Forging the steel of unity: Left politics in contemporary Pakistan
First published at Jamhoor.
Jamhoor has published two articles that explicitly attack the position and politics of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (HKP), particularly our stance during the recent Indo-Pak war. While both articles took an unnecessarily hostile and polemical tone to mischaracterize HKP’s position, they nonetheless provide an opportunity for dialogue on the ideological and political divergences within Pakistan’s Left. I engage in this debate in the spirit of propelling the discussion forward on how to reconstruct a Left capable of meeting the challenges of the contemporary moment.
In this article, I make three broad interventions. First, I respond to Ayyaz Malick’s criticism of our positions, exposing the ahistorical and, ultimately, apolitical character of his argument. Second, I engage with Syed Azeem and Umar Ali’s polemic, demonstrating how it represents a messianic form of politics that takes flight from any concrete reality (or even possibility), an analytical framework that can only end in disappointment and dissolution. Both perspectives, I argue, only worsen the paralysis and disorientation of the Left at a moment when the decaying imperialist system is preparing for wars of annihilation in the global South and social movements struggle to forge popular unity. Finally, I argue that the way forward for the Left in Pakistan is to simultaneously address the concerns of sovereignty, imperialist intervention and internal repression, with all the contradictions that such a task entails.
Contradictions abound
Mallick’s article levels a number of allegations against HKP without either justifying his claims or addressing the key issues at stake. The title of his essay, “Anti-Imperialism and Geopolitical Binaries,” encapsulates his central charge: that we “reduce everything happening” to geopolitical rivalries between the US and China. Yet, he offers no proof for this sweeping claim. This lack of evidence for what is presumably his primary argument stems from the simple fact that HKP’s position on the Indo-Pak war was not based on the US-China rivalry. Instead, it was a response to the very real threat posed to the region by Indian belligerence and grounded in Pakistan’s right to self-defense. His mischaracterization then enables a series of further accusations, including calling our multi-ethnic leadership “Lahori Left,” “jingoistic” and “chauvinist”, and participates in the long tradition of sectarianism that has crippled the Left in Pakistan.
Let us briefly recount the core of his analysis. He claims that a “sub-imperialist power” (India), endowed with both the ambition and the capability (hence, sub-imperialist) to establish regional hegemony and guided by an ideology (Hindutva) he deems worse than Zionism, launched an attack on a neighbouring country (Pakistan) — a state whose political economy is shaped by opportunistic rent-seeking and which has a sordid record of internal repression, primarily in its peripheries. Note that he describes Hindutva as an ideology worse than Zionism, a force that has not only perpetrated genocide in Gaza, but has also participated in the destruction of several countries across the Middle East. As with most wars of aggression since the onset of the unipolar order, we are faced here — in the case of both Zionism and Hindutva — with hegemonic powers seeking to establish hegemony over countries ruled by repressive governments. This is hardly an ideal configuration, but historical contradictions seldom appear in neat moral binaries. Actual history unfolds through such contradictions — constantly in motion, colliding and recombining — producing unexpected situations that demand difficult, and at times tragic, political choices.
Any serious political commentator can decipher that the primary question raised by this collision of contradictions is whether the weaker country, despite its neo-colonial structure, retains the right to defend itself. No answer to such a question would be ideal. Does the Iranian government, with its long record of repression against Leftists, women and minorities, have a right to defend itself when attacked ferociously by a genocidal Zionist entity, backed by the US? Did this right not also extend to Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan and other states that were far from ideal? What should be the stance of the Left when a (sub-)imperialist power unleashes its violence to turn these civilizations into vast wastelands?
One can immediately identify the difficult nature of these questions, and why they have long divided the Left, as the challenge of sustaining external sovereignty collides with ongoing struggles for internal justice. But this is precisely the contradictory terrain upon which history unfolds, the ground from which events erupt that demand decisions from political actors. The perplexing element of Mallick’s writing, however, is that he simply evades the key question confronted by the Left in the aftermath of Indian aggression. By his own account, an Israel-backed sub-imperialist power (worse than Zionism) attacked Pakistan in pursuit of regional hegemony. Yet, astonishingly, this historical conflagration does not, for him, merit a concrete political stance beyond polite calls for “peace and self-determination,” abstractions that no one can dispute in principle (HKP both called for peace and welcomed the ceasefire). He unfortunately retreats into the comfort of “safe scholarship,” avoiding the inconvenient necessity of decision when confronted with an actual historical situation.
The Haqooq-e-Khalq Party did not evade this question. On each of these occasions, our party has upheld the right of countries to defend their sovereignty against foreign aggression. While we called for peace throughout the conflict with India and welcomed the ceasefire, we were pleased when Pakistan was able to curb the attack (with Chinese support) by a government led by genocidal maniacs whose spokespersons were calling for turning Pakistan into Gaza. India’s use of Israeli-made drones deep into Pakistani territory left little doubt about its intent. Similarly, we were not ashamed to cheer when Iranian missiles hit targets in Israeli territories, which provided a brief moment of joy to Palestinians enduring genocide as the world shamefully watched. Intellectuals should not pretend that they were the only ones calling for peace while others were excited about the prospect of war between the two nuclear-armed rivals. The bitter truth is that, faced with a belligerent, fascistic, and expansionist neighbour intent on aggression—and with no peace movement in India to challenge its belligerence — the restoration of military equilibrium by the Pakistan Air Force was the only means of securing even a tenuous peace in the region.
It is difficult to see what conclusion other than upholding Pakistan’s right to self-defense could follow from Mallick’s own analysis of the balance of forces involved. Yet, he substitutes the urgency of decision with oscillation between pedantic analysis of Pakistan’s political economy as an opportunistic rentier state and impassioned rhetoric about the corrosive impacts of military intervention in the political sphere, particularly in the peripheries. His underlying suggestion seems to be that by recognizing the right to self-defense, the Left relinquishes its own right to criticize the state. Yet, he provides no justification for this claim, relying instead on sweeping statements — such as accusing HKP of “war patriotism” that supposedly takes “no consideration” for the concerns of those in the periphery.
This is an extraordinary accusation, which Mallick does not even attempt to justify beyond rhetorical hyperbole. By what principle of politics, let alone of dialectical thought, does upholding a country’s right to self-defense automatically mean forfeiting any “consideration” of the state’s excesses? Did the Soviet Union’s alliance with Britain and the US (two regressive imperialist powers) in the fight against Nazi annihilation mean that it thereby forever lost the right to fight imperialism? Did Mao’s decision to join forces with the Kuomintang government to defend China’s sovereignty against Japanese invasion permanently disqualify him from attacking the militarism, warlordism, and feudalism exemplified by that same Kuomintang? Or, to take another example, did extending support to the French partisans defending their territorial sovereignty against Nazi forces amount to endorsing French colonialism then ravaging Africa and East Asia
Indeed, in each case, the fulfillment of the immediate objectives of wartime alliances at the end of the Second World War gave rise to the re-emergence of older conflicts: the onset of the Cold War, the acceleration of the Chinese civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communists, and the intensification of anti-colonial revolts against British, French, and Portuguese colonial rule. If such tactical alliances, which included the sharing of military and intelligence resources, did not foreclose the possibility of future conflicts, why would HKP’s public statements on a 3-day conflict prevent us from critiquing and resisting militarized forms of capitalism in Pakistan?
In fact, HKP members proudly remain among the most prominent Left critics of the current hybrid regime, from opposing the Pakistani state’s suicidal policies in Afghanistan to providing legal aid to persecuted PTI political workers; from exposing exploitative mineral deals with the US to organizing with Sindhi and Punjabi farmers against the establishment-backed resource grabs in the name of corporate farming. Recently, we organized protests against Pakistani state repression in Kashmir as part of our firm commitment to the Kashmiri people’s right to self-determination. Our criticisms of the Pakistani military do not make us Indian agents, just as upholding Pakistan’s right to self-defense does not make us its allies. It merely means that, rather than remaining captive to fixed analytical categories, we are responding to contradictions as they collide and transform in an actual historical situation. Those who find this delicate dialectic too exhausting — and who desire an absolute Manichean division between good and evil—will never develop a strategic orientation adequate to a terrain riven by multiple contradictions. Or to quote Lenin, “whoever wishes to see a pure social revolution will never live to see it.
Messianic expectations
Before commenting on the substance of Azeem and Ali’s argument, it is again important to underline the unfortunately hostile and accusatory tone of the article. For example, they present HKP’s participation in elections as evidence that the party has “sidelin[ed] ongoing people’s struggles” in order to “enter mainstream national politics in Pakistan as a ‘big-tent’ progressive and social democratic party.” Proof of this supposed shift? None whatsoever. A quick glance at our social media platforms is enough to show the kinds of activities we have been engaged in over the past year. In any case, no Left group in Pakistan (including HKP) can credibly claim to have become the vector of people’s struggles in the country, let alone to have developed hegemony in society. Thus, we must be guided by humility and camaraderie as we rebuild a Left decimated by state repression and debilitating sectarian attitudes.
Let us then focus on two key differences with our comrades that are crucial to the reconstruction of the Left. The first concerns their dismissal of the Left’s central role in Pakistan’s mass struggles for democracy as “tailism,” “NGOism” or “liberalism”. In particular, they single out the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD), a popular front against the counter-revolutionary, US-backed dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq, as emblematic of this supposedly compromised politics. Consider how they suggest that the “traditional Left’s” incorrect positions led it to “eventually merging with the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) in the 1980s and arriving at their final ideological destination of NGOs and human rights by the 1990s and 2000s.”
Again, we are not provided any reason to believe why participating in a mass alliance for democracy against a brutal military dictatorship somehow necessitated NGOs as the “final destination” of the Left. This logical leap appears even more suspect when one considers the rich history of sacrifice, including imprisonment and martyrdom, made by Left activists throughout the 1980s. Yet this dismissal offers a window into our divergence on the question of democratic rights, which seems to underlie the thinking of the two LUMS professors.
The history of democratic struggles has never rested on the generosity of feudal or bourgeois classes or their imperialist backers. Even in Europe, the expansion of mass democracy — including the extension of suffrage to workers, women, and minorities — was won through militant organizing from below, and was often met with severe state repression. Lenin was keenly aware of this when he criticized the British Left for its disinterest in electoral politics, regarding such abstention as a form of escapism from the terrain of actually existing struggles. The question of democratic rights is even more contentious in the postcolony, where the ruling classes’ preferred mode of governance is to suspend juridical rights, a condition re-inforced by countless CIA-backed military coups against democratically elected governments across the global South.
The situation in Pakistan is no different, as Washington identified the military as its preferred strategic partner in the region in the 1950s, setting in motion the decimation of left-wing and progressive organizations in the first decade of the nascent state. This explains why the first wave of mass struggles against the authoritarian Ayub regime was led by Left-wing student groups and trade unions. Pakistan’s current Constitution emerged from these struggles for dignity and equality, combined with the courage of Bangladeshis in resisting the genocidal violence unleashed by the state. This fragile achievement was reversed by the US-backed Zia dictatorship, which made the formation of the MRD a historical necessity in the renewed fight against authoritarianism.
For us, the MRD’s ability to unite trade unions, oppressed nationalities, and the women’s movement in a federal struggle for social justice represents an ideal formation—one that came closest to building an alternative, popular hegemony in Pakistan. The courageous women’s movement, represented by the Sindhiyani Tehreek in Sindh and the Women’s Action Forum in Punjab, fought against the dictatorship’s regressive laws despite a monstrous crackdown and the relentless demonization of women activists. It is both disrespectful and counterproductive to view these struggles, which claimed over a thousand lives in Sindh alone, as a sideshow to some imagined “authentic” Leftist struggle happening elsewhere. In truth, they constitute an essential part of the very tradition that has made the survival of Left forces possible today.
To reject these battles, arising from the everyday experiences of the oppressed, as mere “tailism” or “social movementism” is not only to betray our own history but also to refuse engagement with the burning questions of the present, as the hybrid regime dismantles the hard-won juridical and political rights of our people. Without participating in these concrete struggles for dignity, we exit the terrain of history, reduced instead to moral posturing in anticipation of an absolutely pure socialist politics that will never arrive.
The second disagreement concerns geopolitics, where the authors characterize India as a Brahmanical-fascist state and China as a social-imperialist and expansionist one. To make the latter claim, they point to sharpening contradictions in the peripheries around the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) investments, and to the Chinese state’s reluctance to support revolutionary movements in South Asia. China’s internal dynamics, including its adherence to socialism, require a separate debate altogether. Yet, it is pertinent to note here that the US containment policy against China does not stem from concerns for democracy or human rights. As Jason Hickel has recently demonstrated, US antagonism stems from China’s success in improving life standards (wages have risen eightfold since 2005), ending its subordination as a peripheral source of cheap labour and raw materials, while simultaneously achieving technological parity with the West. Overcoming these two structural pillars of imperialism, wage differentials and technological inferiority, represents an unprecedented achievement for a country of the global South. The clumsily executed trade tariffs, the escalating tech wars, and the dangerous military encirclement of China are thus counter-revolutionary measures geared precisely at reversing the remarkable gains made by the Chinese people under the leadership of the Communist Party.
Yet, it is bewildering to witness Azeem and Ali equate China and the US as imperialists. Imperialism is not merely a set of exploitative contracts between governments; it is an entire architecture of military, economic and cultural domination designed to annihilate the sovereignty of the colonized to facilitate capital accumulation in the metropole. No understanding of imperialism is possible without considering the destructive military conquests of Africa, Asia and the Americas, the opium wars, the slave trade, and the decimation of societies that refused to surrender. In the contemporary moment, imperialism cannot be conceived in a political register without considering the centrality of NATO (and its 800 military bases), the CIA, the IMF and the World Bank—key elements of a distinct architecture geared towards breaking the will of the people, whether through structural adjustments, regime change, sanctions or outright war. We must be particularly sensitive to this destructive core of imperialism at a moment when the US-Zionist alliance has destroyed several states across the Middle East for refusing to yield to Western diktats, with the people of Gaza paying the heaviest price in a televised genocide.
The Chinese state neither has the military architecture (with only a single overseas base) to obliterate other states, nor has it used its considerable economic influence to impose regime change, structural adjustments or economic sanctions. Erasing these basic material and historical facts evacuates politics from analytical categories, reducing concepts such as imperialism to mere descriptions of asymmetry in inter-state relations. The consequence of this erasure is strategic disorientation, as exhibited in the article. For example, the authors make a grand proposal that the Pakistani Left should “align with the masses of Pakistan in waging a genuine anti-imperialist struggle against Western imperialism, Indian aggression, and Chinese expansionism and social imperialism.” To make things clear, they reject calls for an “abstract peace” in favour of “revolutionary militant people’s struggles,” a euphemism for the People’s War strategy of Maoist groups in India which they cite approvingly.
This is an apocalyptic vision for the Pakistani Left. Rather than prioritizing the expansion of democratic rights, the reconfiguration of the internal political economy to defeat parasitic ruling classes, the renegotiation of CPEC projects to center working-class and local concerns, or the strategic use of the economic shift towards Asia to advance the prosperity for our people, the authors propose waging simultaneous war on Indian, Chinese, and Western imperialism (why not add Iran and Russia?). Since we know that wars are not fought on sentiment alone, one may ask the innocent question: who would fund the weapons, technology, training and logistics that the proposed “people’s militias” would require to fight this epic war? More pertinently, how would this region-wide conflagration avoid falling into the strategic calculus of the Pentagon, which seeks to intervene in and exploit such regional cleavages to turn the global South into a theater of permanent devastation? We are offered no answers.
The strategy then seems to reject “piecemeal” politics of “social movementism” in favour of “deep organizing” that will prepare for a final battle that takes on the combined military might of India, Pakistan and China to bring salvation for the oppressed. There is little consideration of the logistics of this strategy, nor is any evidence presented to indicate that such a war is supported by any significant section of the “people’s movements” currently underway in Pakistan. Thus, this proposal is merely an escape from the material realities that constrain the terrain of Left politics in Pakistan, a classic case of messianic expectation replacing strategic analysis.
A new strategic orientation: What are we fighting for?
In the realm of politics, strategic thinking cannot limit itself to fighting the status quo. Instead of merely focusing on what we are fighting against, we must also clarify what it is that we are fighting for. It requires a sober analysis of the global, national, and regional situation that both constrains and opens opportunities for the reconstruction of the Left. Perhaps a historical situation, analogous to our contemporary moment, can aid in illuminating the path forward.
In 1927, Chiang Kai-shek, the young general leading the Kuomintang nationalists, was at the pinnacle of his fame and power. After years of war and political turmoil since the collapse of the Qing dynasty, he managed to unite the country as a modern Republic. His forces were supplied weapons by both the US and the Soviet Union, ideological rivals who sought to enhance their influence in Asia. In the midst of the dizzying shifts and chaos in the global order during the inter-war period, China appeared as an unexpected candidate for regional stability and progress.
Yet, this apparent stability proved to be the calm before the storm. Chiang refused to undertake the internal reforms necessary to modernize the economy, dismantle the parasitic classes (feudals and warlords) that monopolized the country’s resources, institutionalize democratic reforms, or address the sharpening ethnic divides across China. To make matters worse, he unleashed a brutal crackdown on all forces advocating social reform, beginning with the mass murder of Chinese Communists in Shanghai in 1927 and culminating in the brutal campaign of suppression during the heroic Long March.
Eventually, the decadent order sapped the vitality out of the national project, forcing Chiang’s forces to face humiliating defeats at the hands of the invading Japanese forces. Mao joined forces with the Kuomintang to face the “principal contradiction” represented by the Japanese imperial forces in the mid-1930s, but he was clear that the nationalists were hopelessly inadequate to shoulder the burden of defending China’s sovereignty. A national sovereign project could only be sustained if it was premised upon the popular classes and sought to radically transform China’s internal political economy, a task bequeathed to the Chinese Communist Party.
It is this dialectical method that utilizes the gap between the opportunities opened by history and their betrayal by the ruling classes that propels revolutionary movements forward. Consider contemporary Pakistan, which has now established a security umbrella that is unprecedented in the Muslim World and being simultaneously courted by the West, China and the Middle East. It could provide the conditions of possibility for a sovereign project that positions Pakistan as a gateway for different civilizations, becoming an engine for economic activity and bringing desperately needed peace and prosperity to the people of the region. Yet, much like Chiang’s Republic, the hybrid regime in Pakistan (and the parasitic classes it represents) is singularly incapable of undertaking reforms that can usher in the new era.
The obscenely luxurious lifestyles of the elites are sustained by Pakistan’s rentier political economy, fueled by debt and dollar wars that eschew any serious economic reforms. The country has historically rented its geostrategic location to the US in order to receive cheap dollars that are washed away in speculative projects (such as real estate) or whisked away in secret foreign assets. This myopic strategic thinking has resulted in ongoing deindustrialization, necessitating new loans to pay the older ones, placing the country’s financial policies under the tutelage of viceroys from the IMF, who impose conditions that further strangle the economy. Yet, while this vicious cycle of war, debt and structural adjustment allows bonanzas for the elites, it results in death, destruction and immiseration for the people of Pakistan.
The simultaneous rise in inflation and unemployment has pushed poverty levels to almost 40 percent, with 25 million children out of school (10 million of them in Punjab alone). The peripheries suffer not only the wrath of economic deprivation, but also destabilization from the fallout of misguided security policies, which have destroyed lives and livelihoods, while placing these regions under a permanent state of emergency. Moreover, the lack of industrial planning is being compensated for through the plunder of natural resources, as exhibited by the Pakistan Green Initiative that aims to sell Sindh’s water, Punjab’s lands, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s and Balochistan’s minerals, and Gilgit-Baltistan’s tourism industry to the highest international bidder. For local populations, this translates into perpetual displacement and exploitation, with the military’s relentless might unleashed against those daring to resist the expropriation of their lands and resources.
No stable form of hegemony, let alone an independent foreign policy, can be built upon an unproductive, loan-dependent rentier system. The Pakistani state’s vacillation between the US and China, the prime minister’s nauseating sycophancy towards Trump over Gaza, the constant tensions with Afghanistan, and the botching of CPEC all reveal the incoherence of a decaying order. It is thus crucial to avoid confusing the country’s right to self-defense against foreign aggressors with an acceptance of state excesses on the domestic front. In fact, with the specter of war and destruction looming as the US attempts to use Pakistan in its China containment policy, the need for intensifying internal struggles and building a country-wide mass front is more urgent than ever before.
Yet, the key question is what could be the basis for this alliance? I have already indicated that the old alliance between the Left and ethnonationalists is now hopelessly inadequate for this task. As Umair Javed has recently shown, the 18th Amendment has precipitated the integration of political elites from the peripheries into provincial structures of power and patronage, creating concentrated loci of power and resources at the provincial level, a departure from the 1960s struggle against the One-Unit system that neatly pitted each provincial leadership against the center. Moreover, the demographic shifts, particularly the displacement and centrality of Pashtun migrant labour in Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan, and the destruction of economic infrastructure in South Punjab after repeated floods, are increasingly pitting oppressed groups against one another rather than against the state. The ethnic tensions in Sindh, the brutal murder of Punjabi, Seraiki and Pashtun workers in Balochistan, the disputes over the census in both provinces, and the PML-N’s conscious attempts to stoke Punjabi majoritarianism are reflections of ethnic fault lines turning into open conflict, weakening the possibility of popular democratic struggle against the establishment and economic elites.
The divergence is acute on the global front as well. For example, various liberal and ethnonationalist groups welcomed US presence in Pakistan and Afghanistan, supported US drone strikes, and lobbied Washington for sanctions on Pakistan. More recently, a militant group announced support for Indian strikes on Pakistan and sought Modi’s help in dismembering the country, while other sections of the same group have been accused of seeking support from Israel. Even if one momentarily brackets the (gigantic) moral dilemmas that arise out of these alignments, it is a nonviable policy even at a strategic level. The US neither has the will nor the capacity to provide long-term support to its “allies” in different parts of the world. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, all victims of US military bombardment, were reduced to wastelands as part of the US crusade for “democracy” and “human rights,” demonstrating how its ability to destroy far exceeds its capacity to rebuild. Moreover, the US embrace of the Pakistan military—Trump declared Asim Munir his “favourite Field Marshal”—is further proof that a reliance on external forces for liberation is a colossal mistake.
Are we then permanently condemned to our own silos, oscillating between militarized violence, imperialist aggression, religious bigotry and outbursts of ethnic hatred? Fortunately, significant historical trends point toward a different path. The economic and social interdependence of the country’s different regions reveals shared interests and common aspirations for democratization, prosperity, and social justice. The very material subsistence of working masses across Pakistan depends upon the equitable distribution of land, agricultural output, water, revenue, and other natural and economic resources. Politically, Punjab and Sindh long served as bastions of support for the PPP’s left-wing populism, with hardly any Punjabi leader matching the popularity attained by Sindh’s Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. In recent years, Imran Khan’s vocal opposition to drone strikes and incessant military operations has turned him into an unbeatable force across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, far outpacing traditional nationalist forces, while also enjoying considerable support in other provinces. Still more recently, the Baloch Yakjehti Committee’s struggle received overwhelming support from different sections across Punjab, with even mainstream political figures joining its cause. As ever, the people remain ahead of the intellectuals, who continue to be imprisoned within their analytical categories.
The material basis for these emerging solidarities is the pervasive economic crisis and political crackdown across the country, exemplified by the blatant theft of the people’s mandate in Punjab in the 2024 elections and the continued incarceration of PTI’s leadership. One need not agree with the political orientation of the PTI to decipher that it points to a real possibility of a country-wide political formation, a task the Left has practically surrendered to the Right.
It is time to reclaim a universalist project that mobilizes the shared aspirations of the vast majority of our people. This task entails rebuilding a popular front that simultaneously fights for the sovereignty of the country, the democratization of its politics, and the economic prosperity of its people. The defense of sovereignty implies a resolute anti-imperialist line that not only resists economic and military imperialist intervention against Pakistan, but also pushes Pakistan towards regional cooperation with its neighbors. Similarly, the struggle for democracy, including the fight against the military’s stranglehold over the electoral process, media, judiciary, security policy and parliament, is a central feature of the dialectics of liberation in Pakistan. This battle also includes an end to inter-provincial disparities, genuine local democracy, as well as advancing the rights of women and minorities in the face of reactionary assaults.
The vision for a shared prosperity necessitates wresting power from the parasitic classes addicted to wars and the IMF, increasing our surplus capacity through robust industrial planning and investment in sustainable human development, and transforming the country into a gateway to a prosperous Asia. To address historical faultlines, the concerns of smaller provinces must be centered in any development policy, including the recognition of the rights of each province over its natural resources. Indeed, socialism is incomplete if it is not geared towards addressing historical grievances and economic unevenness produced by militarized forms of capitalism.
Finally, this project will require a renewed engagement with existing categories to reinscribe them with new meanings Terms such as Pakistan, Islam or democracy cannot be left vacant for the elites or the Right to use as emotive vehicles for reactionary agendas. There is no reason for us to accept that those ruling elites who sold the country’s future repeatedly to the highest bidder have any right to distribute certificates of loyalty to political dissidents. On the other hand, it was precisely the Left that insisted on Pakistani sovereignty whenever the state moved into the US security and financial ambit, leading to the famous National Student Federation slogan Kaun Bachaye ga Pakistan? Tulba Mazdoor aur Kissan! (Who will save Pakistan? Students, workers and peasants!). Similarly, Islam carries an ideological density within the region’s psyche that cannot be wished away. Recent scholarship by Layli Uddinand Asmer Safi reminds us of the vast intellectual and political work in the sub-continent that developed an affinity between Islam and socialism, and that can still aid us in illuminating the path forward.
These terms are not fixed categories but sites of struggle upon which a new national popular project can be created. We must not disarm ourselves in the ideological battle by rejecting these terms in favour of a pristine politics outside all existing nomenclature. Instead, our method must be dialectical, one that utilizes contradictions immanent to these categories in order to transform their inner content. More concretely, one can imagine new ways of being Pakistani and being Muslim that are not beholden to the suffocating definitions of the state or the bigotry of the reactionary Right, just like one can imagine resisting the military establishment without positing the collapse of the country into competing exclusionary ethno-nationalist statelets as the only viable destination for progressive politics. Such a project would have the potential to unite the largest possible coalition of people within Pakistan and present a credible alternative to the crumbling status quo.
Eventually, however, the steel of unity is forged in the fire of ongoing battles for dignity. From protecting the ecologies of Sindh and Gilgit-Baltistan to defending the devastated rural world of Punjab, from challenging enforced disappearances in Balochistan to resisting military excesses in the former FATA, and from organizing workers, women and students to defending Kashmir’s right to self-determination, each battle is an iteration of the heroic attempt to reclaim our common humanity. The forbidden encounters and unexpected solidarities that emerge within these movements point the way forward.
The task for a political organization is to weave together these different threads into a common political project that seeks to overthrow the existing state of affairs. It is a herculean task indeed, but we always knew that revolution was no dinner party.
Ammar Ali Jan is a historian and general secretary of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party in Pakistan. He is a cabinet member of the Progressive International.
