During Gen. Zia’s rule, the Pakistani state and society experienced a profound process of decadence, plunging the country into a long-term decline that cannot be attributed to a singular crisis; rather, it was the product of systemic institutional decay engineered under a decades-long dictatorship, accompanied by societal anomie and hysteresis, whose effects persisted for decades to come. As change was in the air, some exiled Baloch, Pashtun, and Sindhi leaders, including Mumtaz Bhutto, Abdul Hafeez Pirzada, Ataullah Mengal, and Afzal Bangash, had already formed the Sindhi–Baloch–Pashtun Front (SBPF) in London in 1985 to fight for the rights of the smaller ethnic groups as administratively constituted within the provinces of the country. According to the Front, the 1973 Constitution had failed and the federal system was not delivering the protection needed for the rights of the smaller provinces. It therefore proposed a confederation in which the central government would exercise limited powers, retaining only defence, foreign affairs, and currency, while advocating greater provincial autonomy through control over a wider range of affairs, including taxation and natural resources, to counter Punjab’s demographic and political hegemony.

Nationalist parties from the NWFP, Sindh, and Balochistan, along with left-wing parties and groups, founded the Awami National Party (ANP) on July 28, 1986, with Wali Khan and Rasool Bux Palijo as its president and general secretary, respectively. It emerged as a left-wing party committed to the struggle for constitutional rights and democracy within the framework of Pakistan, with provincial autonomy as one of its key points of departure, alongside the struggle for the rights of workers, peasants, and minorities, secularism, anti-imperialism, an independent foreign policy, and regional peace.

It was a welcome development in the new era, as nationalists and progressives joined hands in the struggle for oppressed nationalities, subaltern classes, and communities in the light of Left politics, while seeking to counter imperialist designs and policies. However, this political alternative was short-lived, as Baloch and Sindhi leadership retreated into their respective ethnic politics and the ANP gradually became predominantly a Pashtun party. The ideological confusion and political fragmentation that followed became quintessential features of ethno-linguistic movements during the 1980s and 1990s.

The progressive nationalist struggles for self-determination had initially gained impetus in the light of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its influence across the colonial world. The hallmark of these movements was to work under enlightened and progressive leadership for a better world by forging international solidarity and waging a broader struggle against imperialism and its policies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Pashtun, Baloch, and Sindhi nationalist movements, despite their vacillations and compromises, adhered, in one way or another, to this worldview until the 1980s.

It was during this period that a transition took place from a nationalist struggle for self-determination towards ethno-linguistic politics aimed at safeguarding the interests of particular ethnic groups and their elites within the existing political framework. The ideological obfuscation and political euphemism associated with the so-called New World Order, articulated by George H. W. Bush in 1990–91, together with the ideologies of the free market and globalization and the expansion of information technology, marked the........

© The Friday Times