Why PTM matters

Why PTM matters

By: Khan Zaman Kakar

It was widely believed that the ethnic Pashtuns would never get politically united in a way as we have seen in the uprising managed by the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM). A newly established nationalist platform, it provides the oppressed Pashtuns with a possibility of a different politics — a long-awaited one, almost a forgotten one and a desired politics that can utilise and enhance human capabilities for emancipation.

Most of the popular studies on Pashtun political history, by overemphasising the existence of political and social divisions among Pashtuns, ignore an undeniable historical fact about Pashtuns — that they had managed to establish a stronger political unity than all other ethnic groups of present Pakistan against the British Empire in the twentieth century. The Khudai Khidmatgar Movement led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (Bacha Khan) was the largest political movement in the region that makes up today’s Pakistan.

Put differently, the analytical frameworks based on popular information and a divided Pashtun administrative and electoral landscape in Pakistan have been stuck in portraying fragmentations as an essential feature of the Pashtun polity. The largely ignored political fact is that Pashtuns have an ideologically rich legacy of progressive and anti-imperialist struggles. No one else but the Pashtun nationalists have been standing like a rock against terrorism and extremism since the 1980s.

Moreover, the popular perspective applied to this part of the world has established that the ethnic Pashtuns, who are so badly divided along class, geographical, administrative and tribal lines, could hardly be able to practically manage nationalism in the driving seat of their politics. The emergence of PTM proved this perspective as a flawed one. The PTM is now very much in the driving seat of politics in Pashtun society.

It was a shared experience of victimhood which has been instrumentalised in some very conscious efforts for reorganising the Pashtuns on a nationalist political line vis à vis the state of cruelty, and a manufactured ‘state of exception’ in the Pashtun homeland, particularly the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata).

The rise of the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, the ideological commitment and the growing number of people in it, shows that (a) Pashtuns are no more willing to buy the hegemonic state narrative about (in) security), (b) They have overwhelming political strength to resist someone else’s war on their land, (c) and they consider nationalism as a true representative of their aspirations.

The PTM has inspiringly challenged the politics of security — a technique of control over human lives. While building strong arguments on the primary data mostly collected from the war-trodden Fata, the PTM proves that security and terrorism are supplementary to each other in the Pashtun areas in the post 9/11 Pakistan.

The post 9/11 political dynamics have produced a new Pashtun political generation that is either itself subject to organised violence and structural inequality or is informed of the victimisation of its ‘imagined community’ on both sides of the Durand Line. That generation over years have negotiated the possibilities for a politics that could secure their lives from the regime of (in) security and (counter) terrorism.

Though the PTM specifically represents the ‘war on terror generation’ of the Pashtuns and their shared identity as a people badly suffering from structural inequalities, organised violence and ethnic cleansing, by creatively linking itself with the established nationalist narratives, it has so far succeeded in getting the support of ideologically and organisationally trained workers of the existing Pashtun political parties.

Truth be told, the PTM, through its nonconformist way of politics, has tested the organisational limits of the political parties and found them very weak in the face of the ongoing agitational wave. An overwhelming majority of the Pashtuns refuse to go with the politics of parliamentary compromises, ideological ambiguity and passivity.

Most importantly, the nature of current Pashtun uprising is neither of a purely spontaneous action nor is it a kind of civil society struggle that structurally plays the role of an intermediate sphere between the state and society in certain urban and metropolitan circumstances. The PTM is rather a more conscious political platform which appears as a result of conscious efforts for emancipation, and manages a space for a different politics in Pashtun society to secure Pashtun lives through the power of people, mass mobilisation, agitation, long marches, sit-ins etc.

The PTM is nationalist, it’s about Pashtun polity and it has emerged as a reaction to the coercion of the state, and strongly demands from the state to explain what the relationship it has with the ethnic Pashtuns in its territory.

The Pashtun Tahafuz Movement originally emerged from the offensively stereotyped ‘no man’s land’ or ‘the most dangerous place of the world’. What it tells the world is that Fata is inhibited and owned by human beings who can gather the courage to reclaim their land and identity; it also tells the world about who turned their land into this so-called ‘most dangerous place of the world’.

But, the PTM is no more Fata’s movement. It has successfully connected Fata with rest of the Pashtun homeland. It’s now a Pashtun movement. It goes global in terms of its humanitarian appeal and virtual outreach. The PTM matters because it is a genuine grass-root movement, the uprising of the subalterns or the movement ‘from the below’. The most fascinating aspect of this movement is that its leaders do not talk dirty politics. Rather it’s concerned about the issue — how to ideologically politicise the Pashtun youth in this counter revolutionary and anti-politics age.

The PTM is a non-violent movement, and it practically shows what Pashtun’s non-violence means in politics. It proves that Pashtuns can be united and Manzoor Ahmed Pashteen, as a symbol of Pashtun unity, can truly represent them at this crucial juncture of their history.

(Khan Zaman Kakar)

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