The Mapping Social Movements in Pakistan report of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan is an account of recent social activism in the country.

The report states that the first decade of the 21st Century featured several forms of contentious politics including the lawyers’ movement for the restoration of superior courts that culminated in a broad political movement against the Musharraf regime.

It also discusses nation-wide campaigns against privatisation of public utilities. Region and city-specific peasant and labour mobilisations for land rights and improved wages are also a part of the report. The struggle of public-sector workers for better service structures has also been highlighted. Additionally, the ethno-nationalist uprisings in peripheral regions, away from central Punjab districts, are also discussed. These social movements took place in isolation, without a broad-based network among activists and mobilisers that could synthesise the various particularistic struggles into a unified mass movement. There is a conscious effort to link various social movements.

To assess the relationship between these social movements and the democratisation process, the HRCP held a series of focus group discussions with the activists and organisers of various movements and with public intellectuals closely observing those. The broad themes were the students’ solidarity movement, the women’s rights movement, efforts to end enforced disappearances, protests by victims of urban development, public sector workers’ collectives, movements referring to ethnic identities and role of social media in social movements.

With regard to women’s activism, it was noted that until 2018, International Women’s Day (IWD) celebrations had been firmly established in the country as an instance of contained collective action. These would feature rallies, seminars, workshops and assembly resolutions. These events, when organised and attended by rights-based organisations and women activists themselves, would feature commemoration of past achievements, identification of present concerns and vows for future work. This signified quietist and reformist struggles for incremental change. Important as these events were for organisers, activists and participants, they lacked the power to disrupt and unsettle the various authorities that sustain patriarchal norms and structures. Since 2018, however, the contained collective activities have given way to a new form of public protest and expression under the banners of Aurat March Aurat Azadi March.

The scale and vibrancy of these have increased amid backlash from conservative and far-right segments of the society. The report notes that like earlier waves of women’s activism, the emergence of the contemporary wave is related to issues in the current political environment.

The report acknowledges that many of the legal and administrative processes have been reformed over time, and issues like domestic violence and sexual harassment have become part of the policy agenda. The results have been mixed. The state-centric activism of the Women Action Forum (WAF) and the transnational links established between civil society actors like rights NGOs and the UN system have enabled political reforms that have enhanced women’s participation in key decision-making bodies.

In the section on students politics, the report chronicles the country-wide students’ solidarity marches in November 2019 under the platform of the Students Action Committee (SAC) that had rekindled memories of earlier students’ mobilisations that had proved precursors to the anti-Ayub and anti-Musharraf movements. However, the extraordinary mobilisations and nation-wide scale of the marches in 2019 remained unmatched in 2020 and 2021. This may, in part, be due to a state-led crackdown on organisers besides the Covid-19-related precautions.

“The Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement came forward as anti-authoritarian. The most spectacular and disruptive mobilisations in the year 2018 were by the PTM. It began as a modest long march towards Islamabad by Mehsud youth from Dera Ismail Khan. However, the numbers at the caravan grew exponentially after the news of extrajudicial killing of an aspiring social media model from Karachi, Naqeebullah Mehsud,” the report notes. Concluding the sit-in, Manzoor Pashteen, 22, who had by then emerged as the face of the PTM, maintained that they reserved the right to return [to protest] if the state did not deliver on its assurances.

Like women mobilisations, the PTM faces the difficult task of sustaining mobilisation in the face of a status quo resistant to change. This includes a virtual blackout by mainstream media.

With the year of spectacular mobilisations behind it, the PTM has since evolved into two distinct yet inter-related trajectories: a faction representing the voice of the lower-middle- and working-class youth in the PTM leadership has sought to continue the ‘movement.’ The other faction, mostly representing the upper-middle class segment of the leadership (from families of Maliks who resisted the Taliban and were brutalised for it) has formed a political party. Giving voice to the former, Manzoor Pashteen insists, “We are a movement of the aggrieved Pashtun. If we form a political party, we will lose support of other parties.”

The author works for The News. He can be contacted at sherali9984@gmail.com