.
And they too like their Punjabi counterparts from the North are similar but different.
The differences between Punjabi/Sindhi Indians & Pakistanis can be best summed up by the analogy that they are to each other what Urdu & Hindi are to each other - same roots (i.e Hindustani - the mother language) but they later evolved into different directions till a point when they ceased being the same language & instead became two separate languages a little like Afrikaans & Dutch or even German & Dutch....mutually interchangeable & understandable to a degree but different enough to be called two different languages !
So far as the rest of Pakistan is concerned - the West of Pakistan has next to nothing in common with India. The Baluch, the Barahvi, the Makranis in the South, the Pukhtoons, the Kohistanis, the Swatis, the Gilgiti, the Baltis, the Hazarawal etc. in the North have next to no cultural, linguistic or ethnic similarities with their Indian counterparts because there are no Indian counterparts of theirs.
They're similar to Afghans, Iranians & the Kashmiris !
Pakistan has the unique advantage to be born at the crossroads of civilizations - India on East, Afghanistan & Central Asia on the West & North-West, Iran on the South-West & China in the North; naturally there has been an imprint of different civilizations borne out of those regions on Pakistan just as there has been an imprint of different civilizations that were born out of Pakistan on those regions themselves !
That doesn't mean that Pakistanis & Indians are only separated by a passport or religion - Its like saying Swedish, Dutch, Danish & Finnish are all the same people because they're collectively called the Scandinavians !