A conversation by Mahvish Ahmad with Marvi Latifi, Ismat Shahjahan and Tooba Syed of the Women Democratic Front in Pakistan
On 8 March 2018, long-time political workers with the organized Left – especially the Awami Workers Party (AWP) – established the Women Democratic Front (WDF), an autonomous socialist-feminist political organisation of women in Pakistan. WDF’s manifesto commits its members to anti-capitalist and anti-feudal politics and sees its struggle as intimately linked with movements resisting the centralisation of power through the oppression of Pakistan’s marginalised nations, broader anti-imperialist and anti-war battles, the fight against religious orthodoxy, and feminist, anti-patriarchal struggles. The formation of the WDF came in the heels of a multi-year debate on the importance of creating an autonomous space for socialist women, one that could openly discuss and critique patriarchy without undermining anti-capitalist politics, and one that could provide an alternative to liberal feminism without sabotaging the struggle against patriarchal formations.
As a member of the WDF based in London, I reached out in 2022 to my comrades to discuss the possibilities and challenges of building socialist feminism in Pakistan. The idea was to interview three members engaged in grounded organising in the country, including Ismat Shahjahan (federal president) and Tooba Syed (federal secretary, Information and Publishing) based in Islamabad and Marvi Latifi (president, Sindh National Unit) based in Hyderabad. Yet, getting my comrades onto one call proved to be a challenge that ironically mirrored the difficulties of building socialist feminism on southern ground.
Our initial plan to speak was postponed because of apocalyptic floods; Marvi’s house was destroyed and Tooba got involved in using the skeletal network of WDF chapters to distribute flood relief in the absence of a functioning humanitarian state apparatus. Ismat was constantly travelling for political work, running socialist-feminist political schools or holding branch meetings. When the final edits for this chapter were due, Ismat’s dear comrade and mentor, the progressive lawyer Latif Lala, was shot eight times inside the Peshawar High Court. She could not miss his funeral, and she could not fail to pay her respects. An economy on the brink of collapse, and the everyday struggles of making sure the home held together under the weight of skyrocketing inflation and a country at the edge of sovereign default, puttered along in the background for all those who took part in this interview. Insecurity caused by economic downturn, ecological devastation, militarisation and militarism, and ongoing patriarchal violence is everywhere, but the difficulties of cobbling together this interview is a reminder that it is concentrated on southern ground. For my comrades to take time out to speak despite the precarious conditions of life itself reflects the steely commitment socialist feminism requires in Pakistan.
Through this interview, two kinds of interventions are made possible. First, as revolutionary Left politics in the Global South gains ground within academic institutions as a legitimate topic of scholarship, writing these histories remains stubbornly separated from the political practice of actually existing movements. This interview is a step towards bridging this gap. Second, a host of books are emerging in both Urdu and English accounting for the Pakistani Left. This literature reproduces a tenacious attachment to the biographies of big men in the telling of its history,1 reflecting a practice of identifying parties through the name of male leaders.2 By entering the biographies, experiences, analyses and theorisations of four socialist feminists, this interview actively disrupts a history and politics of the Left too long tethered to men.
—Mahvish Ahmad, January 2023, Lahore
Mahvish Ahmad (MA): I want to start with your autobiographies, as a route into telling a feminist history of the Left – and introducing the WDF. How were you politicised as socialist feminists? Why form, or join, the WDF?
Marvi Latifi (ML): The question of women’s place in society emerged for me in 2006, though not in the way you might suspect. I was initially conservative, a bit of a fundamentalist, and started wearing an abaaya and destroying pictures of myself to follow strict ideas of Islamist modesty. It was only once I was quite deeply involved that I began to feel a restriction in my mobility, I was told I can’t go here or there, so I began to think about gender.
I also experienced restrictions from my family. I come from a lower middle-class family so they let me study and go to school. But they also tried to stop me from political work, from going to study circles and protests, preferring I pursue personal interests like getting married early. Sometimes, their attempts to stop me turned violent.
I arrived at socialist feminism through the Left. A philosophy professor introduced me to the class question, the differences between rich and poor, around the time of the 2011 floods. The readings he introduced me to – classics like The Germany Ideology – combined with my own experience of watching the unequal effects of ecological devastation turned me towards questions of class oppression. As I got more deeply involved with the Left, by around 2014, I joined others in forming study circles. We went to villages in Sindh, some cities too like Sanghar in Nasirabad, with the main aim of understanding what gendered roles exist in our society, what kind of oppression women face. We read Kamla Bhasin’s What Is Gender? and Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy and started the very first socialist-feminist magazine in Pakistan, Nariwaad, in Sindhi and out of Hyderabad. In a country where Urdu is the dominating, national language and Sindhi is minoritised – and where feminism has for so long been associated with liberal, urban upper-class women who speak Urdu – this was a big achievement. It builds on a long history of women’s organising in Sindh, for instance, in the work of Sindhiani Tehreek, a women’s peasants movement founded in the 1980s.
My route into the WDF came through the AWP, where I was a member. Here we had formed a woman’s group called Naari Jamhoori Mahaz. We were very successful, the Sindh branch of the AWP mobilised women at a level noticed by leftists across the country. A few years later we felt it necessary to organise a separate front for women, so we established the WDF.
Ismat Shahjahan (IS): I’d like to first question the definition and boundaries of feminism. If the definition is too narrow, there is little space left to include my struggle or broader struggles that I consider part of feminism in Pakistan. Typically, resistance against patriarchy is defined as feminist struggle. But, coming from a socialist-feminist background, I, and the WDF, believe that the struggle against colonialism, class oppression, women’s oppression, and national oppression are all feminist because half of humanity is formed by women.
On my involvement with the Left: I was born into a family of Khudai Khidmatgars, a non-violent, Pashtun anticolonial movement formed in the early twentieth century by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. My grandfather’s family were part of the Indian National Congress and deeply rooted in anticolonial struggles: My father’s uncle was killed by colonial forces.
I grew up on the Left of the National Awami Party (NAP), which was formed in 1957. It brought together socialist, nationalist, and feminist forces. The Anjuman Jamhooriat Pasand Khawateen or the Democratic Women’s Association (1950–2005) took part in the establishment of NAP. As a young girl, my father used to take me and my younger brother to a Marxist study group, run by his comrade, the communist leader Sarfraz Mehmood. I started my political journey at age 19 and became a student leader in 1983. I first joined the Pashtun Students Federation, a nationalist organisation, and then the Democratic Students Federation, a communist group, before finally joining the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP). I participated in the very last election of student unions in Pakistan, before they were banned by the US-backed, military ruler Zia ul-Haq in 1984. I also joined the Qaumi Inqilabi Party, a mainstream leftist party which was formed after the dissolution of the CPP in 1989. I eventually became a founding member of the AWP, and later a founding member of the WDF. In 2018, I also joined the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM). The PTM is a continuation of the struggle of progressive Pashtuns against imperialist war in the region, and one of the most important grassroots movements against militarised violence in Pakistan today. It emerged from Pashtuns displaced by the triple violence of the Pakistani military, religious militancy, and US American drones in the former Tribal Areas.
On developing a feminist consciousness: I was born to a mother who was a forcibly converted Muslim; she was among many Hindu and Sikh girls left behind in the chaos of Partition. She suffered from many kinds of oppression and was always supporting women in my village. That was how I developed my initial social consciousness. But critical political consciousness emerged during my work with the CPP. The CPP was banned and operated under the cover of the Awami National Party (ANP), so most Pashtun communists including myself were members of the ANP. After a split in the CPP, Pashtun communists believed we may need a national democratic revolution. Pashtuns were and remain an oppressed nation in Pakistan and gun fodder in an ongoing Great Game. Their oppression mirrors that of the Baloch and the Sindhis – as well as the Bengalis who seceded from Pakistan in 1971. Pashtuns specifically are racialised as violent and backward, suspected of harbouring loyalty to Afghanistan, and hounded by the military apparatus as terrorists. As Pashtun leftist women, we decided that we wanted to have an autonomous organisation, not only autonomous of political parties but also autonomous from Punjab and Pakistan level socialist-feminist configurations, like the Anjuman Jamhooriat Pasand Khawateen. So, we formed the Democratic Women’s Association Pakhtunkhwa or DeWA (1987–94). That was the first socialist-feminist organisation that I worked with and I actually founded it myself in 1987. It was one of several democratic women associations throughout the world during the Cold War.
As far as the WDF is concerned, it emerged from broader efforts in post-Cold War Pakistan to rebuild the Left. I am the founding president of the WDF. As part of this effort, the AWP, of which I am also a founding member, was formed in 2012 in an effort to merge three left-wing parties. In addition to centring the agenda of women’s emancipation in party politics, we decided to have an autonomous platform for women with a commitment to socialist feminism, one that saw all feminists and leftists as allies. Today, the WDF has its own flag, its own constitution, and its own manifesto.
Our aim is to bring together struggles of women along class and national lines, and also to create a space for women, who live amidst feudal or tribal formations, as well as working-class women in cities, where conservatism and class oppression is growing. In both places, we face extreme forms of religious fundamentalism and violent patriarchy. We are children of a war that has used extremism and fascism as its main instruments.
Tooba Syed (TS): My introduction to socialist feminism was more in terms of my own lived experiences rather than an introduction to feminist or socialist texts or movements. Like comrade Marvi, I was born into a lower middle-class family. My father had leftist leanings, but he was associated with the Pakistan People’s Party during his youth, a mainstream, social democratic party.3 I learned so much through his encounters. Both of my parents were leftists, but only my father actively participated because it was easier for him to do it as a man.
On my more formal engagement with politics – when I moved to Islamabad during my teenage years, I read in the newspaper that there was a protest against the rape of Mukhtar Mai4 and I realized this was something I could join. It was a coincidence … I just walked over. It was liberating to know that something I couldn’t talk about in the confines of my home was suddenly made possible in public – we could say it all in the streets. So as a young girl, I joined protests, mostly against sexual or domestic violence. Then, in 2013 when the Baloch missing persons march led by Mama Qadeer was arriving in Islamabad, I reached out to the AWP. I met women comrades with whom I went to the march.
It became clear that there was space for all kinds of struggles from the platform of the AWP. This became one of the most important spaces I have belonged to. Yet, it was clear that changes were needed in the Left. Comrades in Sindh were already organizing socialist-feminist fronts, so we came together to discuss the extension of their work, to talk about the formation of WDF at a national [federal] level.
MA: Thank you so much comrades. I asked you this first question because I see each of you as historical subjects participating in and shaping the history of the Pakistani Left. You are Left-feminist history in the making right now.
I’d like to now build on where each of you left off, at the moment you came to socialist feminism, and joined the WDF. What kinds of challenges have you faced in efforts to promote a socialist feminism? What kind of criticism or pushbacks have you had to grapple with from broader political formations, especially other progressives who you’d otherwise think were your comrades?
TS: In my experience, we faced pressure from various different organisations or collectives. Of course, there was some pushback from the Left because, for them, it was an argument about women and men working together instead of forming a separate autonomous organisation, so we had to first convince our own comrades. The party at large believed in the formation of either a woman’s front of the party or women working within the party, they did not understand why an autonomous organisation was important for the political work of the Left in the country. However, we also received support from some male comrades on the Left. But there was a pressure that I didn’t foresee coming, which was from within the feminist movement, or the mainstream feminist movement as we know it. I realised that many of us were not welcome in traditional feminist spaces, primarily because most feminists associated with other organisations – who might have socialist leanings but did not call themselves outright socialist feminists – were not very comfortable with our existence. We were not welcome in a lot of feminist spaces; we were never invited in discussions, we were never asked to come to seminars initially, I’m talking 2018, 2019. When we tried to organise the women’s march, even though WDF was autonomous, we were still seen as women fronting for men of the Left. But we were women fighting the men of the Left at the same time.
ML: I totally agree with comrade Tooba. When we established WDF in Sindh, it was ironic that at a regional level Naari Jamhoori Mahaz was welcomed by Left and progressive circles. Yet, once we inaugurated the WDF at a federal level we faced challenges in Sindh and within the party – once we became autonomous at this level, we were criticised. In Sindh, WDF was also not welcomed in a number of other feminist organisations, because we address class as well as gender issues. Even now, as we are organising relief work in Sindh – one of the worst hit provinces in Pakistan after the floods – we again face a number of challenges. Liberal feminist organisations say that we take orders from our male comrades of the Left, and they dismiss us as a feminist organisation. But I think we are creating a kind of revolution and organising at the grassroots level.
IS: As the president of a feminist-socialist organisation in a country which has been ridden with military dictatorships, wars, extremist patriarchy, national oppression, state repression, and religious fundamentalism, it has been a nerve-breaking experience for me taking all these pressures and coordinated attacks. As my comrades have mentioned, a section of the Left thought that the woman question should be resolved within the class struggle only and that by establishing an autonomous organisation we are dividing the movement.
There are ideological issues between sections of the Left and the WDF, but WDF is the leading organisation theorising a socialist feminism in Pakistan. We have had to take a position on debates on labour theory, relations of production, social reproduction, and current debates on the new faces of capitalism, for example the social care debate. We have also broadened the ideological frontiers of feminism and included national liberation struggles into its framework.
The biggest challenge we face is from the state itself. Armed and political groups that had the patronage of the state attacked us, they attacked our rallies, and some of us had to go underground. There was an ongoing campaign against the Aurat Azaadi March. The liberal feminists organised the Aurat March (Women’s March) and the WDF together with the Left organised the Aurat Azaadi March (Women’s Emancipation March). As organisers, WDF had to face court cases, fake charges of blasphemy and so forth. I personally received threats from all sides, from the state, from religious militant groups. There was a coordinated attack on us from the media, there were court trials. Building a socialist-feminist movement in Pakistan is highly revolutionary work. At any moment anything can happen to you and all the frontline leadership of the WDF remain under threat. We had to raise self-defence groups in Islamabad to guard the movement ideologically and guard the movement physically. And whenever we take a rally, we do drills, and we figure out: From which side will they attack us?
MA: I’d like to ask you to scale up and think about socialist feminism in the region and around the world. To think, in other words, about international solidarity and difficulties you face in being part of a global conversation – also in terms of building a socialist feminism that crosses over to Afghanistan, Iran, India and China. What are some of the ideological and practical difficulties in building transnational solidarity?
IS: The socialist-feminist movement had a very close association with the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) which was established in 1945 and was a global association, a platform of socialist women and outfits around the world. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the collapse of many communist parties around the world, the WIDF did not continue as an active body. It was the forum where all socialist-feminist organisations in the world did international solidarity work. Today, there is no international platform of socialist-feminist organisations, that is a major issue.
Another issue is that in mainstream Pakistani politics the centrality of the anti-India cause is a big barrier for us to establish any relationship with our Indian sisters in struggle. As far as regional solidarity exchange is concerned, I used to work closely with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) way back in the 1980s and 1990s, but this organisation was crushed and its revolutionary leader Meena was assassinated here in Quetta in Pakistan. In Afghanistan the Left has been crushed, in Iran the Left has been crushed fully. Most of the feminist solidarity work in Pakistan and in India is through NGO forums which I don’t prescribe to so I have not been actively pursuing these networks. It involves a lot of co-optation. In terms of international solidarity we have not been able to do much. We have established a brief relationship with the Kurdish movement, and we established some communication with the Communist Party of Iran. I feel that from the day the socialist internationals and the WIDF collapsed, we haven’t found any platform, and the war with Afghanistan and very problematic relationship with India limit our abilities.
There is one view within the organisation, and I personally am also of this view, that we have to build an organisation here. WDF is a very small organisation on that account. We believe: Think internationally, or globally, and act locally. We want a home-grown, organic movement rooted in our own history and our own society first, and then we will find the right connections for international solidarity.
TS: WDF is still only four years old so I feel much of our time has been invested in grassroots organisation building. We’ve been so mired in local dynamics, state repression, internal dynamics we she who struggles have here because of being a socialist-feminist organisation within Pakistan. Almost an entire year went into dealing with the court cases of the Aurat Azaadi marches.
We are part of the Progressive International, we are founding members, but there aren’t many socialist-feminist member organisations. Not much has happened on the feminist front within the Progressive International. If we have to form transnational or international feminist solidarity, I think we should prioritise the South Asian region because it is very important that we talk to each other right now given the floods, climate change, and the rise of authoritarianism across the region. So, I think that starting there and perhaps reaching out to other organisations in the Global South is what should be on WDF’s agenda in the coming years. However, I agree with comrade Ismat. Our priority remains to first build our own organisation in the country.
MA: Let me return to the theme of this volume: the dominance of men in written histories of the Left, and the erasure of women. What would it mean to write the histories of women and feminist movements, or female figures in progressive politics or other kinds of political struggles? When you think about the histories of political struggle that you have grown up with and have heard about throughout your life, what have they looked like? Why do you think that women are made invisible in the history of the Left and political movements?
ML: In the history books we hardly find women’s resistance or what role women have played. When women are at home, they provide services to male comrades or partners to allow them to do their political work, without women, men would not be able to do that work! And it’s not only women at home but women outside who are made invisible. I want to talk about a character named Mai Bakhtawar, a daughter of Sindh.
When we organise, we don’t bring the portrait of Mai Bakhtawar forward, but we have portraits of other male comrades or other peasant or Marxist leaders. We are trying to familiarise our co-workers to talk about all those who have played a role in peasant or other resistance movements. In the history of Sindh we have a number of peasant movements, be it Hyder Bux Jatoi’s movement or other movements in Jhuddo and Sangar. There are a number of peasant movements in Sindh, but again, we have a lot of work written or mentioned in terms of Hyder Bux Jatoi, but it was because of Mai Bakhtawar’s sacrifice that there was a Sindh Tenancy Act, which now secures peasant ownership of their own crop yield. Mai Bakhtawar is considered a brave daughter of Sindh.
During the colonial period, before partition in 1946, and even today, it was common in Sindh for landlords to arrive with armed men at the time of the yield and take most of the harvest, leaving little for peasants. This happened in Tando Bago Tehsil where Mai Bakhtawar lived. In 1946, there was a conference in the village of Jhuddo and many men went. Mai Bakhtawar was the only person securing the harvest on her land. When the men arrived, she resisted and stood against feudal landlords to protect her harvest. In that moment, she is remembered to have raised the very slogan later familiarised by Hyder Bux Jatoi, and which is heard spoken by peasant movements across the country: Whoever sows, shall reap! The men shot Mai Bakhtawar and she died. Because of this remarkable, revolutionary moment – Mai Bakhtawar’s sacrifice – the Tenancy Act was passed by the Sindh Government in 1950. Mai Bakhtawar opened a path for women to be part of the peasant resistance, and women of Sindhiani Tehreek remember and are inspired by Mai Bakhtawar’s struggle.
There is another recent character of Mai Jindo, a peasant in Tando Bahawal. In 1992 Major Arshad Jameel kidnapped and killed nine villagers. They included the sons and sons-in-law of Mai Jindo. The army said that they were terrorists, but this was false and they had been involved in a land dispute. Mai Jindo stood against Major Arshad Jameel’s claims, and argued that they were fighting for their rights. She won the court case against him, and is today a symbol of resistance in a patriarchal Sindh, against the army.
These are not the only women. Women students from the University of Sindh took part against the One Unit Policy, protesting for the right to Sindhi in an Urdu-dominated Pakistan, and the restoration of provincial rights. Sindhiani Tehreek, a women’s peasant movement, took part in the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) against General Zia ul Haq.
TS: I think in feminist scholarship, the invisibilisation of women within the larger political context has happened because women who were not identifying as feminists or fighting for the causes of only gender-based oppression were never seen as having a legitimate voice or struggle that contributed to the feminist movement. In WDF we want to blur those clear distinctions between what is a feminist movement and what does not get categorised as a feminist movement by feminist scholars. Within the wider Left, historically, the Left was not as conscious of women’s oppression as it is today, and I think that has another role to play as well. Only workers were seen as the true subjects of a class-based politics and revolution, and women workers are still not remembered nor recorded in these histories. I think that is changing now, we see the need for women in these movements and the need for women to be visible. There are a lot of women one can see in the photo archives, but you don’t know their names.
IS: Generally, whatever is written in Pakistan does not even include the resistance against colonialism. Pakistan’s history has been enforced through a state narrative that starts from 1947, August. And there are so many lies. I recently presented a paper for WDF’s school and made the point that Bangladesh’s entire struggle for freedom has been erased, including the rape of Bengali women at the hands of the Pakistan army. Most scholarship is coming from the Pakistani diaspora and they are writing from the framework of Muslim nationalism. The anti-nationalist and anti-class or bourgeois lens based on a state narrative has also excluded entire movements. Meanwhile, feminist scholarship marks an artificial line between women’s movements and feminist movements, the former is not seen as part of the latter. But when you define feminism in these terms, you exclude women’s movements in other progressive and connected struggles.
I believe one aspect of critical political work which we need to do is to build socialist-feminist scholarship in Pakistan. We do not think that patriarchy is the only structure of oppression. There is class, religious, and national oppression. For us, the national struggle, class struggle and the struggle for secular democracy is a part of the feminist struggle. We need to make a new socialist-feminist scholarship which recognises how these oppressions and movements are intertwined and interlocking.
Another problem also exists, we don’t know who the characters in these histories were and what their role was. When the entire struggle is lost, even if you find a few of those characters, it doesn’t really solve the problem. We need to look at broader resistance movements and women’s leading and non-leading roles.
The fight to be seen, to build our scholarship is a critical area for us and we plan to open this debate but not at the cost of fracturing feminist solidarity or our solidarity with the Left. But we are opening this up and are determined to continue doing this.
MA: Thank you so much everyone, your answers have raised new and important questions. What are some of the methods for WDF’s theorisation and its intellectual arm, in what kind of ways can we address the issue?
ML: First-hand experience is a must, it is necessary. It will only be possible when we connect people with the living experience of facing oppression right now with theorising. Language is also a barrier when we are trying to write these histories. These women are remembered in their own languages, not Urdu. There is also the question of how to articulate experience into broader theory, because women living in repression can find it hard to articulate what they are facing or going through.
TS: In my opinion histories can only be rewritten if you are doing something today towards change. My problem with the writing of history is that it is primarily written by people who are not part of the movement within the country. We need to change who gets to write and who doesn’t get to write. I think it can only happen if organic scholarship or the people who are actually invested in this politics themselves start writing and I think it’s only in the process of politically organising or working that you see what is missing and what has to be unearthed. Me and another comrade of mine who is part of WDF are trying to write. We don’t know if we will ever finish, it’s still a practice we are doing simply because we personally felt that there are gaps. There are a lot of missing archives, there are a lot of missing voices or missing movements. We’re working on questioning this binary of what is and is not scholarship, what is and is not feminism. This is one of the main issues in terms of scholarship produced in or on Pakistan. Rewriting is important but it has to come from one’s own political work and grounded-ness.
IS: Reclaiming or rewriting history is not an option for me. Change the history instead of rewriting it – this is my political position. Of course, we cannot be ahistorical in our struggle, we should remain in continuation with analysis and resistance. We do not need to engage in modernist or post-modernist tendencies of reconstructing texts, or the philosophical view that objective truth does not exist. We need not assume a break with the past, from history. But, we must focus on changing our objective realities, the structures of oppression which surround us, which are the condition of our politics.
I also believe that rewriting history projects can be meaningful but who rewrites them is an important question. We must think about standpoint. We should archive our own work and we have started doing so in Nariwad. A lot of researchers have contacted us, but when they publish they write something other than what we tell them. They do commissioned research projects they are paid for, and sometimes it becomes knowledge they break up and sell, knowledge but not truth grounded in struggle. So, I think it’s better to not even get involved in these kinds of history projects. Instead, we want our organisation to write. We have to combine our struggle with our history, and have a historical approach to struggle.
A lot of this scholarship is in English but most of the working class in Pakistan can’t understand English. We have some people in our own organisation who are not even able to read. So we must translate and also create texts in our own national languages including Pashto, Balochi, Sindhi, Saraiki, Punjabi, Pakistan’s lingua franca, Urdu, as well as other languages.
TS: In a way, we end up writing our own history the very moment we stand on the frontlines of this struggle.
This interview was first publish in “She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Shaped the World“, (2023). edited by Marral Shamshiri and Sorcha Thomson. Pluto Press, London. Permission for republishing was obtained from both the authors and the publisher.
Dr. Mahvish Ahmad is a writer and an academician. She is an Assistant Professor in Human Rights and Politics at the London School of Economics, and associated with the left politics in Pakistan.
NOTES
- Many books are biographies or autobiographies – one might even say hagiographies – of communist men. Take Sajjad Zaheer’s Roshnai (Model Town, Lahore: Prime Time Publications, 2006), a book written from the perspective of the founder of the Communist Party of Pakistan about the Progressive Writers Movement or, more recently, Abid Hassan Minto’s compilation of essays, speeches and interviews in Apni Jang Rahe Gi (Lahore: Sanjh, 2016). Or books like Chale Chalo Ke Manzil Abhi Nahin Aai (Lahore: Jumhoori Publications, 2017), penned by Nuzhat Abbas and Ahmad Saleem on Jam Saqi, the former general secretary of the Communist Party of Pakistan, who later joined the Pakistan People’s Party, from Sindh. Though other writings on the Pakistani Left have a more capacious reading of Pakistani Left history – Saadia Toor, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan (London: Pluto Press, 2011), for instance, thinks deeply with progressive feminist poets – this remains a dominant genre of left-wing history-writing.
- The AWP is, for instance, known as Abid Hassan Minto’s party. A split in the now defunct National Awami Party led to the creation of one NAP associated with the Abdul Wali Khan and another with Maulana Bhashani. This reflects broader tendencies in Pakistani political parties and is not limited to the Left – the leading Pakistan Muslim League, Nawaz, is identified through the name of its male leader, Nawaz Sharif. Nevertheless, it does show us that the Left is not above reducing partypolitics to the identities of male leaders.
- The Pakistan People’s Party was formed by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, from a feudal background himself and a minister in the first military ruler’s government, who eventually took up the mantle of Islamic socialism in Pakistan, with the support of long-time communist political workers. His legacy and that of the PPP is checquered, and he and his followers have been accused of both making a Left imagination possible on a mass scale through slogans like roti, kapra, makaan (bread, clothes, shelter) and of destroying any hope of a mass-scale Left movement.
- In June 2002, Mukhtar Mai was targeted in a gang-rape sanctioned by a tribal council which ruled that it would constitute a revenge of honour. Mukhtar Mai went against local custom, which would expect her to commit suicide, and instead took the rapists to court. Her case became famous across Pakistan and the world.
