Per Building the Future, una raccolta di ricerca sulla costruzione socialista contemporanea, esaminiamo il Partito Haqooq-e-Khalq — un movimento studentesco che divenne un partito politico della classe operaia pakistana.

“Avevamo letto Marx, avevamo letto Mao, avevamo letto Fidel. Ma quando siamo arrivati a Chungi, abbiamo visto che persone che non avevano mai sentito questi nomi conoscevano Marx. Hanno vissuto Marx.” 

— Dott.ssa Alia Haider

Sono venuto in città in un periodo di disordine Quella era governata dalla fame. Mi sono rifugiato con la gente in un periodo di tumulto E poi mi sono unito alla loro ribellione.

— Bertold Brecht

Introduzione: I limiti del riformismo

Il 29 novembre 2019, studenti di oltre cinquanta città in tutto il Pakistan sono scesi in piazza. La Marcia per la Solidarietà Studentesca — la prima rivolta di massa studentesca da decenni — chiese il ripristino delle unioni studentesche, la fine degli aumenti delle tasse e la smilitarizzazione dei campus. Fu organizzata dal Comitato d’Azione Studentesca, con il sostegno del Movimento Haqooq-e-Khalq (HKM), dei sindacati e delle organizzazioni contadine. Migliaia di persone si unirono alle manifestazioni. Nel giro di pochi giorni, lo stato ha risposto. Furono presentate accuse di sedizione contro gli organizzatori, tra cui il fondatore di HKM Ammar Ali Jan e l’organizzatore sindacale Farooq Tariq. Ali Jan fu dichiarato “una minaccia alla sicurezza pubblica” dal Vice Commissario di Lahore e detenuto ai sensi dell’ordinanza coloniale sul mantenimento dell’ordine pubblico.

The march had achieved some gains. One province even announced it would lift the ban on student unions. Yet the state’s response revealed the limits of movement politics within Pakistan’s existing political architecture. On the whole, appeals go unanswered. The protests swell, then dissipate. The charges remain and state repression continues with each new wave of protest. Facing such an impasse, a movement may fall back on the false comforts of reformism — writing more letters, making more appeals. Or it may take seriously its mission and reassess the tactics, strategies, and theories that power it — a process that compels the activist to become an archaeologist, digging up the past to construct new blueprints for the present.

For the HKM, that impasse proved decisive. For years, the student movement had been dominated by the wealthier strata of Pakistani society — higher education remains largely beyond the reach of the Pakistani working class and peasantry. But a politics untethered from the actual conditions of working people’s lives can do little to resolve the deep structural challenges facing Pakistani society. The transformation necessary to ensure a dignified life for Pakistan’s people would not be delivered from above; it had to be built by and for the country’s working class and peasantry. From January 2023, that recognition would carry the movement’s organizers to the muddied streets of Chungi Amar Sidhu, an impoverished working-class neighborhood in Lahore — and from there, to the construction of a new kind of political organization.

“This is how atomized individuals experiencing exploitation activate as political subjects who are no longer at the whims of the ruling class. This is the cycle of revolutionary construction; this is how socialism and democracy are built.”

This is how the Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement became the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (HKP) — the people’s rights party. The HKP emerged from the recognition that transforming Pakistan requires more than appeals to existing institutions. It requires the construction of alternative structures of popular power through which working people could develop and advance their own political demands. A movement for the oppressed would not bring about change — what was needed was a new movement of the oppressed, one that could embody and advance their common aspirations. 

In Pakistan, the political landscape is a carefully-constructed “patronage machine”. Different factions of the ruling class — the military, the feudal lords, and the comprador capitalists — vie for power, while systematically sidelining working people from any meaningful participation. This exclusion is structural, rooted in the material arrangements of power that emerged and evolved since the partition of the subcontinent. The Pakistani state apparatus, inherited from colonial administration and later developed through military-bureaucratic structures, serves primarily to mediate between competing elite interests while maintaining the fundamental architecture of exploitation.

Here, both reformist and purely humanitarian approaches of contemporary social activism come against fundamental limitations. A state designed to exclude working people from power cannot be appealed to — not in ways that deliver durable change. And, while organizing humanitarian efforts can offer some relief, such interventions fail to address the systemic reproduction of poverty and oppression. The recognition of these limitations creates the objective conditions for moving away from the politics of the non-governmental organization or reformist movement — long dominant in the political architecture of the Pakistani opposition — in pursuit of revolutionary alternatives.

The HKP’s formation thus represents more than simply another political party entering Pakistan’s electoral arena. It constitutes an attempt to construct a political organization capable of developing and advancing the aspirations of the working masses while preparing them for the eventual task of governance. And it represents a conscious effort to break past the impasses of past political strategies. “On the Pakistani left, you either had anarchist types saying, ‘everything around the world and everything that’s happened on the history of the left is wrong,’” Ammar Ali Jan said, “or you had those who were nostalgic.” The party sought to overcome both tendencies by building a new political vehicle that would be firmly rooted in the Pakistani working class. 

The Struggle for Communism in Pakistan

Pakistan’s left-wing political tradition reached its zenith during the 1960s, a period characterized by militant mobilization and ambitious visions for social transformation. This period saw the articulation of sophisticated analyses of Pakistan’s position within global capitalist structures and the development of concrete strategies for addressing the interconnected challenges of feudalism, capitalism, and neocolonial dependency.

But by the 1980s and 1990s, the socialist alternative that had once appeared imminent had largely been dismantled. This transformation represented a dual assault — driven by forces both global and domestic — that fundamentally reshaped the battleground of political struggle. Globally, the Soviet Union’s eventual collapse ripped away a vital lifeline of ideological and material support, ushering in a prolonged winter for socialist movements worldwide. Domestically, Pakistan’s ruling classes developed increasingly sophisticated strategies of cooptation that effectively neutralized working-class political organization.

These co-optation strategies operated through complex systems of patronage and clientelism designed to remove workers and peasants from meaningful participation in popular power. Alongside direct confrontation, the state apparatus became adept at a more sophisticated game: absorbing popular discontent and funneling it into clientelistic networks tightly controlled by local power brokers. To get anything done, the right people had to be paid or appealed to — a politics that eroded popular organization and fragmented the labor struggle. 

The Pakistani state that took shape in this process reflected a complex web of competing yet compatible ruling class interests. Capitalist, feudal, and neocolonial elements existed in permanent contradiction at the surface level while maintaining underlying unity around the preservation of systems of exploitation and exclusion. This arrangement provoked frequent changes in officeholders without corresponding changes in the conditions facing the Pakistani people. The military-bureaucratic apparatus continued to operate as the ultimate arbiter of political conflicts, maintaining its role as kingmaker while adapting to changing circumstances.

The consequences of the left’s fragmentation extended beyond organizational decline. As working-class movements collapsed, right-wing forces filled the vacuum. This reflected developments across South Asia. In Mumbai, the Shiv Sena had replaced communist textile unions. In West Bengal, former communist strongholds came to vote for the Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This analysis shaped the HKP’s strategic orientation from the start. The party rejected the widespread assumption that social movements necessarily lean towards progressive politics. Instead, the political content of a movement is defined by organizations that are anchored in the masses — organizations that can take various forms and represent various ideologies. The lesson for Pakistan was clear: what mattered more than waiting for a social eruption was doing the organizational work — building institutions, sustaining a presence among the working class — prior to the emergence of a social upheaval or revolutionary situation.

It was in this context that the HKP took shape. The choice of Chungi as a site for party-building reflects this historical consciousness. Rather than attempting to reconstruct the left within the intellectual or student circles that had long been the domain of oppositional politics, the HKP’s founders recognized the necessity of grounding revolutionary politics within the experiences of Pakistan’s most oppressed people. This represented a conscious departure from the patterns that had contributed to the earlier left’s fragmentation and isolation — and an attempt to revive the long-lost traditions of Pakistan’s radical political movement. 

From Student Movement to Working-Class Organization

This evolution of the HKM into the HKP passed through several stages. In the wake of the 2019 student mobilizations and the state repression that followed, the question of whether the HKM should remain a movement or formalize as a party became the subject of intense internal debate. The Covid-19 pandemic, which struck Pakistan in 2020, accelerated the answer. As the state abandoned working communities to the virus and the economic devastation it brought, the HKM organized food drives, health camps, and vaccine awareness campaigns. 

In Chungi, schools reported a fifteen percent drop in enrollment as the economic crisis hit working families. The HKM organized book drives, mobilized international donations, arranged scholarships, assembled summer camps, and ran a free evening school for children who had dropped out. These experiences confirmed what the 2019 impasse had suggested: the movement needed institutional form. In March 2022, at a mass gathering in Lahore that brought together working people from across the city and surrounding areas, the HKM announced it would register as a political party and contest elections. The party was formally registered with the Election Commission of Pakistan in November 2022. In January 2023, Ammar Ali Jan and a small group of organizers entered the working communities of Chungi to begin building the party’s base.

The strategic significance of Chungi extends beyond its demographic characteristics to encompass its position within Lahore’s broader urban geography. Located in stark proximity to the Defence Housing Authority (DHA) districts that house Pakistan’s military and professional elites, Chungi manifests the class contradictions that define Pakistani society — with conditions so stark that they truncate the lives of those who live there. When HKM organizers tested the water supply in Chungi and surrounding neighborhoods, for example, they found it was contaminated with sewage. In the neighboring settlement of Shareef Pura, Dr. Alia Haider — the party’s health secretary in Punjab — was organizing free medical camps when she noticed an alarming pattern. A young woman came to her for a checkup. Judging by her appearance, Dr. Haider assumed she was nine or ten years old. She was seventeen. This was not an anomaly. Children across the neighborhood displayed stunted growth, blackened teeth, and swollen gums. Women reported frequent miscarriages and stillbirths. 

The HKP brought in Dr. Nousheen Zaidi, a cancer biologist at Punjab University and a party member, who assembled a team of students to test blood, water, and soil samples from three hundred households. The results were devastating. Fifty-two percent of Shareef Pura’s residents were anemic. In nearby Shadipura, where iron foundries melted scrap metal containing lead, eighty-two percent of children suffered from anemia and thirty-six percent of women had experienced miscarriages. The lead content in Shadipura’s soil reached 22,900 parts per million — nearly sixty times the level at which the United States Environmental Protection Agency prohibits children from playing outdoors. When Dr. Zaidi’s team presented their findings to the Water and Sanitation Authority (WASA), they were told the contamination was not WASA’s jurisdiction. The team then sent WASA samples of branded bottled water with added lead; government laboratories declared it clean and safe. 

The lead crisis became a paradigmatic case for the HKP’s approach to party formation. The health camps they established would treat symptoms, while generating political knowledge about the conditions of working class life in these communities — and the chain of corporate and state complicity that sustained them. The party channeled this knowledge into collective demands — for water purification filters, soil remediation, and the enforcement of environmental regulations — and began preparing legal challenges to force state accountability. This methodology drew explicitly from successful revolutionary experiences in Cuba and China, where mass movements emerged through coalitions combining peasants, intellectuals, women, workers, and youth to address the concrete challenges of life under feudal, colonial, and imperialist structures. As Dr. Alia Haider, an HKP organizer, explained: “We had read Marx, we had read Mao, we had read Fidel. But when we arrived in Chungi, we saw that people who had never heard these names knew Marx. They lived Marx.” 

The transition from movement to party reflected a recognition that external representation alone could not awaken working-class subjectivity or reassert the popular protagonism of working people. As Ali Jan said: “The Pakistani working class does not exist as an independent political subject. It exists in a state of non-being, unable to assert its interests.” To awaken the working class, it was necessary to build “the subjective factor of the revolution — the party — with all the patience, consistency and courage that this requires.”

This theoretical framework draws from the Marxist analysis of political parties as vehicles for representing class interests. More often than not, capitalist societies lack political parties that represent the working class — instead, they have a host of parties representing various factions of the ruling class. That is why it is imperative to form a party of the working people. The historic mission of such a party is to contain, develop, and advance the aspirations of the working masses. Without such organizational vehicles, working-class political activity remains fragmented and ultimately subordinated to bourgeois political logic. The party serves as the institutional mechanism through which scattered individual experiences of exploitation and resistance can be synthesized into coherent political strategy and collective action.

The practical implementation of these theoretical insights required developing strategies capable of sustaining long-term political work while maintaining connection to immediate community needs. The HKM’s early activities, for example, focused on addressing sanitation crises through community mobilization for street cleaning and canal maintenance. These initiatives served multiple functions: providing immediate material improvements, demonstrating the potential of collective action, and creating spaces for political discussion and education.

Organizing the Working People of Lahore: Practical Strategies for Popular Power

The HKP’s approach integrates institutionalization — the process of building structures capable of organizing people to respond to their immediate community needs — with political education and mobilization. 

The establishment of weekly health camps in 2022, led by Dr. Alia Haider, exemplified this approach. These initiatives emerged from recognition that the conditions facing working-class communities could not simply be redressed in the ways that NGOs addressed them, through technical or humanitarian interventions. Fundamentally, they were political problems. As Dr. Alia explained: “As we began to organize the first of our free medical camps, we saw that the devastation facing the working classes was beyond our capacity to help them as a movement. So we had to not only develop the infrastructure to support these people, but also cultivate a politics of solidarity.”

The opening of the Khalq Clinic in August 2023 marked a major advancement of this process. It sets up free medical camps in working class neighborhoods across Lahore. Beyond the provision of essential care, the clinic had a political aim: it demonstrated the possibility of organizing society according to principles of collective welfare rather than individual profit. The attendance of the Cuban ambassador at the clinic’s opening ceremony symbolically connected these local efforts to broader traditions of medical internationalism and socialist construction.

The party’s educational initiatives followed a similar logic. In Chungi, the HKP established five vocational schools offering courses in English, computer literacy, financial management, and business. These programs addressed immediate needs for skill development while creating spaces for political education that raised the consciousness of both the workers in Chungi and the university students who organized with the HKP. The electoral campaign of February 2024 provided opportunities for testing and expanding these organizational approaches. The mobilization of seven hundred campaign workers, including seventeen-year-old alumni of the vocational schools who managed complex voter registration processes, demonstrated the party’s success in developing local leadership and governance capacities. 

Although that first electoral campaign resulted in only 2,174 votes across multiple polling stations, the HKP’s leadership correctly interpreted these results within broader strategic objectives. The campaign had achieved its primary goals of expanding organizational capacity, deepening community relationships, and demonstrating the possibility of alternative political approaches. Unlike mainstream parties that only ever visited the neighborhood during electoral campaigns, the HKP maintained a permanent presence and continued expanding its activities.

The party’s success in workplace organizing demonstrated the centrality of developing organic working-class leadership. Key to this process was Baba Latif Ansari. Baba Latif never completed his schooling. He came from a humble background and had started as a religious activist before redefining his understanding of struggle — recasting “jihad” as workplace justice. In 2003, he founded the Labour Qaumi Movement to combat the exploitation of industrial workers. In 2014, factory owners attempted to assassinate him; he survived. By the time he became president of the HKP’s Punjab chapter, he became a powerful trade union leader and among the most important voices for the working class in Pakistan.

Alongside Baba Latif, a second organic leader emerged from the Chawla factory: Maulana Shahbaz, a worker and a religious cleric. The Chawla factory struggle began with a basic scandal: workers were receiving sixteen thousand Pakistani rupees per month — roughly sixty US dollars — when the legal minimum wage was thirty-two thousand. The workers did not know what to do. The HKP stepped in and worked alongside them to organize a demand for higher pay. A subsequent government intervention raised wages to twenty-three thousand rupees — the largest increase since 2001. When the government announced a new minimum of thirty-seven thousand rupees, another round of education and organizing followed. Shahbaz emerged as a leading voice and spoke at the HKP’s first workers’ conference at Kot Lakhpat in July 2024, alongside workers from other factories. The next day he was fired. Within five minutes, workers stopped production and walked out in solidarity — an act that was, by all accounts, unprecedented in the area.

The HKP then fought on three simultaneous fronts: sustaining the workers’ sit-in at the factory, defending their hostel accommodations after the owner attempted mass evictions, and building enough media and public pressure to force negotiations. The outcome exceeded expectations. Workers who had been offered the minimum wage as severance — twenty-three thousand rupees — ultimately received between two hundred thousand and one million rupees (roughly seven hundred to thirty-six hundred US dollars) depending on length of service, representing what Jan described as “the largest golden handshake in the industrial area since at least the seventies.”

The Chawla victory catalyzed rapid expansion. By mid-2024, the party was active in eight to ten factories across Lahore, with organizing spreading to Gujranwala and Faisalabad. In the textile mills of Gujranwala, weeks of strikes forced local authorities to broker agreements reversing wage cuts. In Faisalabad, where workers blockaded industrial corridors chanting “Kam do ya jaan do!” — “Give work or give death!” — factory owners retaliated with a lockout of over three hundred factories, chaining gates and freezing wages. A labor court later declared the lockout illegal.

The October 2024 Jhang Kissan Conference represented the HKP’s turn toward the rural dimension of Pakistan’s class structure. Co-organized with the Pakistan Kissan Rabita Committee (PKRC) — a network of twenty-six small peasant organizations and the only Pakistani member of the international peasant movement La Via Campesina — the conference brought together thousands of small farmers, landless peasants, agricultural workers, trade unionists, and youth from across Punjab and Sindh. Baba Latif Ansari, addressing the crowd, warned: “Our ancestral lands, our source of livelihood and our identity are at stake. Corporate farming will only lead to exploitation, displacement and devastation of our communities. We are the backbone of this nation who are feeding the people, and it’s time our voices are heard.”

La conferenza adottò un programma di ventitré punti per la riforma agraria. Le sue richieste includevano le immediate richieste: fissare prezzi minimi di sostegno per grano, cotone, canna da zucchero, riso e mais; Acquisto di grano direttamente dagli agricoltori. E includevano il settore strutturale: porre fine all’agricoltura aziendale e distribuire le terre governative e private tra contadini, piccoli agricoltori e la popolazione rurale senza terre; abolire le politiche che permettevano al settore privato di importare e scaricare cereali in concorrenza con i produttori locali; porre fine alle politiche di mercato aperto guidate dal FMI e dall’OMC; ristrutturazione del sistema di irrigazione; e fissare tariffe elettriche a dieci rupie per unità per i piccoli agricoltori. Il programma rappresentava un’alternativa coerente all’Iniziativa Verde Pakistan del governo, che le organizzazioni agricole accusavano di aver sfollato migliaia di famiglie dalle loro terre per favorire interessi aziendali.

Nei mesi successivi, l’alleanza tra PKRC, HKP e formazioni alleate ha organizzato mobilitazioni a livello nazionale — incluso il giorno internazionale della lotta contadina nell’aprile 2025, con riunioni su larga scala a Depalpur, nel Punjab, e in tutto il Sindh. Queste azioni collegarono esplicitamente la crisi agraria a modelli più ampi: la promozione da parte del governo dell’agricoltura aziendale, la costruzione di canali sull’Indo che minacciavano di lasciare le regioni ripariali inferiori senza acqua per l’irrigazione, e i programmi di aggiustamento strutturale imposti dal FMI che avevano sistematicamente favorito i grandi proprietari terrieri e gli interessi aziendali rispetto ai piccoli agricoltori che costituiscono la maggioranza della popolazione agricola pakistana.

Alla base di queste lotte c’era un’analisi economica strutturale che il partito ha promosso in modo programmatico. Il partito sosteneva che il Pakistan si fosse “deindustrializzato prematuramente” — non perché i lavoratori chiedessero troppo, ma perché le élite avevano abbandonato gli investimenti produttivi a favore della speculazione su terreni, risorse minerarie, azioni e immobili. Recentemente, il partito si è unito alla principale alleanza di opposizione del paese, il Tehreek-Tahaffuz-e-Aaine-Pakistan (Movimento per la Protezione della Costituzione), per costruire un ampio fronte contro l’attuale governo militare in Pakistan. Dopo decenni di isolamento, la sinistra in Pakistan è entrata nella politica principale del paese. Tuttavia, l’obiettivo del partito rimane sulla costruzione di forti quadri ideologici in tutto il paese come base per una trasformazione politica più profonda.

Durante tutte queste attività, l’HKP mantenne impegni internazionalisti espliciti. Il partito organizzava proteste regolari in solidarietà con Palestina e Libano, forniva sostegno incondizionato alla resistenza iraniana contro gli attacchi sionisti-imperialisti, combatteva contro la nuova guerra fredda contro la Cina, esprimeva amicizia con Cuba e si posizionava all’interno di un’analisi più ampia del ruolo del Pakistan nell’ordine globale in evoluzione. Questo internazionalismo rifletteva la comprensione teorica che le lotte locali contro lo sfruttamento si collegano a modelli globali di imperialismo e resistenza. La costruzione della coscienza rivoluzionaria richiede di comprendere questi legami piuttosto che limitare gli orizzonti politici ai confini nazionali.

Conclusione

L’emergere e lo sviluppo del Partito Haqooq-e-Khalq rappresentano un contributo significativo alla comprensione contemporanea della strategia rivoluzionaria nelle condizioni del capitalismo del ventunesimo secolo. Le esperienze del partito a Chungi forniscono dimostrazioni pratiche che, studiando la storia delle lotte passate e applicando le intuizioni teoriche alle condizioni contemporanee in modi che costruiscono il potere collettivo della classe operaia, rimane l’unica via praticabile per un cambiamento strutturale nel lungo periodo.

L’approccio strategico dell’HKP affronta questioni fondamentali che affrontano i movimenti rivoluzionari che operano all’interno di sistemi politici formalmente democratici dominati da partiti borghesi e reti di clientelismo. Come può svilupparsi la coscienza politica della classe operaia all’interno di società in cui il discorso politico dominante esclude sistematicamente l’analisi di classe? Come possono le organizzazioni rivoluzionarie mantenere una visione strategica a lungo termine coinvolgendosi al contempo con bisogni materiali immediati? Come possono gli sforzi di organizzazione locale collegarsi a progetti trasformativi più ampi senza perdere le radici nelle lotte concrete?

Come molti movimenti radicali prima di lui, l’HKP ha trovato risposte nel paziente lavoro di organizzazione comunitaria, che vede come dialetticamente inseparabile dal compito a lungo termine di ricostruire e riaffermare una soggettività della classe operaia. La popolazione viene mobilitata per pulire un canale o costruire una clinica. Nel processo, sviluppano le competenze, le capacità e la fiducia in sé stesse per cambiare le condizioni della loro vita. È così che individui atomizzati che subiscono lo sfruttamento si attivano come soggetti politici che non sono più a mercé della classe dirigente. Questo è il ciclo della costruzione rivoluzionaria; È così che si costruiscono socialismo e democrazia. Non è un processo semplice, né dipende da soggetti politici che si formano perfettamente come ‘socialisti’ o ‘comunisti’. È, invece, un processo dialettico, in cui le persone vengono plasmate e trasformate attraverso l’atto stesso della costruzione politica.

7/4/2026 https://progressive.international/