Understanding PTM: Pashtun national consciousness and the counter-hegemony to common sense of the state

Abdul Ghaffar Khan, popularly known as Bacha Khan, who shaped the Pashtun national consciousness through his political struggle, used to say that non-violence is a moral weapon. It disarms the oppressors. It renders all his tanks and jets useless. You cannot fight the oppressor through his weapons which he has in abundance and if you use counter-violence, it will give moral grounds to the oppressor to exercise more violence. When you rise for your rights and present your bare body as the only form of resistance, the oppressor loses the battle already. Violence can be therapeutic in certain political situations and can be a strategy in the ultimate periphery where hunger is order of the day and where the essential element of a non-violent strategy i.e staging a spectacle by bearing all violence doesn’t register in any mainstream or any consciousness at all is totally absent. For Franz Fanon, violence to the oppressed Africans was a tool through which they could reclaim their humanity and by demonstrating their capacity to inflict pain they could tell the colonizers that they were as humans as them and the colonizers as vulnerable as the oppressed. Violence in the context when the Africans were mocked for their gentle non-violent nature became a tool, a psychological reaction, to undo the colonial logic.

But colonialism comes in all shapes and forms. In India, the British produced Pashtuns as noble savages who had known one thing for entirety of their existence: unencumbered violence. British produced Pashtuns, as a political and epistemological category, as a group of people whose moral arcs revolved around the logic of violence and thus who can be dealt with violence only. The self-image and self-conception that the colonizers made Pashtuns to imagine themselves through was that of a resigned violence where violence was the end in itself. Violence dehumanized Pashtuns. If nations, as we know them today, are a result of modernity and in the colonized world constructions of colonial modernity, then Pashtuns as a modern nation was born in the womb of violence. But then came along Bacha Khan!

Bacha Khan made non-violence not only as a tool for political mobilization but also as a philosophical way of life. The body-politic and socio-political self-imagination was rewritten, through education and non-violence political mobilization—something the deep tribal Pashtun society hadn’t known for much of the last many centuries as they were caught in the imperial conquests because of lying at strategic locations. Thus was born a national consciousness which was acutely aware of the toll that violence has extracted from Pashtuns as a people overall.

The project of building a national consciousness was not done though. Over years and decades both the colonial and postcolonial Pakistani state stuck with the logic of violence and they were adamant in inculcating through colonial policies the violent self-image in Pashtuns to make them as cannon-fodder for their strategic games. As a result the Pashtun national consciousness submerged every act of violence in the vortex of memory and resistance. That national consciousness now has crystallized every trauma and pain into a memory which is meant to sustain the today and now. But for over a century non-violence is used as a therapeutic elixir to rid the bodies, minds and souls from the clutches of violence. There is continuity with the past. In this moment lies the kaleidoscope of all memory: the memory of resistance.

This moment of now and here belongs to an evolved stage of Pashtun national consciousness. This moment belongs to Pashtun Tahuffuz Movement (PTM). PTM is another stage in development of that national consciousness. To account for the alluvium of the last two decades of war, suffering and pain, PTM emerged as the most radical non-violent movement to continue the collective project of national consciousness of claiming the right to life and dignity. PTM is using bare bodies as the only weapon and they are calling out their names. No road-blockade, no burning, no vandalism, no forcing them to listen to stories of pain. It is just voice, stories and bodies of the oppressed. The struggle is intimate. The struggle gives visceral shape to pain. Pashtuns are there in pain. And they are suffering more pain to demand answers for the pain they imposed on their bodies and on their soul. The only weapon is the moral uprightness and the tactic is laying bare into open the tension the violent selves the oppressors are in.

On the other hand is moment of the state: the moment of vulgar orgasm of worshiping tools and fragile inhuman logic of violence. Their moment is a rootless illegitimate vacuum where the past didn't happen and where the future will be born out of more violence. The moment of PTM is reliving of the entire past trauma, inter-generational pain and awakening the memories of the past resistance to carve out a new future. For them past is squalid, a horror to be forgotten. For PTM, it is a memory of dreams which the present will fulfill.

Bacha Khan imbibed in the Pashtun national consciousness how to neutralize their arrogance on possession of violence. This memory has made the non-violent political activists to bear all violence. The paucity of imagination and the vulgarity of the souls of the oppressors (of the security establishment) can be seen by their insistence on having the profane means of violence. The present for those who dream of another Pakistan has a temporal breadth where the past lives in the present. Their present, past and future all tell the same story of oppression and violence. Their present is a grand ode to the tyranny of violence. But it is dying. The present of PTM is a glorious defiance, full of pain. But its march is with the progress of history. Their moment represents their Pakistan, born out of oppression, violence and inflicting pain. The moment of PTM presents a future where humans will be equal and where humans will live with dignity.

There is a revolutionary anger. Not a regret, not a remorse. But a sense of great violation of sanctity of Pashtuns' lives and their valid struggle. This has happened before. Three years ago in Bakakhel camp army opened fire on IDPs in Ramzan when they were demanding drinking water at the food distribution point. That moment was forced to be forgotten. So were many others. But not this moment when Khar Qamar happened. In this one moment all time has collapsed and debris of ruins of memory of excesses and oppression of the last two decades in particular have come to life. This moment of massacre has converted the memories of time into space. And the image of Khar Qamar has come to embed in itself images of all previous massacres, indignities and violations of souls and bodies.

The debate on this side is not about the particulars of this one event per se (the event being the singular repression PTM is facing after the Khar Qamar massacre), but how this one moment has condensed the spaces where such moments happened into a singular image of soldiers firing on protesters. The past has come to live in the present. The present has ruptured its relation with time and has become a space where fragments of the past live. Thus in insisting on surviving and winning this moment the whole struggle has come to represent the dream of the epoch: the dream of emancipation from daily common-sense humiliation. The vehicle driving that dream is an immense anger and the strategy of surviving is lying to rest the debris of memories of the last two decades.

The present as well as the past for the state is that of hegemony, a hegemony which is sustained either through tools and instruments of violence or imposed through the threat of that violence. That hegemony not only encapsulates the state’s actual policies but also its narrative. The hegemony in fashioning the minds, bodies and souls of the citizens through arbitrary and whimsical dictates of unelected portion of the state is total. That hegemony has become the common sense politics of the state and common sense existence of the people when it comes to bond and arrangement with the state. The stepping stone of that common sense is that army, its decisions, its structure, its role and its policies which can’t be questioned. Both the ideological and secular reason de etre of the state places the supremacy of the security state on the survivalist line of argument; the ideological core blessing the security state as a prophecy to safeguard Muslim Ummah while the secular variant extends the exterior and interior threats to argue for de-facto existence of a security state. The de-jure structure of the state, the promise of democracy, justice, due human dignity and rights can always be sacrificed at the altar of survivalist imperative. The de-jure state promises citizens’ rights, the de-facto state makes it common sense that those rights can be disposed of with and not inviting even a mere criticism. The de-jure state promises a federation; the de-facto state makes it common sense politics to divide the state into a strategic core and periphery. The de-jure state commits itself to equality; the de-facto makes it common sense that some people will have lesser lives while others have some values accorded to their lives.

And in here lies the challenge of Pashtun national consciousness and of national identity of other small nations in Pakistan who are not willing to forego their collective memory of existence and subsume their identities in that of Pakistan. The focus here can be Pashtun national consciousness because it is the most subversive threat to that of the established hegemony of the state’s. The reason being the numerical strength combined with spreading over multiple federal units of Pashtuns and the dispersion throughout the country as economic immigrants leaving their homes behind because of the wars imposed by the state and because of the asymmetric development policies of the state which sees Pashtun lands as the hinterland for strategic games. That challenge born out of Pashtun national consciousness is now taken the shape of PTM, whose emergence was spontaneous but which readily translated the unsayable grievances and anger to legal and constitutional articulation of a political program.

The depth of subversive promise of the lawful and constitutional demands of PTM is what is unsettling them. PTM in course of only a year propelled into the mainstream the duality of existence of lives under the state. It was a war affected activists and youth which put it out there in the open that there are two states: one the formal and the other the real; one the de-jure and the other the de-facto. By demanding equal treatment before the law and asking for the guarantees of the law it demanded the de-jure to become the de-facto and the formal to wrestle itself from the 'real'. It is not the demands per se but the state structure which will be the result if those demands are met which is making the 'real', the de-facto powers tremble at the sight of PTM.

The more you think the more it becomes clearer that the threat of PTM is to their whole project of narrative and image building which the army and security agencies have mastered in the last decade or two by making every blunder and human tragedy play for it. Think about it: suicide attacks all around, shootings all around, what will people do? Naturally they will turn around to the people who can save them from the horror and terror. When you are confronted by existential dread and the very real possibility of annihilation you don't question your saviors. And every bomb blast and every terrorist attack made them the saviors. Yes, there were voices pointing out to the complicity of the army in all this terror project and how its policies are protecting the Taliban and other terrorists. But it was a general calm until came along PTM. The technique of narrative dominance overwhelmed any opposing faint voices here and there. Having a state machinery backing up a narrative and having the mainstream print and electronic media controlled the social media activity was a fringe which couldn’t even produce ripples on margins of a huge lake. The Goebbelsian strategy of shouting the lies repeatedly until they become the common sense truth worked well for the state. But then came along PTM!

PTM said that we are the most affected of this existential annihilation and we are firsthand witnesses of how the saviors--the army--is complicit in our killings and that we need accountability. Herein lays the disruption of their whole image and their whole narrative. They had before used every tragedy to amass more power. APS happened and they had military courts. This happened and they had that budget increase. All was playing right to their plan till PTM happened. The problem was not that PTM was the first one to sabotage their image of being saviors. The problem was that it was saying it in the open with tens of thousands of people listening and all over the country. What to do of a small organization amassing this much attention and galvanizing this much popular support? Panic set in at the first sight but then the hope was that a carrot of engaging and dialogue and the stick of arrests and intimidation would stop it. But PTM was result of pain and the tolerance had reached to the critical level beyond which there was no return.

After carrot and stick, misguided young men and foreign agents, aggrieved youth and soldiers of fifth generation warfare, negotiations and arbitrary violence, cajoling and weaponizing every legal instrument, the latter finally won in minds of the powers that be. Stick, violence, labels of treason have become the final strategy for the state to reclaim its politics of common sense and to erase the Pashtun national consciousness once and for all, for the new dream of finally making Pakistan a totalitarian reality where one narrative, one image, one party and one wish will rule all, can’t stand any form of national consciousness which are not that of artificially constructed, ahistorical, rootless Pakistaniat.

Pashtun national consciousness born out of non-violence, memory and dream of a future is total antithesis to the colonial and post-colonial production of Pashtuns epistemologically as a violent category for whom only the dictates of political violence can be prescribed. The moment to erase that national consciousness couldn’t have been more urgent than today as PTM had contested the common sense in the periphery and through solidarity the mainland and mainstream have found vocabulary to speak the unsayable. The state has inexhaustible resources of violence, infinite resources to generate a narrative and maintain it but when a national consciousness is steeped into a tradition of resistance, a memory of pain and when a political program is articulated through logic of generational trauma then the only dream, the conscience can dream of, is that of a resistance sustaining and winning. This day is continuity of the colonial massacre of Qissa-Khwani and of early Pakistan’s massacre at Babarra. In that history Khar Qamar becomes a memory born in today which provides a dialectical unity of yesterday with today. A tomorrow has to be born where the images of Qissa Khwani, Babarra and Khar Qammar can be laid to rest. And when that tomorrow comes there will be a new future, which we only can dream of in today.