MOB lynchings under the pretext of blasphemy have become commonplace. In exceptional circumstances, law enforcement officials intervene and take accused persons into custody before the mob sets upon them. But two recent cases in Quetta and Umerkot, where accused persons were killed while in police custody, make clear that the rot runs deep.

Mercifully, there is another side to this story. The response of a wide cross-section of Sindhi political circles, intellectuals and common people to the Umerkot incident has been swift and considerable. Immediately after the event, a young Hindu man, Premo Kohli, prevented the enraged mob from setting the body of the lynched man, Dr Shahnawaz Kunbhar, on fire. This act of bravery then became the rallying cry for a wider mobilisation, culminating in a public protest bringing together thousands of people in Umerkot, the scene of the original lynching, on Sept 25.

There is likely to be more mobilisation in the coming days on both sides of the ideological divide. It is not to be understated that the religious right — both mainstream and militant — has created significant pockets of support in Sindhi society in recent years. The right-wing always looks at emotive events like lynchings as opportunities to further its agenda. But of all of Pakistan’s brutalised peripheries, Sindh remains home to the most robust and historically powerful expressions of cultural resistance to right-wing militancy.

Ironically, it is from Sindh that mainstream Pakistani historiography traces its origins; in this familiar story, Islam entered the subcontinent through Muhammad bin Qasim’s conquest of Sindh. But despite the investments made by the Pakistani state in propagating this official history, Sindhi public opinion has always resisted the idea that Muhammad bin Qasim was a liberator.

Sindh is home to a robust pushback against right-wing militancy.

Over the past eight decades, the Sindhi language and its literatures have been developed more than all of Pakistan’s vernaculars. The vast majority of Sindhi-speaking children grow up learning how to read and write their mother tongue. Sindhi-language newspapers have a reach far exceeding Urdu and English ones.

Cultural resistance to the religious right, as well as the big landed pirs who instrumentalise their spiritual power, is not a recent phenomenon. The 17th-century Sufi saint and poet Shah Inayat was also a Robin Hood figure who mobilised landless peasants — popularly called haris in Sindh — against landlords and local kingdoms. This legacy carried on into the 20th century under the tutelage of legendary figures like the communist leader Haider Bux Jatoi. These feats of popular resistance are immortalised in the words of Latif, and many others.

Despite all of this, Sindhi politics remains in the shadows of the PPP. For a brief period after it was formed in 1967, the PPP in Sindh embodied the aspirations of workers and peasants, as well as the progressive intelligentsia at large. While some of the latter remain convinced of the PPP’s progressive credentials, today’s PPP is an umbrella for landlords and state functionaries that are anything but answerable to the people.

So it was with Dr Shahnawaz Kunbhar, killed while in the custody of high-ranking police officials, who were in turn garlanded by prominent religious functionaries. To date, there has been no meaningful action taken by the PPP-led provincial government against these powerful men, let alone a public statement by PPP leaders condemning the mob lynching.

The PPP is not fundamentally responsible for Pakistan’s drift towards the right — that accolade belongs to the military establishment and its org­anic intellectuals. But the PPP, like all mainstream bourgeois parties, almost always chooses silence rather than confrontation over incidents like the Umerkot lynching.

As the PPP continues to insist on finding a way to pass the latest constitutional amendment, which makes a mockery of the notion of separation of powers and institutional independence, it should not be forgotten that it was when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was prime minister that the second amendment was made to the 1974 Constitution through which Ahmadis were excommunicated.

Such expediencies have gotten us to where we are. Every day they push us further towards the proverbial abyss. The fact that Sindhi progressives continue to push back despite everything is a source of hope. They are paralleled by young Pakhtun progressives resisting the forces of reaction and the establishment through the PTM, and Baloch women that are doing so through the BYC. The next step would be a countrywide umbrella that brings together all of these vibrant forms of cultural resistance to offer a genuine political-economic alternative to the establishment-centric system of power.

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

Published in Dawn, September 27th, 2024