“Main Nahin Manta” I Refuse to Accept: The Left and the Struggle for Civil and Democratic Rights in Pakistan, 1947–1977

Abstract

The left of Pakistan presents the mirror image of the country’s religious right: a second movement without an electorate that conducted its politics through the public arena. This article reconstructs the left’s struggle for the civil, democratic, and federal rights of Pakistan’s citizens between 1947 and 1977, through the editorial voice of the Pakistan Times and Imroze, the assembly interventions against the safety acts, the student movement of 1953, the defense of the Bengali language and provincial autonomy, the resistance poetry that carried the argument past the censor, and the mass movement of 1968–69 that carried it into the streets. The state answered this arena, unlike the arena of the religious right, with bans, seizures, and imprisonment rather than concession: the Communist Party outlawed in 1954, the Progressive Papers seized in 1959, the movement’s energies absorbed and then repressed by the Pakistan People’s Party after 1972. Yet the left’s bequest proved durable in a different register. It wrote the democratic vocabulary of Pakistani politics, jumhur, dastoor, awam, fundamental rights, so completely that even the governments that broke it campaigned in its language, and its refusals, condensed in Habib Jalib’s refrain, outlived every regime they refused.

Keywords: Pakistani left; civil rights; democracy; press freedom; Progressive Papers; Habib Jalib; provincial autonomy; public arenas