Afghan Refugees and the Left in Sindh [English]
The question of Afghan migrants is a test case for Sindh’s Left, progressive, and nationalist groups.
This article, originally in Urdu (and available here), was written in December 2023 during a campaign by the Pakistani state to deport Afghan migrants and refugees. It responded to heated discussions on this issue among Sindh-based Left and nationalist groups. The article led to further debates between the author and comrades of the Critical Studies Forum and Porhiyat Muzahimat Tehreek (Workers Resistance Movement), Sindh.
Illustration: Jamhoor
The past few months have seen a heated political debate on the issue of Afghan migrants in Pakistan. While the state decided to deport nearly 1.7 million ‘undocumented’ refugees back to Afghanistan, the policy was loudly cheered on by everyone from the Prime Minister to the Army Chief and the Foreign Ministry. Meanwhile, the events triggered furious debate in Pakistan’s progressive circles, especially in the Left and nationalist circles of Sindh. Some groups strongly welcomed the news, while others were more cautious but supported it nonetheless. Passions ran high and took precedence over concrete analysis and a progressive, just, and revolutionary course of action. While passion is certainly essential to politics, this can be counterproductive if not grounded in concrete historical and dialectical analyses.
This essay aims to place the issue of Afghan refugees, particularly those in Sindh, within its historical and structural context, to help move us towards a truly progressive and pro-people course of action. Our analysis will closely examine four key aspects of this issue: the current crises of the Pakistani state and ruling elite along with their long-term economic and strategic tendencies; the importance of the national question; the demographics of the Afghan refugee population; and the objective role played by the liberal and intellectual circles of Sindh.
Social Crisis, Ideological Offensive
It is evident that the Pakistani state currently faces its deepest and most serious crisis of the last half century. In the political sphere, the establishment is locked in a seemingly irresolvable contradiction with their last popular fig leaf, Imran Khan. In the economic sphere, it faces a spiraling inflation crisis, and more alarmingly, an insurmountable burden of debt owed to global financial institutions and other countries.
Importantly, the ruling bloc’s tried-and-tested solution out of such crises over the past half-century – taking on mercenary warfare at the behest of imperialist and semi-imperialist powers – is also no longer viable. As American imperialism has shifted its attention away from the so-called War on Terror in this region, the wellspring of civil and military aid to the Pakistani elite has all but dried up (from around $4 billion USD in 2010-11 to just about $1 billion now). At the same time, rapidly ballooning foreign debt payments (from $12 billion/year in 2021 to soon touch a staggering $20 billion) have pushed the treasury towards bankruptcy. In fact, the government has resorted to charging Afghan deportees travelling to countries other than Afghanistan (like the US or UK) a fine of $800 per person, in a venal ploy to further squeeze people who are already dispossessed.
On the other hand, Pakistan’s military leadership, which pulled out all the stops to install a ‘friendly’ Afghan Taliban government in power after the American withdrawal has failed to reap the desired reward for their ‘noble’ service. The Pakistani leadership was expecting a grateful Afghan Taliban government to help them rein in Pakistani Taliban outfits operating from Afghan territory. Au contraire, the Pakistani Taliban and other such militant organisations have been further emboldened by the triumph of the Afghan Taliban. Owing to a resurgence in their activities within Pakistan, the state and military establishment have been trying to find newer avenues to pressure Afghan leadership.
“ In a system predicated on unequal and hierarchical distribution of power, the development of national questions and consciousness cannot be dismissed merely as ‘false consciousness’ or conspiracy by a particular class.”
This is how Afghan ‘migrants’ (including many generations who were in fact born and raised in Pakistan) have become unfortunate victims of the pincer movement between wider socio-economic crises in Pakistan and the state’s hare-brained foreign policies. As Sanaa Alimia has shown in her recent book, Refugee Cities, the state’s attitude towards Afghan refugees has been capricious, often vengeful for the past half-century. They have been driven out of Pakistan through direct and indirect means, often in reaction to tensions with the Afghan government. At their peak in 2005, there were 8 million Afghan residents in Pakistan. Today that number has fallen to less than half – around 3.5 million – of which approximately half are ‘registered’ while the rest are unregistered or “illegal”. Thus, Pakistan’s policy of expelling Afghan refugees, and its attendant maneuvering, propaganda, and ideological onslaught, is both part of a historical continuity, and an attempt to deflect public attention, anger, and frustration away from the state’s recent economic and foreign policy failures.
However, alongside these immediate crises, state policy and propaganda on Afghan refugees is also connected with wider dynamics of popular consciousness and ‘common sense’ which need further examination. It is crucial to understand this aspect of the issue, particularly in the context of Sindh and its national question.
The National Question
The capitalist system, linked intrinsically as it is to colonialism, imperialism, and social and geographical unevenness, generates from its womb the national question. Regional and power-based hierarchies that form under capitalism, and the system’s reliance on a state structure (with attendant economic, cultural and geographic effects), all lay the ground for the emergence of national consciousness and politics. In a system predicated on unequal and hierarchical distribution of power, the development of national questions and consciousness cannot be dismissed merely as ‘false consciousness’ or conspiracy by a particular class. In a postcolonial and multiethnic polity like Pakistan, there can be no pro-people politics without a concrete understanding of the reality and significance of this question; if disregarded, one would only engage in a detached and abstract politics.
In Pakistan, and especially in Sindh, the question of national identity and oppression is linked with the hierarchies and dispossessions of land, language, and labour. Linguistic and regional differences among Pakistan’s working masses often map on to occupational, regional, and urban-rural patterns. In Karachi, for example, Pashtun workers are concentrated in the transportation and construction sectors, while Urdu-speaking migrants have historically held ‘skilled’, technical, and managerial positions. Of course, these occupational differences are not absolute but indicate general and historical trends. In a similar vein, the state’s deliberate efforts to suppress national languages – especially Sindhi – in favor of Urdu are no secret.
Moreover, it is Sindhi farmers and workers who have historically borne the brunt of land dispossession, while different sections of the elite have been the beneficiaries. After the partition of 1947, 2 million acres of land vacated by those who left for India was distributed among Sindhi landlords and migrants coming to Pakistan, instead of landless Sindhi peasants and workers. In the 1950s and '60s, land appropriated for agriculture through the newly constructed barrages was also distributed among non-Sindhi members of the civil and military bureaucracy. In recent times, the paramilitary Rangers’ seizure of the Indus Delta and the military’s land grab of 50,000 acres in the garb of corporate farming merely continues this sordid history.
“Promoting a popular ‘national consciousness’, as opposed to an elite-centered ‘nationalism’, is essential for a progressive and pro-people future”
These colonial patterns of governance, along with ongoing cultural and economic dispossessions, form the social bases of Sindh’s national question and its ideological weight. At the same time, however, it is important to ascertain which groups’ collective interests are being represented through the different expressions of the national question. Is the national question and consciousness being formulated such that a rhetoric of unity is suppressing real social fault-lines in favour of elite and powerful interests? Or is ‘the nation’ being defined in such a manner that centres the interests of those most oppressed? Thus, promoting a popular ‘national consciousness’, as opposed to an elite-centered ‘nationalism’, is essential for a progressive and pro-people future.
Keeping in mind these objective bases of national consciousness, we now turn to a concrete analysis of Sindh and the engagement of its progressive circles with the Afghan issue.
Afghan Refugees in Sindh: Facts, Fallacies, and Politics
As discussed above, most progressive and nationalist organisations in Sindh implicitly or explicitly supported the Pakistani state’s deportation of Afghan refugees. This has been justified on various pretexts: the influx of migrants threatening demographic change in Sindh; the deprivation of Sindhis from Sindh’s own resources and their control by non-natives instead; and even the idea that Afghan migration is a deliberate state strategy to alter Sindh’s demography. However, these justifications are based less on fact and more on fallacious or partial observations.
Let us first consider the issue of resource distribution and under-development in Sindh. As mentioned previously, the Afghan population in Pakistan, even at its peak in 2005, was around 8 million. In the past decade and a half, with the Pakistani state’s hot-and-cold approach, less than half, around 3.5 million people, remains today. In fact, Human Rights Watch described the exodus in 2017 as “the world’s largest unlawful mass forced return of refugees in recent times”.
We must ask, therefore, whether the return of more than half the population over 15 years has resulted in any noticeable improvement to human development in Sindh or Pakistan at large. If around 20% of children under the age of five in Sindh are still acutely malnourished today, if 35% suffer from severe stunting, if Sindh lags behind most other regions of Pakistan on all indicators of maternal health, and if food insecurity is approaching crisis levels in 8 of Sindh’s 30 districts — even in the absence of half the Afghan population — we must question whether they can be blamed for this mess at all.
We can go even further. According to United Nations data, of the total Afghan population in Pakistan, only 5.5% reside in Sindh, while 76% live in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan combined, and 14% in Punjab. Similarly, the Pakistan Department of Statistics estimates a population of 120,000 Afghans in Karachi Division and around 126,000 in Hyderabad Division. Even if these figures are severely underestimated, and the population is actually twice the size, Afghans will not exceed 10-15% of the population in these divisions. In fact, their proportion is even lower in other parts of Sindh. So, overall, if a very small section of Pakistan’s total Afghan population is settled in Sindh, barely 10% in most areas, and if most of them are from poor and working-class backgrounds, how can they be held responsible for taking over Sindh’s resources or for large-scale deprivation in the province?
It is true that there is a growing middle class or petit bourgeois section of Pashtuns and Afghans, which is overrepresented in certain sectors like transport, chai restaurants, and others. It may also be true that Pashtuns’ higher representation (relative to Sindhis) in the Pakistani military grants them greater access within certain sections of the state. But this is less the result of a sinister plot and more a consequence of the patterns of unevenness through which the colonial and postcolonial state, society, and economy has evolved in Pakistan. Where Urdu-speaking Muhajirs once dominated the bureaucracy, since the Bhutto-era reforms and especially the 18th Constitutional Amendment, Sindhi speakers have considerably increased in the provincial administration including the police.
As such, friction between Sindhis and Pashtuns is often rooted in entrenched occupational hierarchies among the working classes, and more importantly, the disparities and fault-lines between the middle/petit bourgeois classes in affairs of trade, business, and the state. It is not a coincidence that the murder of Bilal Kaka in 2022 and subsequent eruption of Sindhi-Pashtun violence in the province began at a highway truck hotel, due to a dispute over extortion payments.
As the shrinking socioeconomic base of the Pakistani state and economy creates greater internal unevenness and instability, it would not be surprising for this to cause further conflict among the middle and working classes. But it is also equally evident that Afghan migrants are not the ones responsible for the situation facing Sindh.
It thus becomes imperative to identify the structural bases of the disparities we observe, develop a strategic and progressive course of action, and critically examine the role of progressive forces and intelligentsia in this context.
Protesters targeted Pashtun-owned restaurants near Jamshoro Bridge in Hyderabad as tensions between Sindhi and Pashtun communities escalated following the death of Bilal Kaka. Image: DAWN
A (Non-)Strategic Approach
Capitalism, especially in its colonial and postcolonial manifestations, necessarily produces regional and geographical inequalities. In Pakistan, these regional disparities are linked to both the economic imperatives and security policies of the state. Economic disparities were institutionalized under colonial rule, through the creation of canal colonies in central Punjab, and the economic growth of Karachi at the expense of the rest of Sindh. The urban areas of Sindh, especially Karachi, became centres of infrastructural development and drew large numbers of migrant workers even in the postcolonial era. Later, underdevelopment in the rest of Pakistan, changing patterns of land ownership, and multiple ‘natural’ and man-made disasters generated further waves of migration to urban Sindh.
A second factor contributing to Afghan and Pashtun migration is the continuation of colonial modes of governance in Pakistan. Under British rule, the regions that became Pakistan, especially its frontiers with Afghanistan, were designated crucial for a geostrategic ‘Great Game’. By the same token, the Pakistani state went out of its way to facilitate the geostrategic maneuvering and warfare waged in this region by the new imperium, the United States. At the behest of imperial patrons, and in its infinite geostrategic wisdom, Pakistan’s military elite has orchestrated blood-soaked misadventures in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Pashtun belt since the 1970s.
Thus, the Pakistani ruling bloc’s catastrophic foreign and security policies compounded economic deprivation and further catalyzed Afghan and Pashtun migration. This is how both the strategic and economic factors driving Afghan migration are integrally linked with the postcolonial state and economic system. And thus, the toxic deportation campaign against Afghan migrants reflects both the state’s current and long-gestating crises.
If we accept, for a moment, the debatable claim that Afghan migration is a dire issue in Sindh, and if we concede that the drivers of this migration are the historical and internal contradictions of the Pakistani state and economy, then it becomes quite absurd to believe that the issue can be solved by echoing the state’s own narratives. To grapple with the issue of migration, we will first need to challenge and overturn the economic unevenness produced by capitalism and the colonial modes of the Pakistani state – or at minimum, to weaken the system as it currently stands.
For Sindh’s progressive and nationalist groups to believe that the ‘problem’ of Afghan migration can be resolved by relying on the very state, economic structures, and coercive apparatus that are responsible for creating it in the first place is void of both reason and strategy.
Popular Intellectuals or Public Intellectuals
Sindh’s intelligentsia, progressives, and intellectuals have played a crucial but disappointing role on the issue of Afghan deportations. This includes both Sindhi- and Urdu-speaking educated classes. The Urdu-speaking intelligentsia have historically promoted a non-democratic, centralized, and abstract form of Pakistani and Islamic nationalism, which has not only dismissed, but actively suppressed, the national question in Sindh. On the other hand, the Muhajir (later Muttahida) Qaumi Movement (MQM) cultivated a narrow and reductive Muhajir nationalism which sought to resolve the national question in Sindh (and its linked questions of land and identity) along divisive and fascistic lines.
“Contrary to their stated positions and individual liberalism, the objective role of [Sindh’s progressive intellectuals] has been conservative, even reactionary, and in favour of the ruling elite.”
Moreover, the Sindhi-speaking middle class, and intellectual circles in particular, have gradually been incorporated into seemingly liberal institutional structures patronized by the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), such as Arts Councils, Press Clubs, ‘cultural festivals’ of various stripes, and selected ‘civil society’ groups. While these intellectuals often adopt seemingly democratic and progressive political positions, at key political moments they have stood by the PPP and, by association, with the wider state structure. A clear example was their support for the PPP during the state crackdown on the protest march against the Bahria Town real-estate empire in 2021.
The deportation of Afghan migrants is the most recent instance where these intellectuals have aligned with the state narrative and served to channel Sindh’s oppositional consciousness in favour of the powerful and against the oppressed. This is how the issue of Afghan migrants has become a critical juncture where Sindh’s national question, its political consciousness and practice, loses its oppositional character by aligning itself with the state, due primarily to the parochialism of its intellectuals.
Almost a century ago, the Italian revolutionary and philosopher Antonio Gramsci critiqued intellectuals from the middle and feudal classes of the underdeveloped southern areas of Italy in broadly similar terms. Gramsci examined the historical and structural role of southern intellectuals to show that rather than organizing the masses of the Italian south against the state and feudal system, these intellectuals instead served to reconcile them with the ruling elite. Rather than forging alliances between the southern peasantry and northern working class, their actions were serving to diminish the national question and the reality of stark economic unevenness in southern Italy. In this way, by integrating the masses of the South into structures of power, and by crushing dissenting forces, this seemingly liberal intellectual class paved the way for fascism. That is the reason Gramsci excoriated his comrades from the socialist party and called the renowned liberal philosopher from southern Italy, Benedetto Croce, the “lay Pope” of fascism and elite monopoly.
In this light, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to say that in the case of Afghan migrants and refugees, the intellectual, liberal and mostly progressive groups of Sindh have played a role in subsuming the people’s national consciousness and revolutionary potential into the structures of the state. This act serves to further solidify the ruling classes and their oppressive structures, recreating the same conditions of inequality and instability that germinated ethnic violence, ethnic hostility, and internal migration. Contrary to their stated positions and individual liberalism, the objective role of these groups in Sindh’s politics has been conservative, even reactionary, and in favour of the ruling elite.
What is needed is for progressive middle-class intellectuals to be cognizant of their concrete role and take responsibility for it. Middle class assumptions and prejudices (a product of the social fault-lines mentioned above) often do not match the everyday realities and popular solidarities forged by the masses. As such, our activists and intellectuals will have to abandon traditional intellectualism to become peoples’ intellectuals.
Afghans walking along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border as they move to Afghanistan. Image: AFP via Getty Images
This does not mean that all workers will be automatically united or that building unity amongst them is a simple process. That is exactly why progressive workers, activists, and intelligentsia have a pivotal role. This role requires them to grasp the specific processes underlying regional inequality, migration and ethnic violence, while building popular understanding about them. They should recognize the varied historical relationships of different ethnic and national groups to the land, while also countering prejudices within their own communities against others.
“The national question in Sindh cannot be resolved through a facile Pakistani nationalism, an abstract liberal humanism, or a mechanical class unity.”
Such a unity would neither be given nor abstract. On the contrary, we will have to forge a concrete unity among diverse sections of the working classes through a recognition of their subjective and objective differences. Multiple historical factors and processes have shaped highly diverse societies in our (sub-)national regions, especially Sindh. This does not mean that there is no national question anymore. But resolving these questions and contradictions through an honest, pro-people course of action is now imperative. We have no choice other than to forge a concrete unity that finds points of convergence through this diversity. It is only through such a concrete unity that we can challenge our true oppressors and dismantle their structure of socio-geographical inequality and neo-colonial rule. Failing that, the state, its system of oppressions, and the intellectuals directly or indirectly allied with it, will keep instrumentalising diversity in reactionary and divisive ways.
The national question in Sindh cannot be resolved through a facile Pakistani nationalism, an abstract liberal humanism, or a mechanical class unity. It requires taking account of the specific histories, relationships and emotions that bind people to land and nation. It is in the struggle over these that elements of a pro-people and expansive unity will have to be clarified and generalised. This is a “concrete universalism”, one produced from within the patterns of difference and belonging engendered by the system. It is also such a “unity-through-distinction” that is the hallmark of a truly dialectical political practice.
Note: The original version of this article in Urdu is available at this link.
Ayyaz Mallick is an academic and member of Awami Workers’ Party, Karachi.