Daily Times

A group of around 50 youngsters from a packed out Hall 3 moved with the moderator and two of the three panelists to the lawns to continue discussion on Pakistani Left: What is to be done? at the third day of the Faiz International Festival on Sunday.

At the lawns, the gathering comprising students from smaller provinces took a few minutes to absorb the interaction between singer-turned-politician Jawad Ahmed, the third panelist who did not join the gathering in the lawn, and a couple of audience members.

In the Q&A, Ahmed defied the moderator, Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, who had wanted to club together multiple questions before returning to the panel for answers. Instead of waiting, the veteran singer proceeded with his response to a question raised by an audience member on the barbaric role of state institutions in crushing popular movements in different parts of the country. But instead of addressing the questioner’s concerns about different standards of state agencies in dealing with protest movements of marginalised social and economic groups as opposed to those of religious fanatics, Ahmed went on a harangue against leftists. The questioner had said that the state agencies were using terrorism laws to crush the peasants’ movement in Okara.

He said leftists were not relevant to the society and they were not even supported by their own relatives. “This is why I oppose the strategies employed by everyone in the Pakistani left and have formed my own party,” he said, “My party will produce media images with our message in them and reach out to the public on the basis of these images. Once the people have accepted us, then we can help every marginalised community,” he said.

Another member of the audience, a young student from Balochistan’s Dera Bugti, then pointed out the lack of natural gas connections in his district that was home to the largest gas fields. The questioner said that surely India’s Research and Analysis Wing had no role in the absence of gas connections in Dera Bugti. Ahmed again lost his calm. This time, he retorted by blaming the questioner. “It is because of your sardars who kept selling gas on cheap tariffs all their lives,” he said.

To another questioner who alerted the head of the Baraberi Party to the contradiction between the oppressor and the oppressed that held the most primary significance in socialist ideology, Ahmed was similarly dismissive. “That’s your view,” he said.

At this point, the session met its allotted time and was briefly interrupted by the organizers. But seeing the eagerness of the audience to continue the discussion, Akhtar invited them to join him in the lawns. He was followed there with a group of around 50 youngsters, both men and women from various colleges and universities of the city.

Doing politics in a manner that one can gather disparate struggles of people with different identities on a common platform to push for a more just and an equitable society is a creative project. It is an art and cannot just be seen as a science – Aasim Sajjad Akhtar

At the lawn, the discussion resumed on the question of ethnic nationalism, particularly the grievances of the Baluch people. Akhtar said that it was important to recognise that people’s material grievances were linked to their identities in situations where whole groups faced discrimination, like in the case of Baluchistan. But the gathering soon agreed that addressing the national question was as important as building solidarity between all marginalised groups in the country.

A panelist from Quetta, Abid Mir, told the gathering that the sardari system had undergone considerable changes over time. He said the prototypical image of the sardar as a sovereign in his own right was no longer true. “There are many claimants of sardari within tribes. There are divisions among Bugtis and Maris,” he said.

Here, Akhtar said that those in the Left must deliberate on conditions that had led people to take up arms on a separatist agenda. “We cannot just explain away these movements as a conspiracy of hostile foreign agencies. The left’s task is to engage with the people and to listen to them and their grievances rather than projecting its own ideological frameworks onto the people in an uncritical manner,” he said.

“Our task isn’t just to get into power. If we ever get into power without any mobilisational and organisational activity on the ground, we won’t be very effective in enacting revolutionary social change,” he said.

On the balance between individual liberties and collective responsibility, he said a lot of propaganda had been done against socialist movement in the past, portraying them as fundamentally opposed to individual freedoms and creativity.

“Doing politics in a manner that one can gather disparate struggles of people with different identities on a common platform to push for a more just and an equitable society was in and of itself a creative task. This is an art and not a science,” he said.

The session dispersed almost an hour after the end time in the schedule.

Earlier in the hall, the panelists started discussion with the question of ideology in politics. Historian Ammar Ali Jan said that ideology and politics went hand in hand. “Oppression and tyranny is the mainstream ideology of politics today and people have been left to suffer this oppression on their own,” he said.

“Whatever is happening in Balochistan is based on an ideology that defines Pakistani nationalism in an exclusionary manner,” he said.

On the allegations of connections with Indian agency RAW, Jan said such allegations had been made against almost all mainstream politicians, including Fatima Jinnah. “Based on this criteria, it would seem that RAW is the most popular political force in the country.”

he said.

He said the responsibility of the leftists was to figure out the most effective way of linking peoples’ struggles in disparate places like Okara, Balochistan, Gilgit Baltistan and on shop floors of factories and in households and bringing them on a political platform through which massive social change could be achieved. “This is happening in England and United States in the form of movements built around Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders,” he said. Abid alerted the audience to the dismissal state of affairs in Balochistan. “We have been cut off from the rest of Pakistan. The image in the mind of non-Baloch is that of an island where different tribes are just fighting all the time. “Socialism is far cry from. In Balochistan, we can’t even do mainstream politics that is accepted everywhere else in the country,” he said. And as a result of this hostile environment, Baloch and other smaller ethnicities have turned inwards and were just raising voice for their own national concerns now.

He also stressed the need to bring together disparate struggles of people across the country on an emancipator agenda.

Published in Daily Times, November 20^th 2017.