Articles

It’s interesting how, in an intellectual journey, one unlearns sometimes to
learn anew, and then, at some stage, one relearns what they had unlearned earlier
to learn again. Hegel once wrote about this kind of experience of a [sic] man who
repeats the prayers he had once memorised as a child, but only with a lifetime of
experience. The concept of the nation in Political Science resembles that man’s
prayers about whom Hegel wrote. It is an exemplar of such concepts, at least in
our anti-colonial history, when even class consciousness assumes imaginations of
community/people/nation, i.e., political subjectivities. If class is both subjective
and objective, it is the economic content of class that has mainly an objective
character. Similarly, I argue that the recent national movements (movements in
Kashmir, Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan – all mostly employ national idioms) are
defying the official Pakistani racial nationalism, albeit in popular forms. The
Pashtun national movement, too, teaches us that struggles of war-torn working
classes continue around the idiom of ‘nation ’. The Left needs to interrogate why,
instead of being sceptical of these movements in the name of the dreaded
nationalism.

I have come to Quetta from Islamabad for the summer vacations. However, upon arriving in Quetta, I found out that opposite Quetta Cantt on Airport Road, near the BA Mall, a sit-in by the martyrs of Hanna Urak is underway. The next day, I learned that another sit-in has been started at Koyla Phatak against the brutal killing of police personnel in Ziarat. A few days ago, the organizers of the Hanna Urak sit-in announced the end of their protest after negotiations with the Balochistan government, while the sit-in against the martyrdom of police officers in Ziarat has been ongoing for the last eight days. I am continuously participating in this sit-in.