The Babarra massacre, the dialectics of memory and the recognizibility of now in the past: PashtunLongMarch2Swabi

August 12, 1948; the day the Babarra massacre happened. The new state of Pakistan opened fire and carried a massacre in broad daylight consuming, don’t write the numerical, repeat, six hundred and thirty Pashtuns including kids. In our memory that day defines our status within the state of Pakistan. Remembering that day gives the core to our political consciousness and informs us what we can expect from the Pakistan and at what cost. That was a peaceful march but was stopped, an argument soon turned into bloodshed and the machine guns roared till they were out of ammunition. The injured were not taken to hospitals because they will be arrested. Jinnah was alive. Pakistan added with glory and fury the first red scar to its flag but it was made invisible by the opaque green.

Since then there is amnesia. Ruthlessly enforced amnesia. But Walter Benjamin said that an act of revolution is liberating the past. And our political struggle and political consciousness in one way or another has dared revolutionary acts and has kept alive that image of soldiers of Pakistan emptying their guns at a mass of Pashtuns. If memory is a process of dialectic and if history contains images, moments or events which capture the now, then our now, our today is captured by that day in Babarra. Our today can be recognized in that one singular moment and from the workings of memory it will seem that our present is just a continuum of that fateful day. The history from that day on is not an empty time. We have been visited by atrocities which were variations of that defining day.

For the last 14 years mortars shells have visited us while we were lying unsuspecting them, sleeping, in our homes. For the last 14 years, our children are left without schools. Our elders marched to bullets on 12th August, 1948 knowing their fate. If history has progressed in any way it is that we don’t have that choice now. (Regressed actually.) Turning away is not a choice. Only death is. And to give us that choice back, there emerged PTM! History is always the struggle of the oppressed and the last 14 years are the part of history that PTM is rewriting in favor of the oppressed.

We have more stories to tell. We have a whole history to be reproduced in today and redress. But for that the first demand is the right to life, which the increasingly tyrannical state of Pakistan has systemically denied to us. This 12th August will be that one day in popular consciousness that the scar of the day happened 70 years ago will be connected to the scars of today. PTM will be marching to Swabi to demand the very basic right to life for Pashtuns. The tyranny may seem total. The oppression complete but there can be dreams which think of an alternative future. Not only today we can bring to life the images of the past but we can dream anew by completing the dialectic of those images. Again, as the great Walter Benjamin said, “Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow, but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears an end within itself.” The Now today has seeds to germinate into an inclusive, equal future. We have to dream well and expedite the end of this epoch.