WORKING people in Pakistan are literally struggling to breathe. If they seek some relief from the heat by turning on a couple of fans and using a refrigerator (assuming they own one), they will be hit with an electricity bill well in excess of their entire household earnings. To rub salt in their wounds, they are forced to pay through their teeth despite long hours of loadshedding.

It should now be common knowledge that this is all happening because the World Bank and IMF forced the so-called IPPs down our throats in 1994, and we are now stuck with binding agreements to pay these power producers at exorbitant dollar rates. Our own venal ruling class — both khaki supremos and civilian juniors — refuse to pay income tax at all, let alone redistribute wealth, so it is left to the blue- and white-collar working masses to foot the bill.

The IPP scandal is only the tip of a very large iceberg. The government of Pakistan has to meet public debt obligations of $70 billion over the next three years. This does not include private debt to commercial banks which would make the figures even more unfathomable. Seen thus, the class war against working people will only intensify.

This war includes attacks on livelihoods. Urban sprawl, due in significant part to free-for-all real estate development, is swallowing up more and more agricultural land. Small and landless farmers, as well as non-agricultural castes, are thus increasingly pushed to the wayside, and forced into daily wage work in the metropole, bereft of any social safety net. In villages proper, more and more of the rural poor are subject to some form of servitude or left to abandon agriculture altogether. Even middle-sized farmers are under attack, as was evidenced by the wheat import scandal which pillaged large parts of the Seraiki belt and parts of otherwise prosperous central Punjab.

This war includes attacks on livelihoods.

The industrial working class, once a relatively powerful entity which could defend itself through trade unions, is on the back foot. Other than the odd instance of resistance, workers neither have secure pay, decent working conditions, affordable housing nor other basic amenities.

Beyond ‘peaceful’, metropolitan Pakistan, another form of the class war is playing out in the long-suffering ethnic peripheries. The border trade in and around towns like Chaman and Taftan which sustains millions of working families is being formally criminalised even while the biggest guns of all continue to make windfall profits from cars to cigarettes and from Iranian petrol to wheat.

Over the past week, the so-called civilian government of Balochistan demonstrated its unerring commitment to colonial statecraft against thousands of peaceful protesters who have sought to gather in Gwadar and other parts of the province. Their crime was only to voice their entirely legitimate demands for economic justice and an end to enforced disappearances.

In Gilgit-Baltistan, Kashmir and KP, mountainous highlands are being devastated in the name of ‘tourism’ and ‘development’. Land and mineral grabs are routine, the nexus of state and private capital running amok. Here too wheat subsidies are being slashed and electricity bills jacked up.

While there is heroic resistance to this class war, it tends to be in isolated pockets. This is in large part because there is no shared understanding of class, nation and empire of the kind that once animated progressives across Pakistan’s unevenly developed social formation.

This is not by chance. The state and its organic intellectuals have diligently cultivated hateful ideologies while clamping down on progressive political workers, artists and intellectuals. Today, a new generation of progressives is fighting for the oppressed in its own way, but there is yet to be a major breakthrough that can transcend palace intrigues and cancel culture that animates the majority of young people.

Today’s class war is arguably more intense and harder to resist than in the 20th century when mainstream politics was deeply informed by progressive principles. We should, however, take inspiration from iconic organisations like the National Students Federation and Baloch Students Organisation, which saw the struggle of vibrant trade union and farmers’ collectivities in Punjab and other parts of metropolitan Pakistan as part and parcel of the struggle of oppressed ethnic-nations, and aligned themselves with national liberation struggles all over the world, including Vietnam, Palestine, South Africa, and many more.

With class war now playing out on ecological terrains that increasingly places all oppressed peoples into the same boat, perhaps this will provide the impetus for another universalist politics that can bring young people together around a shared vision of the future.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, August 2nd, 2024