The winds of change from Gilgit-Baltistan to Sindh

The winds of change are flowing from up in the north to deep in the south. From the mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan to the plains of Sindh, the cry is one and only one: Give us our right to live and to live with dignity. People in Gilgit Baltistan are in streets for the very basic human rights and so are people in Sindh (emergence and struggle of PTM has been analyzed and discussed amply by now). The emergence of the new mass movements goes beyond the visible, populist slogans of good governance and development and the rightist slogans of a pious tomorrow. The demands though basic are as radical as the struggle for right to land and to emancipation from a brutal, tyrannical order.

The struggle is for challenging the amnesia and the façade of supremacy of law. The struggle is not to challenge the law but the struggle is for the law. People in Gilgit Baltistan want their lives to be governed by a law giving them basic human rights, representation and self-governance while those in Sindh want the law as is written in the books to become the de-facto mode of exercise of the state power. The sense of urgency, the sense of forbearance point to the toll accumulative and cumulative silence has extracted on the bodies, souls and minds of the people. Finally, they are speaking!

Gayatri Spivak in her monumental work, “Can the Subaltern speak”, came to the conclusion that you can’t speak for the subaltern, you can only speak TO the subaltern. The subaltern is speaking. Your propagandas and your labels can neither represent nor erase their voice. You can only listen to them and then speak in the language of law and basic human rights guarantees. Sartre in his preface to epoch-making book of Franz Fanon, “Wretched of the earth,” proclaimed with righteous anger, “the colonized are not talking to you, they are talking of you [among themselves].” The next stage, if you don’t speak to them, will be that the colonized, the subaltern will begin to talk to each other about you, against you. Sartre also said that in colonies the truth stand naked. In the peripheries of the state of Pakistan, the oppression of the extra-legal powers stands naked. The indignity of being subjected to a power without representation is awakening the radical human spirit in the hearts of youth of Gilgit-Baltistan. The ignominy of being subjected to arbitrary detentions and torture is breaking the slumber of masses in Sindh.

The dawn is near and as Faiz would have it:

Lekin ab zulm ke meead kay din thorray hai
Ik zara sbr, ke faryad ke din thorray hai.

Long live the struggle