A couple of days ago, the Awami Huqooq Forum invited Prof Riaz Shaikh and me to speak on Inqilaabi Tabdeeli ke Liye Daur-e-Haazir ke Taqazey (the demands of the present age for revolutionary change).
It was a gathering of political activists, intellectuals and journalists who wanted us to address two questions that are easier to ask than to answer: Is revolutionary change possible in Pakistan? And what should – or should not – be done to achieve it? The discussion reminded me how casually we use the word ‘inqilaab’ (revolution). Almost everybody in Pakistan seems to have promised one. Politicians promise political revolution, clerics an Islamic revolution, technocrats an economic revolution and educationists an educational revolution. Military rulers have repeatedly claimed to be rescuing or transforming the country. Even governments that represent considerable continuity with the existing order describe minor administrative initiatives as revolutionary.
If everything is revolutionary, nothing is. So I began with a simpler question: what is a revolution? Inqilaab is not merely ‘tabdeeli’ (change). Governments change; revolutions transform the structures through which societies are governed. Aristotle was interested in changes of constitutions and regimes. Locke and Paine shifted attention towards legitimacy, consent and resistance to arbitrary authority. Their great question was: who governs, and by what right? Marx pushed the inquiry underneath formal political institutions. Who owns property? Who controls production? Which class possesses economic power and consequently exercises political power? Engels elaborated on that historical interpretation; Lenin concentrated on organisation and seizure of state power. Rosa Luxemburg insisted that popular participation and political freedom could not simply be postponed until after victory; Trotsky emphasised the continuing and international dimensions of revolution.
Pakistan requires us to ask all these questions simultaneously. For ours is a country that has changed rulers repeatedly while displaying an extraordinary capacity to preserve structures of power. Consider 1968-69. Students demonstrated, workers struck, lawyers protested and ordinary citizens challenged the self-appointed Field Marshal Ayub Khan after a decade of authoritarian rule. What developed was perhaps the closest Pakistan has come to a nationwide revolutionary situation: Ayub fell.
And yet the system did not undergo a democratic social revolution. Power passed to another general, Yahya Khan. The distinction is crucial. The fall of a ruler is an event. The transformation of a structure is a revolution. The PPP initially understood something of this distinction. Its emergence in the late 1960s was remarkable because it connected political democracy with economic questions. ‘Roti, kapra aur makaan’ was powerful precisely because it translated abstractions about socialism into everyday needs. Workers, students and sections of the intelligentsia acquired an unusual sense that politics belonged to them.
The nationalisations of the 1970s attempted structural change, but the experience also exposed the difference between transferring ownership to the state and transferring power to working people. A state-owned enterprise is not necessarily a democratically controlled enterprise. Bureaucratic control can replace private ownership without creating workers’ control. Land reform remained limited. Older elites adapted rather than disappeared. And political intolerance eventually damaged the democratic promise with which the period had begun.
Then came 1977. General Ziaul Haq’s dictatorship was not simply another military interruption. Its consequences reached deep into society. Political parties were suppressed, students and workers were weakened, censorship expanded and religiosity was systematically deployed to legitimise state power. Laws and institutions helped reshape public culture. The effects survived Zia himself. Pakistan returned to elected governments in 1988, but democracy returned without many of the social organisations that make democracy meaningful. Trade unions had weakened. Student politics had been severely damaged. Progressive cultural organisations had lost space. Political parties increasingly revolved around personalities, families and electability.
This remains one of the central problems of Pakistani democracy. We have political parties, but too few are internally democratic. We hold elections, but economic power remains highly concentrated. We have legislatures, but local government is repeatedly weakened. We have millions of workers, but only a small proportion are effectively organised. We have enormous numbers of young people in colleges and universities, but campuses seldom function as schools of democratic citizenship. And then we wonder why democratic culture remains fragile.
The first requirement for revolutionary change today is therefore organisation. Social media cannot substitute for it. A million views are not a million members. A trending hashtag is not a trade union. A viral speech is not a political programme. Crowds can remove governments; organisations build alternatives. This is one lesson Lenin understood exceptionally well. Yet Leninism also offers a warning. A tightly disciplined organisation may become so convinced of its historical mission that it begins to treat disagreement as betrayal. Luxemburg perceived the danger. Freedom cannot mean freedom merely for supporters of the revolution.
If a movement cannot tolerate disagreement before acquiring power, there is little reason to expect it to become tolerant afterwards. Pakistan’s progressive movements should take that warning seriously.
The second requirement is therefore democracy within movements themselves. A party cannot credibly promise democracy to 250 million people while denying it to its own members. Leaders must be electable and removable. Accounts must be transparent. Women cannot merely decorate platforms. Workers cannot simply provide crowds for leaders. Young people must be allowed to question their elders. Our political culture is authoritarian partly because authoritarianism is reproduced in miniature everywhere: in political parties, universities, bureaucracies, workplaces and sometimes even organisations describing themselves as revolutionary.
The third requirement is rebuilding the social foundations of politics. Trade unions matter. Student unions matter. Peasant organisations matter. Women’s movements matter. Journalists’ bodies matter. Teachers’ associations matter. Bar associations, neighbourhood committees and professional organisations matter. This is where Gramsci remains more useful for contemporary Pakistan than romantic images of armed insurrection. Power is not located only in the presidency, parliament or GHQ. It is reproduced through schools, media, religious institutions, workplaces, bureaucracies and everyday ideas about what is normal and possible. A democratic revolution must therefore be fought in society before it can be consolidated in the state.
The fourth requirement is economic transformation. Pakistan cannot become genuinely democratic while millions remain economically powerless. Political equality means little when one child attends an elite school with laboratories, libraries and digital facilities while another sits in a government school struggling for teachers, toilets and electricity. Nor can economic democracy ignore land, taxation and labour. Pakistan has repeatedly postponed serious land reform. Large sections of wealth remain lightly taxed while indirect taxation burdens ordinary consumers. Informal workers enjoy little protection. Housing, healthcare and education reproduce inequality from one generation to another.
But the Left must also confront an uncomfortable truth. Redistribution alone is not an economic programme. Wealth must also be created. Pakistan needs productive agriculture, competitive industry, scientific research, technological capability and a skilled workforce. Socialism cannot mean distributing poverty more evenly.
The fifth requirement is intellectual renewal. Here Pakistan’s Left has often disappointed itself. Too much political discussion still proceeds as though history stopped somewhere between the Russian and Chinese revolutions. Marx must be read, but Marx cannot tell us what artificial intelligence will do to employment. Lenin cannot provide a policy for digital privacy. Mao cannot solve Karachi’s water crisis.
The revolutionary questions of the twenty-first century include climate change, artificial intelligence, automation, surveillance, data ownership, gender equality, urbanisation and ecological destruction alongside the older questions of class, land and labour. Who owns the data generated by citizens? Who controls algorithms? Who decides what people see online? Who benefits when automation replaces labour? The factory has not disappeared, but the server has joined it as a site of power.
The sixth requirement is to reject the cult of violence. Revolutionary literature has too often romanticised guns, barricades and martyrdom. Pakistan should know better. We have had more than enough bloodshed. Violence is particularly dangerous in a society already possessing armed state institutions, militant organisations, ethnic tensions and sectarian divisions.
The writer is dean of the faculty of liberal arts at a private university in Karachi. He tweets/posts @NaazirMahmood and can be reached at: [email protected]
