ARTIST Sana Ahmad SANA AHMAD is a graphic designer and artist residing in Karachi, Pakistan. She majored in Communication Studies and Design and has been working on various projects in both fields for the past two years. Her work has been displayed internationally at Sharjah Art Foundation for Focal Point 2019 and for Art Book Depot 2019 in Jaipur by Farside Collective , as well as various local group exhibitions throughout the country. She currently works as a Content Executive for Unilever Pakistan, and is based in Karachi. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

For years, “The Urgent Call of Palestine,” a rallying cry from the 1970s by Zeinab Shaath, was a lost cultural artifact until it was recovered in 2017. In 2024, British-Palestinian label Majazz Project and LA-based Discostan released an EP with the titular song, sitting with startling ease alongside contemporary Palestinian music. BOOKS & ARTS The Tortured Roof For years, “The Urgent Call of Palestine,” a rallying cry from the 1970s by Zeinab Shaath, was a lost cultural artifact until it was recovered in 2017. In 2024, British-Palestinian label Majazz Project and LA-based Discostan released an EP with the titular song, sitting with startling ease alongside contemporary Palestinian music. Vrinda Jagota Fifty-four years ago, a sixteen-year-old girl named Zeinab Shaath sat in her bedroom in Alexandria, Egypt, with a guitar and a poem. Her older sister had handed her “The Urgent Call of Palestine,” written by Indian poet Lalita Punjabi, and told her that she couldn’t come out of her room until she had composed music to accompany the words. Shaath came from a politically active family. Her father left Palestine in 1947, just months before the Nakba led to the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians , but he always maintained that they would all return one day. Her Lebanese mother was constantly hosting Gazan students at their home and organizing many fundraisers for Palestine. The musician had been singing for a few years but was hesitant about starting the project. She had never composed music before and was still determining how to become more involved in political organizing. Nonetheless, she got to work. Two days later, she had composed a track that elevated the defiant tone of the poem. Across a fervently strummed acoustic guitar, Shaath sings in an unwavering, golden vibrato that builds intensity and verve as the song progresses. “Liberation banner, raise it high,” she declares in the song's last few seconds. “For Palestine, let us do or die.” Image from the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath. Shaath’s powerful voice and unequivocal message resonated widely. In the early 1970s, “The Urgent Call of Palestine” became a rallying cry heard (and subsequently censored) around the world. Shaath’s sister played it on her radio station where it immediately gained popularity. Shaath went on to perform it—and a collection of other musical adaptations of Palestinian protest poetry—everywhere from Beirut to Berlin to Baghdad. The song especially moved Palestinian artist Ismael Shammout , who ran the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) Culture and Arts division in Beirut. He filmed Shaath singing the song in what some historians consider the first Palestinian music video. The master copy of the footage, along with countless other cultural artifacts by Palestinian artists, were stolen from Beirut in 1982 during a mass looting by the Israeli Occupation Forces. “Urgent Call” seemed lost for years until Israeli scholar Rona Sela fought to have it declassified in 2017, by which time momentum around Shaath’s work had lessened. But in March 2024, Shaath started a new chapter in her career: an EP of songs, first released via the PLO in 1972, including “Urgent Call,” was reissued as a collaboration between the Palestinian-British label Majazz Project and the Los Angeles-based label Discostan. Arshia Haq and Jeremy Loudenbak, who run Discostan, discovered the EP via the UK collector James Shambles and then reached out to Mo’min Swaitat, the archivist and label runner behind Majazz Project , to see if he wanted to co-release the album. Swaitat had encountered the record already and felt it was “the greatest Palestinian record we’ve ever had.” Haq and Loudenbak were piqued by the record’s contemporary resonance. “When we play the music in record stores, people stop and listen,” says Loudenbak. “[The state] attempted to erase these songs from the cultural imagination, but they have had an incredibly long life.” “I’m struck by the very hopeful voice of a 16-year-old calling us together.” In March 2024, Arshia Haq, Jeremy Loudenbak, Zeinab Shaath, and Mo’min Swaitat met with me via Zoom to discuss the project . Haq and Loudenbak were in Los Angeles, Shaath in Cincinnati, and Swaitat in London. Shaath and Swaitat reminisced about their homeland. Shaath recalled the beaches her cousins visited until the early hours of the night in 1993 after the first Oslo Accord , which gave them slightly more freedom of movement, as well as the green almonds and olives they brought to her family when they visited Egypt. Swaitat traced his love of music to the memory of the weekly wedding songs he had heard played from car speakers, which created a “psychedelic orchestra” of sound and would continue playing in the streets until 3 am. Of course, their grief emerged in lockstep. By the time we spoke, Shaath had lost 27 members of her extended family in Palestine since Israel’s attack on Gaza began in October of 2023 . Swaitat, meanwhile, had been on the phone all night: Israeli forces had just invaded Jenin. Album cover. Image from the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath. Teenage Shaath originally composed “The Urgent Call of Palestine” at a historic moment for Palestinians. Six years before she wrote the song, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) came into being, intending to restore an independent Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. And just three years before, Israel occupied Gaza, the West Bank, The Sinai Peninsula, and East Jerusalem after the Six-Day War of 1967 . The amount of Palestinian land that Israel controlled doubled during this conflict, despite later attempts from Egypt to regain control of some of the land. Over half a century later, Shaath’s protest music is just as relevant. Israel has been imposing a land, sea, and air blockade on Gaza since 2008. As of October, 2024, airstrikes in North Gaza continue, even as the ambit of Israel’s attacks has expanded to Lebanon. Incomplete estimates claim that Israel’s systematic campaign of genocide since October has killed over 50,000 Palestinians , according to official numbers. In a piece about Palestinian rap, Vivian Medithi writes that it can feel frivolous to over-emphasize art’s radical potential in such times. And yet, Medithi argues, Israel’s censorship of Palestinian art, music, and culture—especially at protests—is proof of its power. After all, cultural expression is a means of record-keeping, a counter to Israel’s attempts to control narratives about their genocide and occupation in international news and social media. Swaitat explicitly calls Shaath’s project a “failure of the Zionist plan” because it so clearly documents Palestinian resistance, connecting Palestinians across the world. “One of the main targets of Zionism is Palestinian identity and knowledge systems, which is where we save our memory,” he says. “They don’t think of us as a group of people who should exist, and they don't want us to have any control over our cultural heritage or communication.” Image from the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath. In addition to the poem written by Lalita Punjabi, the three other tracks on Urgent Call are adapted from poems by three Palestinian poets. As she sings their words, Shaath takes on various identities. A proud parent of eight demanding that history remember him and his family. A political prisoner dreaming of returning to their homeland, and a Palestinian citizen finding the strength to survive in the stones of their walls, in “every drop of rain dribbling over the ceiling of the tortured roof.” Shaath’s plainspoken cadence unites these disparate perspectives She sings alone on each song, her vibrato piercing across simple chord progressions strummed on an acoustic guitar. And yet, the songs feel communal, not only because the various perspectives she adopts offer multiple entry points into the music but also because the sparse folk arrangements use candid, repetitive language that encourages the listener to sing along. “Because these songs are composed in direct language, they can be held and carried by people of different ages, from children to people of an older generation,” says Haq. “The musical compositions lend themselves to being repeated, almost like mnemonics.” On “Resist,” Shaath’s call to action is clearly stated and deeply felt: “They slapped down a paper/And a pen before my nose…The paper they wanted me to blemish/Said ‘Resist’/ The pen they wanted to disgrace/ Said ‘Resist, oh, resist.’” On “I Am an Arab,” Shaath repeats the titular phrase with such force that it lingers long after the song finishes. Shaath also directly involves her audience. With her arrangements so minimal and vocals so rich, it feels as if Shaath’s looking you in the eye, candidly asking rhetorical questions: “Can’t you hear the urgent call of Palestine?” “Are you angry?” It is often argued that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land is too complex for the average person to comprehend. Shaath’s phrasing cuts through this fallacy with defiance, her vocals evoking longing, fury, and grief to make the reality of Palestinian suffering entirely clear. Beyond Shaath’s efforts to involve the listener in these specific songs, a broader sense of community informed her activism, too. Not only do the lyrics come from translated works of numerous poets, but they were also written at a time of tremendous creative innovation and organization by other Palestinian artists. Many Palestinian artists were spurred into action following the Six-Day War of 1967. The Third Cinema Movement in the 1960s and 1970s established a transnational anticolonial framework for artistic expression. In 1973, the League of Palestinian Artists was created to unify the output of artists across Palestine and “bring a sense of political urgency” to their work: the sound of an entire movement of artists refusing to be silenced . In addition to the organizing and art happening around her, Shaath also looked to Americans protesting racism and segregation in their country, as well as their government’s involvement in Vietnam, for political inspiration. “I would sing ‘ We Shall Overcome ,’ which is used in the U.S. in Black activist spaces, but it was also a Joan Baez song,” Shaath says. “It was very much relevant to us as Palestinians. We sang that, and everyone would sing with me.” You can hear the influence of activists like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in the plucky, acoustic folk melodies she deploys on the project, as well as her use of guitar and English lyricism. “I used English lyrics because Arabs and Palestinians all know our own history,” she tells me. “We needed the world to know. Even though it’s not a Palestinian or Arab instrument, I thought the guitar would be attractive to the outside world. I felt that people would listen to a song much more than they would read a whole book.” The title track of Urgent Call was—and continues to be—uniquely global in its construction, production, and impact. An Indian woman wrote a poem in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. A few months later, a Palestinian woman living in Egypt transposed the poem into a song that moved hundreds of thousands around the world. Over decades, it became part of an artistic anti-imperial movement that thought beyond borders and saw all struggles as intertwined. This year, American and British archivists are bringing it to entirely new audiences in their countries and beyond. Zeinab in Lebanon. Image from the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath. For Shaath, it’s surprising—and saddening—that her music still resonates so widely. “It blows my mind after all these years,” she says. “Our suffering is still continuing, that’s what it means.” Which also lends credence to Palestinian music as a valuable form of resistance: it must continue. Indeed, Shaath is part of a cohort of Palestinian musicians who recall the past, commune with fellow activists, and create by thinking with street protests. Palestinian rapper Muqata’a samples records his grandparents listened to and had to leave behind when they fled their homes. Oud players in Egypt today revive music that initially served as a protest against Israeli occupation in 1967. Alternative musician Shadi Zaqtan pioneered the Palestinian blues genre to express his sorrow at the ongoing genocide. The daring of this work lies in the strategies of truth-telling in composition: most of these musicians use the most direct, unflinching language possible to document their stories. Often, their work sits alongside darker, more personal reckonings about the reach of their work.“For most of my life, I stupidly believed that art exists to change the world,” Tamer Nafar, often credited as the grandfather of Arab hip hop, has said . “Now, I think about art more like the black box flight recorder on an airplane: it won’t navigate the landing; it’s here to document the crash.”∎ Fifty-four years ago, a sixteen-year-old girl named Zeinab Shaath sat in her bedroom in Alexandria, Egypt, with a guitar and a poem. Her older sister had handed her “The Urgent Call of Palestine,” written by Indian poet Lalita Punjabi, and told her that she couldn’t come out of her room until she had composed music to accompany the words. Shaath came from a politically active family. Her father left Palestine in 1947, just months before the Nakba led to the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians , but he always maintained that they would all return one day. Her Lebanese mother was constantly hosting Gazan students at their home and organizing many fundraisers for Palestine. The musician had been singing for a few years but was hesitant about starting the project. She had never composed music before and was still determining how to become more involved in political organizing. Nonetheless, she got to work. Two days later, she had composed a track that elevated the defiant tone of the poem. Across a fervently strummed acoustic guitar, Shaath sings in an unwavering, golden vibrato that builds intensity and verve as the song progresses. “Liberation banner, raise it high,” she declares in the song's last few seconds. “For Palestine, let us do or die.” Image from the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath. Shaath’s powerful voice and unequivocal message resonated widely. In the early 1970s, “The Urgent Call of Palestine” became a rallying cry heard (and subsequently censored) around the world. Shaath’s sister played it on her radio station where it immediately gained popularity. Shaath went on to perform it—and a collection of other musical adaptations of Palestinian protest poetry—everywhere from Beirut to Berlin to Baghdad. The song especially moved Palestinian artist Ismael Shammout , who ran the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) Culture and Arts division in Beirut. He filmed Shaath singing the song in what some historians consider the first Palestinian music video. The master copy of the footage, along with countless other cultural artifacts by Palestinian artists, were stolen from Beirut in 1982 during a mass looting by the Israeli Occupation Forces. “Urgent Call” seemed lost for years until Israeli scholar Rona Sela fought to have it declassified in 2017, by which time momentum around Shaath’s work had lessened. But in March 2024, Shaath started a new chapter in her career: an EP of songs, first released via the PLO in 1972, including “Urgent Call,” was reissued as a collaboration between the Palestinian-British label Majazz Project and the Los Angeles-based label Discostan. Arshia Haq and Jeremy Loudenbak, who run Discostan, discovered the EP via the UK collector James Shambles and then reached out to Mo’min Swaitat, the archivist and label runner behind Majazz Project , to see if he wanted to co-release the album. Swaitat had encountered the record already and felt it was “the greatest Palestinian record we’ve ever had.” Haq and Loudenbak were piqued by the record’s contemporary resonance. “When we play the music in record stores, people stop and listen,” says Loudenbak. “[The state] attempted to erase these songs from the cultural imagination, but they have had an incredibly long life.” “I’m struck by the very hopeful voice of a 16-year-old calling us together.” In March 2024, Arshia Haq, Jeremy Loudenbak, Zeinab Shaath, and Mo’min Swaitat met with me via Zoom to discuss the project . Haq and Loudenbak were in Los Angeles, Shaath in Cincinnati, and Swaitat in London. Shaath and Swaitat reminisced about their homeland. Shaath recalled the beaches her cousins visited until the early hours of the night in 1993 after the first Oslo Accord , which gave them slightly more freedom of movement, as well as the green almonds and olives they brought to her family when they visited Egypt. Swaitat traced his love of music to the memory of the weekly wedding songs he had heard played from car speakers, which created a “psychedelic orchestra” of sound and would continue playing in the streets until 3 am. Of course, their grief emerged in lockstep. By the time we spoke, Shaath had lost 27 members of her extended family in Palestine since Israel’s attack on Gaza began in October of 2023 . Swaitat, meanwhile, had been on the phone all night: Israeli forces had just invaded Jenin. Album cover. Image from the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath. Teenage Shaath originally composed “The Urgent Call of Palestine” at a historic moment for Palestinians. Six years before she wrote the song, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) came into being, intending to restore an independent Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. And just three years before, Israel occupied Gaza, the West Bank, The Sinai Peninsula, and East Jerusalem after the Six-Day War of 1967 . The amount of Palestinian land that Israel controlled doubled during this conflict, despite later attempts from Egypt to regain control of some of the land. Over half a century later, Shaath’s protest music is just as relevant. Israel has been imposing a land, sea, and air blockade on Gaza since 2008. As of October, 2024, airstrikes in North Gaza continue, even as the ambit of Israel’s attacks has expanded to Lebanon. Incomplete estimates claim that Israel’s systematic campaign of genocide since October has killed over 50,000 Palestinians , according to official numbers. In a piece about Palestinian rap, Vivian Medithi writes that it can feel frivolous to over-emphasize art’s radical potential in such times. And yet, Medithi argues, Israel’s censorship of Palestinian art, music, and culture—especially at protests—is proof of its power. After all, cultural expression is a means of record-keeping, a counter to Israel’s attempts to control narratives about their genocide and occupation in international news and social media. Swaitat explicitly calls Shaath’s project a “failure of the Zionist plan” because it so clearly documents Palestinian resistance, connecting Palestinians across the world. “One of the main targets of Zionism is Palestinian identity and knowledge systems, which is where we save our memory,” he says. “They don’t think of us as a group of people who should exist, and they don't want us to have any control over our cultural heritage or communication.” Image from the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath. In addition to the poem written by Lalita Punjabi, the three other tracks on Urgent Call are adapted from poems by three Palestinian poets. As she sings their words, Shaath takes on various identities. A proud parent of eight demanding that history remember him and his family. A political prisoner dreaming of returning to their homeland, and a Palestinian citizen finding the strength to survive in the stones of their walls, in “every drop of rain dribbling over the ceiling of the tortured roof.” Shaath’s plainspoken cadence unites these disparate perspectives She sings alone on each song, her vibrato piercing across simple chord progressions strummed on an acoustic guitar. And yet, the songs feel communal, not only because the various perspectives she adopts offer multiple entry points into the music but also because the sparse folk arrangements use candid, repetitive language that encourages the listener to sing along. “Because these songs are composed in direct language, they can be held and carried by people of different ages, from children to people of an older generation,” says Haq. “The musical compositions lend themselves to being repeated, almost like mnemonics.” On “Resist,” Shaath’s call to action is clearly stated and deeply felt: “They slapped down a paper/And a pen before my nose…The paper they wanted me to blemish/Said ‘Resist’/ The pen they wanted to disgrace/ Said ‘Resist, oh, resist.’” On “I Am an Arab,” Shaath repeats the titular phrase with such force that it lingers long after the song finishes. Shaath also directly involves her audience. With her arrangements so minimal and vocals so rich, it feels as if Shaath’s looking you in the eye, candidly asking rhetorical questions: “Can’t you hear the urgent call of Palestine?” “Are you angry?” It is often argued that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land is too complex for the average person to comprehend. Shaath’s phrasing cuts through this fallacy with defiance, her vocals evoking longing, fury, and grief to make the reality of Palestinian suffering entirely clear. Beyond Shaath’s efforts to involve the listener in these specific songs, a broader sense of community informed her activism, too. Not only do the lyrics come from translated works of numerous poets, but they were also written at a time of tremendous creative innovation and organization by other Palestinian artists. Many Palestinian artists were spurred into action following the Six-Day War of 1967. The Third Cinema Movement in the 1960s and 1970s established a transnational anticolonial framework for artistic expression. In 1973, the League of Palestinian Artists was created to unify the output of artists across Palestine and “bring a sense of political urgency” to their work: the sound of an entire movement of artists refusing to be silenced . In addition to the organizing and art happening around her, Shaath also looked to Americans protesting racism and segregation in their country, as well as their government’s involvement in Vietnam, for political inspiration. “I would sing ‘ We Shall Overcome ,’ which is used in the U.S. in Black activist spaces, but it was also a Joan Baez song,” Shaath says. “It was very much relevant to us as Palestinians. We sang that, and everyone would sing with me.” You can hear the influence of activists like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in the plucky, acoustic folk melodies she deploys on the project, as well as her use of guitar and English lyricism. “I used English lyrics because Arabs and Palestinians all know our own history,” she tells me. “We needed the world to know. Even though it’s not a Palestinian or Arab instrument, I thought the guitar would be attractive to the outside world. I felt that people would listen to a song much more than they would read a whole book.” The title track of Urgent Call was—and continues to be—uniquely global in its construction, production, and impact. An Indian woman wrote a poem in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. A few months later, a Palestinian woman living in Egypt transposed the poem into a song that moved hundreds of thousands around the world. Over decades, it became part of an artistic anti-imperial movement that thought beyond borders and saw all struggles as intertwined. This year, American and British archivists are bringing it to entirely new audiences in their countries and beyond. Zeinab in Lebanon. Image from the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath. For Shaath, it’s surprising—and saddening—that her music still resonates so widely. “It blows my mind after all these years,” she says. “Our suffering is still continuing, that’s what it means.” Which also lends credence to Palestinian music as a valuable form of resistance: it must continue. Indeed, Shaath is part of a cohort of Palestinian musicians who recall the past, commune with fellow activists, and create by thinking with street protests. Palestinian rapper Muqata’a samples records his grandparents listened to and had to leave behind when they fled their homes. Oud players in Egypt today revive music that initially served as a protest against Israeli occupation in 1967. Alternative musician Shadi Zaqtan pioneered the Palestinian blues genre to express his sorrow at the ongoing genocide. The daring of this work lies in the strategies of truth-telling in composition: most of these musicians use the most direct, unflinching language possible to document their stories. Often, their work sits alongside darker, more personal reckonings about the reach of their work.“For most of my life, I stupidly believed that art exists to change the world,” Tamer Nafar, often credited as the grandfather of Arab hip hop, has said . “Now, I think about art more like the black box flight recorder on an airplane: it won’t navigate the landing; it’s here to document the crash.”∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making From the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath (1972). SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Profile Palestine Zeinab Shaath Music Culture Art Art Activism Resistance Peaceful Resistance Methods of Resistance Majaaz Project Discostan Artifact History Egypt Lebanon Poetry Lalita Punjabi Politics of Ethnic Identity political activism Displacement Nakba Gaza Political Organizing Guitar Acoustic Composer Composition Liberation The Urgent Call of Palestine Rally Protest Poetry Ismael Shammout Palestine Liberation Organization Culture and Arts Division Music Video Occupation Militarism Discovery EP Collaboration Freedom Freedom of Movement Memory Conflict Censorship Genocide Anti-Zionism Communication Community Folk Music Global Protest Muqata Shadi Zaqtan Tamer Nafar Palestinian Music Hip Hop VRINDA JAGOTA is a writer, union organizer, and social media manager based in Brooklyn. She currently contributes to Third Bridge Creative , organizes with Newsguild , and works with Naya Beat, previously at Pitchfork . 2 May 2025 Profile Palestine 2nd May 2025 ZEINAB SHAATH is a Palestinian-Egyptian singer-songwriter. She is known for the song "The Urgent Call of Palestine", released in 1972. Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Pakistan continues to terrorize activists, young and old, for protesting the enforced disappearances of their brothers, sisters, and forefathers—losses the Baloch people are never truly allowed to mourn. In a letter addressed to Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur, a public intellectual who has devoted the past 54 years of his life to the Baloch liberation struggle, a young Baloch journalist seeks reprieve from a fate that seems increasingly inevitable, hoping to transform her grief into revolutionary fervor. THE VERTICAL Letter to History (I) Pakistan continues to terrorize activists, young and old, for protesting the enforced disappearances of their brothers, sisters, and forefathers—losses the Baloch people are never truly allowed to mourn. In a letter addressed to Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur, a public intellectual who has devoted the past 54 years of his life to the Baloch liberation struggle, a young Baloch journalist seeks reprieve from a fate that seems increasingly inevitable, hoping to transform her grief into revolutionary fervor. Hazaran Rahim Dad Editor’s Note: Sammi Deen Baloch was released by Pakistani authorities on April 1, a few days after this letter was first written. Dear Ustad Talpur, Baba Jan, you have watched generations disappear into dust. You know that time is a deceiver, that history is nothing but a long repetition of grief. Baba Jan, you have poured hope into a land that devours it. And still, you stand unshaken. I am writing to you without clarity about the purpose of my words. Perhaps, in times like these—when the sky is thick with grief, when silence is louder than gunfire, when even breathing feels like an act of defiance—writing is the only rebellion left. Or maybe it’s futile, a whisper against a storm, a candle in the abyss. How do I put into words a war, as they like to call it, which is just an unbroken cycle of operations to erase our very existence? I’ve been thinking about how adulthood is merely the accumulation of grief we carry and bury. And childhood, a baptism in violence. So, I write––tracing the outlines of our pain with ink, carving our memory into words. When bullets meet our bodies, do they make the same sound as the shackles that screeched against our land when they dragged Mahrang and Sammi? The leaders who carried the weight of history on their shoulders, who held up the sky when it threatened to collapse, who turned the grief of generations into fire. Mahrang and Sammi, who taught the Baloch they must stop being forever mourners, forever betrayed. On March 21, 13-year-old Naimat was shot . Then a disabled man, Bebarg, was dragged from his home and disappeared. Tell me, Baba Jan, how do we live through this time, where a child’s heart is not enough to satiate the state's insatiable hunger for spilling Baloch blood? What kind of state fears a crippled man’s voice? And what is more tragic than little Kambar? A child who once held a poster of his missing father, Chairman Zahid, and now, eleven years later, in the same cursed month of March, clutches another picture. This time it is his uncle Shah Jan who has been stolen by the same hands—a state that ensures no Baloch child feels fatherly love, that makes Baloch men disposable. Tell me, Baba Jan, does history ever grow weary of itself? Or will this violence continue to carve itself into our bones? Baba Jan, Balochistan stands at a precipice again. In the past two decades, they have buried entire generations, making mourning a permanent state of our existence. And today, the storm rages once more. The crackdown on the Baloch Yakjehti Committee. The arrests. The stifling of resistance. Dr. Mahrang Baloch taken under fabricated charges. The roads are flooding with protesters, repeating the same chant once more: Tum Marogy, Hum Niklengy . Our streets heard the same words when Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti was martyred. When the state unleashed its bloodied military crackdown in 2009. When Karima’s voice—one of the fiercest of our time—was silenced under the most sinister of circumstances. We chanted our pain into resistance. And today, we find ourselves trapped in the same cycle, bracing for what the state has yet to unleash. This is why I write to you, Baba Jan—not just as a thinker, but as a witness to history itself. Who else but you can grasp the chaos that takes root in the minds of the Baloch when faced with such devastation? When conscious, educated youth find themselves at a crossroads, they can only turn to history for answers. But in our case, history does not reside in books—it resides with you. You who saw the flames of 2006 and 2009. You who watched as mass graves were unearthed in 2014. You who lived through the fear and silence that followed Karima’s assassination in 2020. And now, new voices have risen—heirs to those who were brutally taken from us—only to face the same violence, the same retribution. Mahrang and Sammi, whose voices once echoed through the streets, are now being held in cells. A process of erasure perfected over decades. The Baloch lose another voice. And the bloodshed continues. Mothers become wombless. Wives become widows. Fathers become ghosts. Sons search for fathers. Fathers search for sons. And now, mothers search for daughters. Tell me, Baba Jan, what is the state preparing to do next? Will it follow the same script, crushing these voices as it did with the Baloch political leadership before? What consequences will this new wave of repression bring, especially at a time when the armed struggle has only grown stronger? Is it possible that the other oppressed nations of this land will stand with us in defiance of a shared oppressor? Can we still hope that the so-called civilized world will intervene before more of our people are swallowed by this unrelenting state brutality? Or will the detention of women be normalized too? I am worried that the state is now seeking to terrify young Baloch girls who stand firm despite the leadership’s arrest. It seems as if the state is entering a new phase of oppression, sending a message to Baloch women who dare to defy: Beware. Stand down. Who will stand with us? I am writing to you for hope. I am writing to you for answers. Tell me, Baba Jan, are we destined to be forever caught in this storm, forever erased, forever replaced? Signed, A young Baloch writer and journalist∎ Editor’s Note: Sammi Deen Baloch was released by Pakistani authorities on April 1, a few days after this letter was first written. Dear Ustad Talpur, Baba Jan, you have watched generations disappear into dust. You know that time is a deceiver, that history is nothing but a long repetition of grief. Baba Jan, you have poured hope into a land that devours it. And still, you stand unshaken. I am writing to you without clarity about the purpose of my words. Perhaps, in times like these—when the sky is thick with grief, when silence is louder than gunfire, when even breathing feels like an act of defiance—writing is the only rebellion left. Or maybe it’s futile, a whisper against a storm, a candle in the abyss. How do I put into words a war, as they like to call it, which is just an unbroken cycle of operations to erase our very existence? I’ve been thinking about how adulthood is merely the accumulation of grief we carry and bury. And childhood, a baptism in violence. So, I write––tracing the outlines of our pain with ink, carving our memory into words. When bullets meet our bodies, do they make the same sound as the shackles that screeched against our land when they dragged Mahrang and Sammi? The leaders who carried the weight of history on their shoulders, who held up the sky when it threatened to collapse, who turned the grief of generations into fire. Mahrang and Sammi, who taught the Baloch they must stop being forever mourners, forever betrayed. On March 21, 13-year-old Naimat was shot . Then a disabled man, Bebarg, was dragged from his home and disappeared. Tell me, Baba Jan, how do we live through this time, where a child’s heart is not enough to satiate the state's insatiable hunger for spilling Baloch blood? What kind of state fears a crippled man’s voice? And what is more tragic than little Kambar? A child who once held a poster of his missing father, Chairman Zahid, and now, eleven years later, in the same cursed month of March, clutches another picture. This time it is his uncle Shah Jan who has been stolen by the same hands—a state that ensures no Baloch child feels fatherly love, that makes Baloch men disposable. Tell me, Baba Jan, does history ever grow weary of itself? Or will this violence continue to carve itself into our bones? Baba Jan, Balochistan stands at a precipice again. In the past two decades, they have buried entire generations, making mourning a permanent state of our existence. And today, the storm rages once more. The crackdown on the Baloch Yakjehti Committee. The arrests. The stifling of resistance. Dr. Mahrang Baloch taken under fabricated charges. The roads are flooding with protesters, repeating the same chant once more: Tum Marogy, Hum Niklengy . Our streets heard the same words when Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti was martyred. When the state unleashed its bloodied military crackdown in 2009. When Karima’s voice—one of the fiercest of our time—was silenced under the most sinister of circumstances. We chanted our pain into resistance. And today, we find ourselves trapped in the same cycle, bracing for what the state has yet to unleash. This is why I write to you, Baba Jan—not just as a thinker, but as a witness to history itself. Who else but you can grasp the chaos that takes root in the minds of the Baloch when faced with such devastation? When conscious, educated youth find themselves at a crossroads, they can only turn to history for answers. But in our case, history does not reside in books—it resides with you. You who saw the flames of 2006 and 2009. You who watched as mass graves were unearthed in 2014. You who lived through the fear and silence that followed Karima’s assassination in 2020. And now, new voices have risen—heirs to those who were brutally taken from us—only to face the same violence, the same retribution. Mahrang and Sammi, whose voices once echoed through the streets, are now being held in cells. A process of erasure perfected over decades. The Baloch lose another voice. And the bloodshed continues. Mothers become wombless. Wives become widows. Fathers become ghosts. Sons search for fathers. Fathers search for sons. And now, mothers search for daughters. Tell me, Baba Jan, what is the state preparing to do next? Will it follow the same script, crushing these voices as it did with the Baloch political leadership before? What consequences will this new wave of repression bring, especially at a time when the armed struggle has only grown stronger? Is it possible that the other oppressed nations of this land will stand with us in defiance of a shared oppressor? Can we still hope that the so-called civilized world will intervene before more of our people are swallowed by this unrelenting state brutality? Or will the detention of women be normalized too? I am worried that the state is now seeking to terrify young Baloch girls who stand firm despite the leadership’s arrest. It seems as if the state is entering a new phase of oppression, sending a message to Baloch women who dare to defy: Beware. Stand down. Who will stand with us? I am writing to you for hope. I am writing to you for answers. Tell me, Baba Jan, are we destined to be forever caught in this storm, forever erased, forever replaced? Signed, A young Baloch writer and journalist∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Iman Iftikhar Mahrang (2025) Digital Illustration SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Letter Balochistan Pakistan Activism Enforced Disappearances State Violence Protests Liberation Journalism Revolution Grief Sammi Deen Baloch Resistance History Violence Writing After Loss Dissidence Disappearance Baloch Yakjehti Committee Dr Mahrang Baloch Arrests Tum Marogy Hum Niklengy Militarism Leadership Mass Graves Assassination New Voices Imprisonment Armed Struggle Repression Oppression Defiance Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur HAZARAN RAHIM DAD is an MPhil scholar in English Literature and a feature-story writer. Her work primarily explores the experiences of Baloch people in war, violence, and socio-political struggles in Pakistan. 3 Apr 2025 Letter Balochistan 3rd Apr 2025 IMAN IFTIKHAR is a political theorist, historian, and amateur oil painter and illustrator. She is an editor for Folio Books and a returning fellow at Kitab Ghar Lahore. She is based in Oxford and Lahore. To Posterity Paweł Wargan 30th Apr Letter to History (II) Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur 9th Apr Dissipated Self-Determination Zahra Yarali 26th Mar Who is Next? Noor Bakhsh · Qasum Faraz · Sajid Hussain 5th Mar Lima's Forsaken Jack Dodson 18th Nov On That Note:

· THE VERTICAL Dispatch · Sri Lanka The Ambivalent Voter Ahead of the presidential election in Sri Lanka, trade unions and political parties have promised a wage increase to tea plantation workers they hope to win over. Many workers are unconvinced, partly because wage increases are often tied to higher productivity targets that far exceed workers’ bodily capacity. “Into tea forest I,” 2024. Pen and tea stain on brown board, 91.4cm x 121.9cm, part of a triptych. Courtesy of Arulraj Ulaganathan. “Let’s say a small child of around five years old is sick,” says Subramaniam Maheswarie, a 47-year-old tea plucker from Bogawantalawa in the Nuwara Eliya district of Sri Lanka’s Central Province. “We have to look after it and give it medicine.” The sick child Maheswarie is referring to is Sri Lanka: a nation on the slow road to recovery from a devastating economic crisis that led to shortages of food and fuel, and saw costs of living soar. The doctor who nursed the child is Ranil Wickremesinghe, the president who took the reins from Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was ousted from office after months of protests. Wickremesinghe is attempting to hold onto power after two years in office as the country gears up for a presidential election tomorrow, 21st September, the first since the crisis. Such conditions are ripe for the playing out of patronage politics. The Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC), the largest plantation workers’ trade union, is advocating fiercely on Wickremesinghe’s behalf. Last year, the leader of the CWC was elevated to the position of a cabinet minister by Wickremesinghe’s government, and CWC formed a seat-sharing pact with the UNP (United National Party) aiming to garner votes in the central plantation districts. Maheswarie serves as a local chairwoman for the CWC, although she also continues to work on the plantation. Here in the hill-country region, political parties double as trade unions and vice versa—simultaneously trying to win workers’ votes as well as represent their voices in negotiations with plantations. In May this year, Wickremesinghe promised plantation workers a new wage of LKR 1,700 (US$5.64), a 70% hike from their current wage of LKR 1000 (US$3.32). Plantation companies appealed the wage, and Wickremesinghe’s presidential gazette was found to be unlawful by the Sri Lankan Supreme Court. The Wages Board has now issued a gazette mandating wages of LKR 1,350 (US$4.48) for plantation workers, with an additional productivity incentive of LKR 350 (US$1.16) that requires them to pluck extra kilos. Tea workers, most of whom are part of the Malaiyaha Tamil community—descendants of indentured labourers brought from South India to work on plantations by the British in colonial Ceylon—face a number of challenges including food insecurity, lack of access to educational opportunities, precarious housing, and poor living and working conditions. Maheswarie says the wage increase is positive, but admits that the last wage increase in 2021 led to problems for workers. She says productivity targets increased by 3 kilos at her plantation. Additionally, benefits such as medical care and food provisions were withdrawn or reduced, because the implementation of the new wage led to the collapse of the traditional collective agreement between plantation companies and trade unions. “[As part of the collective agreement], there were a lot of rules and regulations regarding what you should and shouldn’t do with workers,” Maheswarie says. “Now those rules don’t exist. Once we got rid of those rules, it was the companies who [arbitrarily] set the rules. Now that we don’t have the collective agreement, we can’t really go and argue [for more benefits].” Many workers are suspicious of the timing of the wage increase, perceiving it as a political ploy to win their votes in the election. However, Maheswarie is adamant that is not the case and accuses plantation companies of “dragging out” the process to frame the CWC as eking out a wage increase for political gain. Roshan Rajadurai, chairman of the Planters’ Association, which oversees hundreds of plantations in Sri Lanka, said targets would not increase. However, he also said productivity must be improved and that the wage increase was unsustainable. “In Sri Lanka, rationale and reason don’t, unfortunately, apply,” Rajadurai said. He questioned the announcement, saying the plantation sector was being “singled out.” He pointed out that wages for other sectors were not being increased. “We have to agree on something we can [actually] pay,” Rajadurai added. “If they [politicians] did everything they promised, Sri Lanka would be better than Singapore.” He refuted Maheswarie’s claim that benefits were being reduced for workers, saying welfare had actually been increased and that it was in the plantations’ best interests to look after their workers. According to Sri Lanka’s Tea Board, the industry contributed USD 1.26 billion to the Sri Lankan economy in 2022. However, plantation workers were severely hit by the crisis, with many struggling to afford basic necessities. “The election is coming, right? So they likely thought we’d only vote for them if they increased our salaries,” says Santhiappillai Mary, who works at the Loolecondera estate, a state-owned plantation in Kandy District, famously colonial Ceylon’s first tea estate. Mary is unmoved by Loolecondera's storied history. She shares that the plantation makes multiple deductions from workers’ salaries, including small amounts for the work cards they register their picked tea leaf kilograms on and, until recently, for their payslips. She has taken out multiple loans by now and is berated by the companies involved when she cannot pay. She often goes to work even when she is sick or it is raining heavily—simply because she cannot afford to miss a day of pay. “We have to take two meals to work, but sometimes, if I take two meals, my children don’t have enough food to eat at home,” Mary says. “So, I just take one meal and go. And sometimes I don’t take anything at all, because the children need food in the evening. I’ve done that, too.” Santhiappillai Mary, courtesy of Udara Pathum Such dire straits also affect access to free public services. In 2022, Mary’s oldest son had to drop out of school. After her family could not afford the bus fare to school, he was not permitted to advance to the next grade alongside his peers. In Agarapatana, local trade union leaders who were part of the National Union of Workers (NUW) are also not totally convinced by the wage increase. NUW has thrown its support behind presidential hopeful Sajith Premadasa, who has promised to turn estate workers into smallholders and increase their pay. “We can’t be sure we’re going to get the new wage,” said Dayalan Ravichandran, adding that he was surprised to see that he received the same salary in June even after Wickremesinghe promised a higher wage. “They say they’ve agreed to it, but it’s not definite yet. We don’t know if they’re just doing it because of the election.” One estate trade union leader said people’s votes were often won with alcohol, even within her own party. “The people in the party give alcohol to the chairmen and tell them to give it to the men,” she said, adding that the women were struggling without basic facilities. “The chairmen give alcohol to the men and tell them to vote for the party.” But perhaps the larger question is: Would a wage increase even shift the needle for tea workers? If even universal education—which Sri Lanka cites as a major source of pride in comparison to its South Asian neighbours—can seemingly be revoked for tea workers’ children for want of bus fare, can tea workers reasonably aspire to the end of generational poverty in the hill country? Tea leaves at a plantation in Kandy District, Central Province. Courtesy of Udara Pathum. Workers might be divided in their political preferences but are united on one issue. None of them believe the wage increase—of which proof will only emerge after the election when next month’s pay is given—will be definitive proof of improved conditions. Mary feels that any wage increase is unlikely to be the better prospect it’s touted to be. “If they increase the salary,” she says, “they’ll demand more kilos of tea leaves, so it’s difficult for the workers.” She adds that an increase in salary will also mean an increase in the cost of essentials. “So there’s no point in increasing the salary. However much we get, it’s not enough.” This linkage of wage increases to required increases in productivity demands is the root of tea workers’ misgivings about their financial future: indeed, a wage increase may well be thought of as an excuse for the extraction of surplus labour that exceeds the limits of bodily labour. Mahendran, 49, also a worker at Loolecondera, says his family often goes hungry for five or six days every month. He, too, believes estates will increase productivity targets in response to the wage increase, adding that workers “can’t work any more than this.” Rajadurai, the Planters’ Association chair, disagrees. “People are not willing to increase their productivity. Our productivity is the lowest in the world,” he says, comparing expectations for tea pluckers in Sri Lanka favourably to Assam, where he claims tea pluckers have to pluck far more. He argues that pluckers should be able to pluck 1 kilo in 12 minutes.“If they want to earn, they earn.” Pluckers, he says, “should not get into the mindset that 18 is an impossible target.” When informed that tea pluckers said they had a daily target of 13 kilograms before the 2021 wage increase, Rajadurai told SAAG: “What are they doing plucking 13 kilos for the whole day? It’s absurd.” If estates and plantation companies increase productivity targets with wage increases, the much-touted increase can arguably be equated not just to an effective wage stagnation but also a more significant risk to the lives and bodies of tea workers and their families. The firm productivity targets tied to the 2021 wage increase demonstrably taxed workers with less flexibility than before. Many workers say the work was harder after the wage increase. Maheswarie says that estates no longer weed the tea bushes properly. Instead, they expect workers to do so and then pluck 18 kilograms on top of that. Ramalingam Priyadharshini, 42, a tea plucker from Agarapatana, is still undecided about who to vote for. She’s been let down in the past by promises to fix the roads in her area and to build housing. Currently, her family has no toilet. Priyadharshini has to use the toilet at her mother’s house, a ten-minute walk away. At night, or in an emergency, she has to ask her neighbours if she can use theirs. “I’m wondering whether I should just not vote at all because our main problem is the road. But it’s only during election time that they come and say they’ll do everything for us,” says Ramalingam. Her mother, Palanimurthy Jeyam, is a retired tea plucker who plans to spoil her ballot after years of involvement with CWC as a local chairwoman. “The current government is only doing everything for the rich,” she says angrily. “But they’re letting the hungry people go hungry and die.” Mary also says she doesn’t feel hopeful that anything will change. Meanwhile, Priyadharshini argues that the state only really thinks of plantation workers when election campaigns are underway, a sentiment that brings to the fore the historical trend, since independence, of Sri Lankan political parties jockeying for power during election campaigns by promising welfare services like food subsidies and wage increases. Indeed, tomorrow’s election may well show the risk of taking plantation workers’ votes for granted—or their successful co-optation by trade unions.∎ Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Dispatch Sri Lanka Plantation Workers Tea Estates Ceylon Workers Congress Ranil Wickremasinghe UNP Central Province Malaiyaha Tamil Community Indentured Labor Agricultural Labor Agriculture Plantations Labor Wage Labor Wages Political Agendas Patronage Politics Clientelism Surplus Value Productivity Demands Production Planters’ Association Political Economy Loolecondera Kandy District Nuwara Eliya District Political Parties False Promises Effective Wage Stagnation Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 20th Sep 2024 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

SENIOR EDITOR Mehr Un Nisa MEHR UN NISA is an astrophysicist, writer, and postdoctoral researcher at Michigan State University. She is based in East Lansing. SENIOR EDITOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Facing a crushing electoral loss and the suffocating grip of Pakistan’s military state, the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party remains committed to Chungi—reclaiming revolutionary traditions, rebuilding popular power, and planting the seeds of a socialist alternative in the country’s most forsaken neighborhoods. THE VERTICAL To Posterity Facing a crushing electoral loss and the suffocating grip of Pakistan’s military state, the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party remains committed to Chungi—reclaiming revolutionary traditions, rebuilding popular power, and planting the seeds of a socialist alternative in the country’s most forsaken neighborhoods. Paweł Wargan In moments of quiet, comrade Sikander sang. The melody—a touch above a whisper—meandered softly, as if probing for an answer to an unasked question. Our faces were lit only by the faint fire we had made in the ceramic bowl, using styrofoam boxes as kindling. The heavy rains of the previous week had cleared the smog, and the Big Dipper now crept up over the water tank on the bare concrete rooftop. The phone signal was down. The internet was choked off. The military had imposed a total blackout. So we lit a fire—and we talked. We talked about Gilgit-Baltistan’s bustling border with Xinjiang. We talked about Fidel Castro , who had sent a medical brigade to Pakistan and, on a call before dawn, instructed his lead doctor on the strain of basmati to be fed to the cadres. We talked about the feudal lords’ grip on the people. We talked, and we reflected. In moments of quiet, comrade Sikander sang his soft, piercing song. News of the election trickled in with each teary-eyed arrival from the polling stations. Sixty-five votes at the City District High School. Seventy-four at the Government Boys High School. Twelve at the Qazi Grammar School. Seven at the Modern Public High School. By the end of the day, the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (HKP) gathered only 2,174 votes. The two candidates were contesting for seats in the National Assembly and the Provincial Assembly from Chungi, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Lahore. Dejection swept through the Chiragh Ghar community center, transformed in recent weeks into a bustling campaign headquarters. The night before, hopes were high and predictions were jubilant. 10,000 votes. 15,000. 30,000. On the campaign trail, where passersby met Ammar Ali Jan , the lead candidate, with song and wreath after wreath of roses, a breakthrough seemed inexorable. Now, the dim hallways and winding staircases filled with whispers of disbelief and consolation. What did we do wrong? What if our critics were right? A few of us gathered on the roof. There, by the open flame, in thickening cigarette smoke, we talked late into the night about the military state and the dizzying structures of patronage that, time and again, condemn Pakistan’s people to the deathly embrace of the past. The Poverty of Chungi Few buildings in Lahore are taller than two or three stories, so the streets and neighborhoods stretch out in all directions across the flat landscape. In Lahore’s vast Defence Housing Authority (DHA) districts, the rows of homes—or, more accurately, walled compounds, often fronted by lush tropical gardens—feel endless. The DHA is the military-run real-estate developer that operates “defense” neighborhoods across the country. Pakistan’s aspiring professional class calls them home, as does the military and political top brass. Each DHA district is bookended by armed checkpoints. How many people who live in DHA cross the stark threshold into Chungi? In this peri-urban settlement that was once a village, paved streets make way for muddied and torn-up roads. The serene, airy alleys of DHA transition to a stifling cacophony of images, smells, and sounds. Cows, goats, and stray dogs mingle with the traffic, where cars and rickshaws buzz past each other from all sides at dizzying speeds. An open canal clogged with sewage and refuse from the food markets bubbles alongside one of the neighborhood’s main roads. The water is so filthy that some seventy percent of children in Chungi suffer from dysentery. These are the material imprints of a political system in which working people have had no meaningful shot at contending power for the better part of half a century. If the Pakistani left of the 1960s had put forward ambitious proposals for pulling the country towards greater equality, by the 1980s, “the socialist alternative which once seemed imminent had become a distant memory,” the politician and intellectual Aasim Sajjad Akhtar wrote . In its place, a series of increasingly entrenched regimes adopted, he wrote, “complex and sophisticated strategies of cooptation,” removing the workers and peasants from the equations of popular power and constructing a vast “patronage machine” to take their place. Then, the Soviet Union collapsed and the left entered a long era of retreat. The Pakistani state came to reflect a complex web of competing class interests—the capitalist, the feudal, the neo-colonial—that existed in permanent contradiction. Officeholders changed often. Little changed for the Pakistani people. At the top, a powerful military bureaucratic state apparatus—an inheritance of the colonial order—operated as kingmaker. This political structure seeped into every aspect of Pakistani society, threading its way through class and ethnic divides. At the scale of their lives, the people of Chungi, too, became beholden to the same contradictions that gripped the nation: above the sewage-filled canal that runs through the district, an opulent residence houses the local kingmaker. His loyalty buys the consent of the salesmen and the elders. The salesmen will secure the consent of their markets, and the elders of their neighbors. Allegedly, ten dollars buys a vote. Here, an electoral campaign resembles a suitcase of cash. What is the strategy for building popular power in Pakistan at this juncture? “None of the mainstream parties are interested in making the working class a subject of its politics,” Ammar Ali Jan told me after the election. “None of them are willing to speak of land reforms or ending subsidies for the elites. None of them are willing to confront the IMF. None of them are willing to give genuine and consistent solidarity to oppressed nationalities against state repression.” As a student, Ali Jan went to Chungi and found it to be a microcosm of the condition of millions of people around the country. Chungi revealed the futility of mere humanitarianism—a fixed road, new water filter, or food handouts—amid the tragedy that is produced and reproduced daily by the very architecture of the state. It revealed the inability of the existing order, so mired in its class interests, to bring dignity to the deprived. The situation of the people of Chungi pointed to a singular, piercing conclusion: the need to resurrect the revolutionary socialist alternative. Chungi Stirs At the start of 2023, Ammar Ali Jan and three activists of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement (HKM)—as it was then known—began their daily walk through the streets of Chungi . They talked with the butchers, stationery salesmen, and tailors at the bazaar. They talked with the textile weavers in the workshops and factories. They talked with the unionists whose struggles traced back decades—memories that they would soon seek to resurrect through public commemorations of forgotten martyrs. They talked with the mothers who cleaned the houses of Lahore’s middle and upper classes in a nearby DHA neighborhood. The HKM had organized in the community for some time before it embarked on the path of party-building. Pakistan’s complex structures of power were on their minds. How do you dislodge a system that dominates all the political offices, all centers of decision-making power, all structures within the judiciary? How do you politicize a dormant student body, and bring it into dialogue with the peasantry and the country’s disenfranchised women? How do you activate the workers in a neighborhood like Chungi? But they also thought about Pakistan’s old left, which had become fragmented and defeated, much of it confined to a series of old comrades’ clubs. How do you bring vitality back into a movement that has lost it? “The revolutions in Cuba and China—these were the most important things that we kept in our mind when we were writing our manifesto,” Dr. Alia Haider, an organizer with the HKP, told me. In Cuba, as in China, mass movements brought together coalitions of peasants, intellectuals, women, workers, and youth, establishing political bases that could overturn the feudal, colonial, and imperialist structures that gripped both nations. It was there, among the most oppressed, that revolutionary energies stirred. “We had read Marx, we had read Mao, we had read Fidel,” Dr. Haider said. “But when we arrived in Chungi, we saw that people who had never heard these names knew Marx. They lived Marx.” For the people of Chungi, the contradictions of class were blinding. They were visible in the sewage flowing through their streets; in the oil that the street food vendors could only afford to change monthly; in summary, uncompensated dismissals from the factories. But, like the broader left, they remained disorganized, disempowered, and dejected. “The Pakistani working class does not exist as an independent political subject,” Ammar told me. It exists in a “state of non-being, unable to assert its interests.” Its subordination has become entrenched. The politics of patronage that have seeped into every crevice and pore of Pakistan’s governing order have denied political agency to those most affected by it. It became clear that simply being voted into office by them would be insufficient. External representation on its own cannot awaken working class subjectivity—it cannot reassert its protagonism in the movement of history. What is needed, Ammar told me, is the reconstruction “of the subjective factor of the revolution—the party—with all the patience, consistency and courage that this requires.” The revolutionary party occupies a central space in the socialist tradition. Karl Marx showed that class analysis provides the fundamental starting point in understanding political parties, whose configuration reflects the stages of development and respective power of different classes. The ability of working people to represent themselves depends on the existence of a party created in their image, and carrying their subjectivity. Without such a vehicle, the working class is forced to align politically with the subjectivity of its oppressors. It becomes divided. Its political horizon becomes truncated. The revolutionary party is necessary to contain, develop, and advance the aspirations of the working masses. Years ago, the HKM first mobilized the community to sweep the streets and clean the canals, seeking to address the sanitation crisis. In 2022 , the movement organized weekly health camps around Chungi, an initiative led by Dr. Alia. With time, the imperative to institutionalize became clear. “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,” Dr. Alia told me. “So we had to not only develop the infrastructure to support these people, but also cultivate a politics of solidarity.” By August 2023, the HKP opened the Khalq Clinic , a permanent site providing free testing, consultations, and medicines to people in Chungi. The Cuban Ambassador attended the opening, recalling Cuba’s own missions of medical internationalism to Pakistan. By the end of the year, the Party had five vocational schools with courses on English, computer literacy, and financial management. Students from universities came to volunteer in droves. At first, Dr. Alia told me, they struggled to connect the problems of others with their own. But the people of Chungi transformed them and opened in them a much more expansive vision of political possibility. “Until we know what the water in the sea is like, we could not know how to navigate the waves,” Dr. Alia said. By the time the election arrived in February 2024, the HKP had mobilized seven hundred people to work on its campaign. Among them were two seventeen-year-old alumni of the vocational schools, who now managed a complex voter registration process at HKP’s campaign headquarters. They checked the voter lists against records from the polling stations. They identified and corrected missing data in the voter lists. For each entry on the lists, they prepared a folder with three sheets of paper, two pens, a ruler, and two pieces of candy to help voters navigate the labyrinthine process on the day of the election. They checked the folders against numbered spreadsheets for each of the polling stations. Within months after the election, further breakthroughs arrived. When, early in 2024 , workers from the Chawla factory learned of planned closures—and proposed dismissals with minimal compensation—they organized. Led by factory worker and HKP member Maulana Shahbaz, they won what Ammar described as the “largest golden handshake since the 1970s.” The workers’ severance package increased from roughly eighty US dollars to as much as three thousand. In October, HKP members traveled to the lush countryside of Jhang, a city on the east bank of the Chenab River, to bring together thousands of peasants for a Kissan Conference. The farmers sang, chanted, and vowed to take on the state that has long subjugated them. All along, the HKP worked to ground its local organizing in an internationalist vision, protesting regularly in solidarity with Palestine and Lebanon as they faced a merciless bombardment by Western-backed Zionist forces, and mobilizing in friendship with Cuba, itself suffocated by economic warfare. If building the revolution means preparing the masses for the task of governance, then the HKP’s small first steps hold immense significance. Carried toward their logical conclusion, their political strategy aims at activating a powerful dormant force that holds singular capacity to resolve the dilemmas of Pakistan’s oppressed—substituting the landlords, capitalists, and compradors for the masses in the equations of political power. In this context, the campaign in the February election had achieved its goals, even if it failed to secure electoral gains. Many described the vote as a referendum on Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf—a rejection of foreign meddling and the brazen denial of even the most basic democratic rights. As a local party, the HKP was not part of the national calculus. As is their wont, the other parties that had come to Chungi on the day of the election—never opening the tinted windows of their jeeps—soon left. They will return for the next election, whenever it may come: in two years, or three, or five. But the HKP has established a permanent presence in Chungi. Its organizational capacities were magnified by the electoral campaign. Now, it is aiming to move further afield: to open branches in other cities across the country, building clinics, building schools, cleaning the water, and everywhere reasserting the idea that working people are the subject of history and not the object of their oppressors. In the days after the February election, the HKP put out a statement. It began with a passage from the poem To Posterity by the German communist Bertold Brecht. The poem says everything there is to say about the permanent task that lies ahead: To the cities I came in a time of disorder That was ruled by hunger. I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar And then I joined in their rebellion. That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Eart h. ∎ In moments of quiet, comrade Sikander sang. The melody—a touch above a whisper—meandered softly, as if probing for an answer to an unasked question. Our faces were lit only by the faint fire we had made in the ceramic bowl, using styrofoam boxes as kindling. The heavy rains of the previous week had cleared the smog, and the Big Dipper now crept up over the water tank on the bare concrete rooftop. The phone signal was down. The internet was choked off. The military had imposed a total blackout. So we lit a fire—and we talked. We talked about Gilgit-Baltistan’s bustling border with Xinjiang. We talked about Fidel Castro , who had sent a medical brigade to Pakistan and, on a call before dawn, instructed his lead doctor on the strain of basmati to be fed to the cadres. We talked about the feudal lords’ grip on the people. We talked, and we reflected. In moments of quiet, comrade Sikander sang his soft, piercing song. News of the election trickled in with each teary-eyed arrival from the polling stations. Sixty-five votes at the City District High School. Seventy-four at the Government Boys High School. Twelve at the Qazi Grammar School. Seven at the Modern Public High School. By the end of the day, the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (HKP) gathered only 2,174 votes. The two candidates were contesting for seats in the National Assembly and the Provincial Assembly from Chungi, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Lahore. Dejection swept through the Chiragh Ghar community center, transformed in recent weeks into a bustling campaign headquarters. The night before, hopes were high and predictions were jubilant. 10,000 votes. 15,000. 30,000. On the campaign trail, where passersby met Ammar Ali Jan , the lead candidate, with song and wreath after wreath of roses, a breakthrough seemed inexorable. Now, the dim hallways and winding staircases filled with whispers of disbelief and consolation. What did we do wrong? What if our critics were right? A few of us gathered on the roof. There, by the open flame, in thickening cigarette smoke, we talked late into the night about the military state and the dizzying structures of patronage that, time and again, condemn Pakistan’s people to the deathly embrace of the past. The Poverty of Chungi Few buildings in Lahore are taller than two or three stories, so the streets and neighborhoods stretch out in all directions across the flat landscape. In Lahore’s vast Defence Housing Authority (DHA) districts, the rows of homes—or, more accurately, walled compounds, often fronted by lush tropical gardens—feel endless. The DHA is the military-run real-estate developer that operates “defense” neighborhoods across the country. Pakistan’s aspiring professional class calls them home, as does the military and political top brass. Each DHA district is bookended by armed checkpoints. How many people who live in DHA cross the stark threshold into Chungi? In this peri-urban settlement that was once a village, paved streets make way for muddied and torn-up roads. The serene, airy alleys of DHA transition to a stifling cacophony of images, smells, and sounds. Cows, goats, and stray dogs mingle with the traffic, where cars and rickshaws buzz past each other from all sides at dizzying speeds. An open canal clogged with sewage and refuse from the food markets bubbles alongside one of the neighborhood’s main roads. The water is so filthy that some seventy percent of children in Chungi suffer from dysentery. These are the material imprints of a political system in which working people have had no meaningful shot at contending power for the better part of half a century. If the Pakistani left of the 1960s had put forward ambitious proposals for pulling the country towards greater equality, by the 1980s, “the socialist alternative which once seemed imminent had become a distant memory,” the politician and intellectual Aasim Sajjad Akhtar wrote . In its place, a series of increasingly entrenched regimes adopted, he wrote, “complex and sophisticated strategies of cooptation,” removing the workers and peasants from the equations of popular power and constructing a vast “patronage machine” to take their place. Then, the Soviet Union collapsed and the left entered a long era of retreat. The Pakistani state came to reflect a complex web of competing class interests—the capitalist, the feudal, the neo-colonial—that existed in permanent contradiction. Officeholders changed often. Little changed for the Pakistani people. At the top, a powerful military bureaucratic state apparatus—an inheritance of the colonial order—operated as kingmaker. This political structure seeped into every aspect of Pakistani society, threading its way through class and ethnic divides. At the scale of their lives, the people of Chungi, too, became beholden to the same contradictions that gripped the nation: above the sewage-filled canal that runs through the district, an opulent residence houses the local kingmaker. His loyalty buys the consent of the salesmen and the elders. The salesmen will secure the consent of their markets, and the elders of their neighbors. Allegedly, ten dollars buys a vote. Here, an electoral campaign resembles a suitcase of cash. What is the strategy for building popular power in Pakistan at this juncture? “None of the mainstream parties are interested in making the working class a subject of its politics,” Ammar Ali Jan told me after the election. “None of them are willing to speak of land reforms or ending subsidies for the elites. None of them are willing to confront the IMF. None of them are willing to give genuine and consistent solidarity to oppressed nationalities against state repression.” As a student, Ali Jan went to Chungi and found it to be a microcosm of the condition of millions of people around the country. Chungi revealed the futility of mere humanitarianism—a fixed road, new water filter, or food handouts—amid the tragedy that is produced and reproduced daily by the very architecture of the state. It revealed the inability of the existing order, so mired in its class interests, to bring dignity to the deprived. The situation of the people of Chungi pointed to a singular, piercing conclusion: the need to resurrect the revolutionary socialist alternative. Chungi Stirs At the start of 2023, Ammar Ali Jan and three activists of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement (HKM)—as it was then known—began their daily walk through the streets of Chungi . They talked with the butchers, stationery salesmen, and tailors at the bazaar. They talked with the textile weavers in the workshops and factories. They talked with the unionists whose struggles traced back decades—memories that they would soon seek to resurrect through public commemorations of forgotten martyrs. They talked with the mothers who cleaned the houses of Lahore’s middle and upper classes in a nearby DHA neighborhood. The HKM had organized in the community for some time before it embarked on the path of party-building. Pakistan’s complex structures of power were on their minds. How do you dislodge a system that dominates all the political offices, all centers of decision-making power, all structures within the judiciary? How do you politicize a dormant student body, and bring it into dialogue with the peasantry and the country’s disenfranchised women? How do you activate the workers in a neighborhood like Chungi? But they also thought about Pakistan’s old left, which had become fragmented and defeated, much of it confined to a series of old comrades’ clubs. How do you bring vitality back into a movement that has lost it? “The revolutions in Cuba and China—these were the most important things that we kept in our mind when we were writing our manifesto,” Dr. Alia Haider, an organizer with the HKP, told me. In Cuba, as in China, mass movements brought together coalitions of peasants, intellectuals, women, workers, and youth, establishing political bases that could overturn the feudal, colonial, and imperialist structures that gripped both nations. It was there, among the most oppressed, that revolutionary energies stirred. “We had read Marx, we had read Mao, we had read Fidel,” Dr. Haider said. “But when we arrived in Chungi, we saw that people who had never heard these names knew Marx. They lived Marx.” For the people of Chungi, the contradictions of class were blinding. They were visible in the sewage flowing through their streets; in the oil that the street food vendors could only afford to change monthly; in summary, uncompensated dismissals from the factories. But, like the broader left, they remained disorganized, disempowered, and dejected. “The Pakistani working class does not exist as an independent political subject,” Ammar told me. It exists in a “state of non-being, unable to assert its interests.” Its subordination has become entrenched. The politics of patronage that have seeped into every crevice and pore of Pakistan’s governing order have denied political agency to those most affected by it. It became clear that simply being voted into office by them would be insufficient. External representation on its own cannot awaken working class subjectivity—it cannot reassert its protagonism in the movement of history. What is needed, Ammar told me, is the reconstruction “of the subjective factor of the revolution—the party—with all the patience, consistency and courage that this requires.” The revolutionary party occupies a central space in the socialist tradition. Karl Marx showed that class analysis provides the fundamental starting point in understanding political parties, whose configuration reflects the stages of development and respective power of different classes. The ability of working people to represent themselves depends on the existence of a party created in their image, and carrying their subjectivity. Without such a vehicle, the working class is forced to align politically with the subjectivity of its oppressors. It becomes divided. Its political horizon becomes truncated. The revolutionary party is necessary to contain, develop, and advance the aspirations of the working masses. Years ago, the HKM first mobilized the community to sweep the streets and clean the canals, seeking to address the sanitation crisis. In 2022 , the movement organized weekly health camps around Chungi, an initiative led by Dr. Alia. With time, the imperative to institutionalize became clear. “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,” Dr. Alia told me. “So we had to not only develop the infrastructure to support these people, but also cultivate a politics of solidarity.” By August 2023, the HKP opened the Khalq Clinic , a permanent site providing free testing, consultations, and medicines to people in Chungi. The Cuban Ambassador attended the opening, recalling Cuba’s own missions of medical internationalism to Pakistan. By the end of the year, the Party had five vocational schools with courses on English, computer literacy, and financial management. Students from universities came to volunteer in droves. At first, Dr. Alia told me, they struggled to connect the problems of others with their own. But the people of Chungi transformed them and opened in them a much more expansive vision of political possibility. “Until we know what the water in the sea is like, we could not know how to navigate the waves,” Dr. Alia said. By the time the election arrived in February 2024, the HKP had mobilized seven hundred people to work on its campaign. Among them were two seventeen-year-old alumni of the vocational schools, who now managed a complex voter registration process at HKP’s campaign headquarters. They checked the voter lists against records from the polling stations. They identified and corrected missing data in the voter lists. For each entry on the lists, they prepared a folder with three sheets of paper, two pens, a ruler, and two pieces of candy to help voters navigate the labyrinthine process on the day of the election. They checked the folders against numbered spreadsheets for each of the polling stations. Within months after the election, further breakthroughs arrived. When, early in 2024 , workers from the Chawla factory learned of planned closures—and proposed dismissals with minimal compensation—they organized. Led by factory worker and HKP member Maulana Shahbaz, they won what Ammar described as the “largest golden handshake since the 1970s.” The workers’ severance package increased from roughly eighty US dollars to as much as three thousand. In October, HKP members traveled to the lush countryside of Jhang, a city on the east bank of the Chenab River, to bring together thousands of peasants for a Kissan Conference. The farmers sang, chanted, and vowed to take on the state that has long subjugated them. All along, the HKP worked to ground its local organizing in an internationalist vision, protesting regularly in solidarity with Palestine and Lebanon as they faced a merciless bombardment by Western-backed Zionist forces, and mobilizing in friendship with Cuba, itself suffocated by economic warfare. If building the revolution means preparing the masses for the task of governance, then the HKP’s small first steps hold immense significance. Carried toward their logical conclusion, their political strategy aims at activating a powerful dormant force that holds singular capacity to resolve the dilemmas of Pakistan’s oppressed—substituting the landlords, capitalists, and compradors for the masses in the equations of political power. In this context, the campaign in the February election had achieved its goals, even if it failed to secure electoral gains. Many described the vote as a referendum on Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf—a rejection of foreign meddling and the brazen denial of even the most basic democratic rights. As a local party, the HKP was not part of the national calculus. As is their wont, the other parties that had come to Chungi on the day of the election—never opening the tinted windows of their jeeps—soon left. They will return for the next election, whenever it may come: in two years, or three, or five. But the HKP has established a permanent presence in Chungi. Its organizational capacities were magnified by the electoral campaign. Now, it is aiming to move further afield: to open branches in other cities across the country, building clinics, building schools, cleaning the water, and everywhere reasserting the idea that working people are the subject of history and not the object of their oppressors. In the days after the February election, the HKP put out a statement. It began with a passage from the poem To Posterity by the German communist Bertold Brecht. The poem says everything there is to say about the permanent task that lies ahead: To the cities I came in a time of disorder That was ruled by hunger. I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar And then I joined in their rebellion. That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Eart h. ∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Noormah Jamal I will never leave you (2022) Acrylic on linen SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Profile Lahore Haqooq-e-Khalq Party Elections Chungi Revolution Socialism Military Crackdown Community Discourse Discourses of War Storytelling News National Assembly Chiragh Ghar Campaign Ammar Ali Jan Pakistan Poverty Defence Housing Authority DHA districts Real Estate Militarism Armed Checkpoints Peri-urban settlements Village History Memory Dysentery Healthcare Inequality Aasim Sajjad Akhtar Working Class Capitalism Feudal Neo-Colonial Ethnic Division Popular Power Land Reform Subsidies Elitist Humanitarianism IMF International Monetary Fund Nationalism Repression Activism Cuba China Revolutionary Karl Marx Dehumanization Disempowerment Khalq Clinic Medical Internationalism Vocational Training Isolation Mobilization Chawla Factory Chenab River Kissan Conference Farming Farmers Agricultural Labor Solidarity Palestine Lebanon Zionism Economic Security Imran Khan Tehreek-e-Insaf Bertold Brecht PAWEŁ WARGAN is an activist and organiser based in Berlin. He co-founded and coordinates the Green New Deal for Europe campaign, sits on the Coordinating Collective of the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25) and serves as the Coordinator of the Secretariat at the Progressive International. He publishes regularly in Jacobin , the New Statesman , Tribune, and Politico. 30 Apr 2025 Profile Lahore 30th Apr 2025 NOORMAH JAMAL is a Brooklyn based multidisciplinary artist. She graduated from the National College of Arts Lahore in 2016, majoring in Mughal Miniature Painting. And earned her Masters in Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute, NY in 2023. Some of her notable shows include: Space in Time at Rietberg Museum in Switzerland and at Canvas Gallery Karachi; Sites of Ruin and Power/Play at Twelve Gates Arts in Philadelphia, and her recent solo booth at Nada Miami. Her work has been featured in various publications and media, including Hyperallergic, The Herald, The News Pakistan, The Karachi Collective , and The Aleph Review . Currently, she is a member of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts' Manhattan studio program. The Tortured Roof Vrinda Jagota 2nd May After the March Zoya Rehman 19th Apr Letter to History (II) Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur 9th Apr Letter to History (I) Hazaran Rahim Dad 3rd Apr The Mind is a Theater of War Ahsan Butt · Sadieh Rifai 10th Feb On That Note:

Kashmiri poet Huzaifa Pandit in conversation with Nazish Chunara. COMMUNITY The Craft of Writing in Occupied Kashmir Kashmiri poet Huzaifa Pandit in conversation with Nazish Chunara. Huzaifa Pandit By abolishing Urdu, they are removing its historical significance... By pushing for the extinction of a language, you're pushing the extinction of a history and the sentiments associated with that history. Because in life the present is a function of the past. And so, by altering that past, they're hoping to alter the present altogether beyond the cognition. RECOMMENDED: Green is the Colour of Memory (Hawakal Publishers, 2018) by Huzaifa Pandit. By abolishing Urdu, they are removing its historical significance... By pushing for the extinction of a language, you're pushing the extinction of a history and the sentiments associated with that history. Because in life the present is a function of the past. And so, by altering that past, they're hoping to alter the present altogether beyond the cognition. RECOMMENDED: Green is the Colour of Memory (Hawakal Publishers, 2018) by Huzaifa Pandit. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Interview Kashmiri Poetics Historicity Poetic Form Poetry Kashmiri Struggle Kashmir Faiz Ahmed Faiz Agha Shahid Ali Mahmoud Darwish PTSD Trauma Mass Protests Memory Language Diversity Urdu Resistance Poetry Metaphor Metaphoricity Raj Rao Varavara Rao Journaling Occupation Pune University Language Language Politics Hindutva Despair Defiance HUZAIFA PANDIT is the author of Green is the Colour of Memory which won the first edition of Rhythm Divine Poets Chapbook Contest 2017 . He is the winner of several poetry contests like Glass House Poetry Competition and Bound Poetry Contest. Born and raised in Kashmir, his poems alternate between despair, defiance, resistance and compliance as they seek to make sense of a world where his identity is outlawed. He holds a Ph.D from the University of Kashmir on the poetics of resistance with Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Agha Shahid Ali and Mahmoud Darwish. His poems, translations, interviews, essays and papers have been published in various journals like Indian Literature, PaperCuts, Life and Legends, Jaggery Lit, JLA India, Punch and Noble/Gas Qtrly . 24 Jan 2021 Interview Kashmiri Poetics 24th Jan 2021 Into the Sea Mai Ishizawa · Polly Barton 27th Apr The Mind is a Theater of War Ahsan Butt · Sadieh Rifai 10th Feb مادری زبانیں Sabika Abbas 18th Oct Kashmiri ProgRock and Experimentation as Privilege Zeeshaan Nabi 21st Dec Bengali Nationalism & the Chittagong Hill Tracts Kabita Chakma 9th Dec On That Note:

Journalist Fiza Pirani in conversation with Editor Kamil Ahsan. COMMUNITY How Immigration & Mental Health Intersect Journalist Fiza Pirani in conversation with Editor Kamil Ahsan. Fiza Pirani I’ve been very frustrated by the way that the media portrays suicide. Suicide contagion has been on the rise for teenagers in wealthy, suburban American neighborhoods. Financial prosperity does not protect them from mental illness. But suicide deaths still aren’t really reported on. RECOMMENDED: Foreign Bodies , a Carter Center-sponsored newsletter by Fiza Pirani, centering immigrants with a mission to de-stigmatize mental illness and encourage storytelling. One year after teen's suicide, Georgia father continues the fight , The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Oct 27th, 2018), by Fiza Pirani I’ve been very frustrated by the way that the media portrays suicide. Suicide contagion has been on the rise for teenagers in wealthy, suburban American neighborhoods. Financial prosperity does not protect them from mental illness. But suicide deaths still aren’t really reported on. RECOMMENDED: Foreign Bodies , a Carter Center-sponsored newsletter by Fiza Pirani, centering immigrants with a mission to de-stigmatize mental illness and encourage storytelling. One year after teen's suicide, Georgia father continues the fight , The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Oct 27th, 2018), by Fiza Pirani SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Interview Investigative Journalism Mental Health Climate Change Erasure The Intersections of Mental Health Suicide Contagion Immigration Foreign Bodies Teenagers Personal History FIZA PIRANI is an independent journalist, writer and editor based in Atlanta, Georgia. She is currently a student in the University of Georgia’s Master of Fine Arts in Narrative Nonfiction program and the founder of the award-winning immigrant mental health newsletter Foreign Bodies . Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Teen Vogue, Colorlines, Electric Literature. Previously, she was managing editor of The AJC’s Pulse Magazine. 16 Sept 2020 Interview Investigative Journalism 16th Sep 2020 On the Relationship between Form & Resistance Iman Iftikhar · Sharmin Hossain · Kalpana Raina · Maira Khwaja · Suneil Sanzgiri 17th Apr Nation-State Constraints on Identity & Intimacy Chaitali Sen 17th Dec Returning to the Sundarbans Amitav Ghosh 28th Oct The Ghettoization of Dalit Journalists Sudipto Mondal 14th Sep Experimentalism in the Face of Fascism Meena Kandasamy 7th Sep On That Note:

DESIGN DIRECTOR Mukul Chakravarthi Mukul Chakravarthi is a Senior Product Designer at Fidelity Labs, a Visiting Critic at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and former Adjunct Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is also a typographer, interaction designer, and architect based in San Francisco. DESIGN DIRECTOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

SENIOR EDITOR Naib Mian Naib Mian is writer and journalist, currently an editor at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, formerly a producer of interactives and visual stories at the New Yorker where he also led The New Yorker Union. SENIOR EDITOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

· THE VERTICAL Reportage · Colombo The Citizen's Vote Alarms of change sounded in 2024 for the first time in Sri Lanka’s history—the leader of the controversial far-Left JVP was elected President, and the majority coalition in parliament is now led by the Marxist party. But not everyone was sold from the outset, perhaps for reasons manifest now in the current president’s follow-through on promises to the poor and respect for the historically marginalized. Sujeewa Kumari Weerasinghe, Full bloom (2022), oil on canvas. Sri Lanka finally has a new face at the helm—a man who brands himself as a political outsider, people’s man, and harbinger of change. Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who assumed the presidency in September 2024, is navigating Sri Lanka’s road out of a crippling economic crisis that caused the masses to lose faith in the island’s political dynasties. But Dissanayake’s victory is arguably more about citizens’ disillusionment with the status quo than it is about a real belief in his politics, which are controversial particularly for his party’s history of violent insurgency during the 1970s and 1980s ; it is otherwise difficult to explain a surge in popularity from 3 percent in the 2019 election to 42 percent in the 2024 election . 2024 also marked the first instance of a president failing to claim an outright majority on first-preference votes alone, and the number of spoiled or invalid votes was the highest in history at 300,000 , more than double compared to 2019. Ultimately, all signs of an island, divided in its voting intentions. “We didn’t get anything we hoped for,” said 37-year-old government bank employee Iresha, speaking to SAAG ahead of the election about the political situation of the country over the last five years. “Politicians made empty promises.They didn’t do what they promised they would. They did what they wanted to do. Because of that, right now we are thinking that the JVP is the solution.” Sujeewa Kumari Weerasinghe, Tinted narratives 1 (2018), Mixed media on canvas. The JVP, or Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, is the political party Dissanayake is the leader of—as well as a member of the National People’s Power (NPP) alliance that claimed victory in September’s presidential elections, as well as a landslide victory in the parliamentary elections that followed two months later. The faith people have in the JVP is significant not just because they have never been in power before, but because they were responsible for two violent Marxist insurrections against the Sri Lankan government in the 1970s and 1980s that led to tens of thousands of deaths and disappearances . “They murdered people, they closed down the shops, they destroyed government property,” said rickshaw driver Chaminda Pushpakumara, explaining why he was unable to support the JVP in the election. “In 1987, it was really tough.” Pushpakumara opted instead to support incumbent Ranil Wickremesinghe, who took the reins of the country in 2022 following a desperate economic crisis caused by an ill-fated fertiliser ban, a decline in tourism amid the COVID-19 pandemic , and financial mismanagement by then-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Widespread protests triggered his resignation, and he fled the country. Wickremesinghe was elected in a secret ballot less than two weeks later. He was unpopular with protesters, who saw him as a crony of the Rajapaksas, as he had served as acting Prime Minister just before Rajapaksa’s resignation. Three years after the economic crisis began, some families are still struggling to stay afloat. Auto-rickshaw driver Ajantha Gunadasa said his family sometimes has their electricity cut when they’re unable to pay the bills. “If we eat today, then we have to go to work tomorrow,” he said. “If we pay our light bill and electricity bills, then we don’t have any money for food.” It was this frustration that led him to vote for Dissanayake. Unlike Pushpakumara, he was not put off by the JVP’s past. “Who hasn’t done something bad in this country?” he said, reflecting on the decades of violence inflicted on the Tamil minority by the Sinhalese government—an issue that primary candidates engaged with far less in the most recent election than in previous ones, perhaps because the cost of living was the primary factor in most voters’ minds. “The people who came to power on a racist platform have destroyed the country,” said Gunadasa. Sujeewa Kumari Weerasinghe, Presence of the past iii (2019), oil on canvas. Former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa is one such example—when he was the defence minister, he oversaw the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Tamils in Sri Lanka’s northeast in 2009, during the final stages of the Sri Lankan Civil War. Although Gunadasa voted for Rajapaksa in 2019, like many others, the economic crisis changed his view of the Rajapaksa clan. “When your parents were your age, they would have lived in so much fear in Jaffna,” Gunadasa tells me, after finding out my family is from the island’s north. It’s true. I grew up hearing stories of how my mother had to flee home, fearing for her safety during the Indian Peacekeeping Force’s (IPKF) occupation in 1987 , when her house was shelled by the Sri Lankan Army. Despite his victory, Dissanayake’s electoral campaign did not connect with all voters, especially those from marginalised communities: Electoral maps show that he failed to appeal to Tamil voters in Sri Lanka’s northern, eastern and central provinces especially. This may be in part because of his positions prior to the election on several key issues. He said he would not seek to punish anyone accused of war crimes or human rights violations—including those committed against Tamils. He also campaigned against a ceasefire during Sri Lanka’s civil war in the 2000s, which was harmful to Tamil communities in the country, whose lives were torn apart by the conflict. Since they came into power, his alliance, the NPP, have dismissed the Thirteenth Amendment, which promises devolved powers to the north, as “ not necessary ”. And Dissanayake’s pre-recorded presidential address to the nation did not include subtitles or a translation in Tamil, making it impossible for many to understand, and prompting criticism from Tamils on social media. Tamils instead voted overwhelmingly for Sajith Premadasa in the last election , a two-time presidential hopeful and son of former president Ranasinghe Premadasa. The elder Premadasa served as President from 1989 to 1993 before he was assassinated by a suicide bomber from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE ), the militant group who fought for an independent homeland in the north and east of Sri Lanka. It might seem like the mood among Tamils has shifted in the months following Dissanayake’s victory, as the NPP swept to power across all the districts in the Tamil homeland in November’s parliamentary elections. Tamil scholar Mario Arulthas argues , however, this is not symbolic of the death of Tamil nationalism, but rather a hope for a better economy and a frustration with Tamil politicians. And, he points out, Dissanayake’s government has continued to arrest Tamils for participating in memorialisation events for their civil war dead—reneging on election promises and suggesting a continuation of the status quo. Local government elections held in early May showed a swing away from Dissanayake’s NPP alliance once again. Dissanayake’s government is failing to meet election promises made to more groups than just Tamil voters. Dissanayake initially promised to renegotiate the bailout deal Sri Lanka struck with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) under Wickremesinghe, which led to widespread austerity measures that affected the poorest Sri Lankans the most. Dissanayake has since backtracked , claiming the economy “cannot take the slightest shock”. Although the mood in Sri Lanka is hopeful a few months into AKD’s presidency, the working class is yet to be fully convinced. Little has changed when it comes to the country’s cost of living, with the poorest citizens facing yet another year of eking out a living. Dissanayake’s government has shown some sympathy, raising minimum wages by TK percent or amount—but it remains to be seen how far these changes will reach. Sujeewa Kumari Weerasinghe, Full bloom (Anatomy) (2022), oil on canvas. Gundasa’s wife was one of the many voters who spoiled her ballot. Ahead of the election, she was emotional as she explained being unable to get a job as a young person despite completing her education—a fate her children are also experiencing. Her 22-year-old daughter is unable to get a job or afford private education in Sri Lanka, while, the couple says, the children of wealthy politicians are studying at private universities abroad. “I am not voting for anyone,” she says, adding, “that’s my policy.” Corruption and the economy were the backbone of Sri Lanka’s 2024 vote, which represented a landmark shift in the country’s politics. Although Dissanayake’s promises to create a Sri Lanka that treats all its citizens equally still remain far-off goals, particularly for the country’s poorest and minority communities, his first six months in office have so far shown a willingness to shake up the status quo. “I am not a magician, I am a common citizen,” Dissanayake said as he took oath as the president of Sri Lanka. Perhaps those words were said with an awareness that the common citizens of Sri Lanka have power beyond what anybody had previously imagined—power to dismantle the ruling class and put their faith in a man who might just change it all. As for whether he really will, only time will tell. If he doesn’t, the citizens will surely have something to say. Sujeewa Kumari Weerasinghe, Full Bloom (Anatomy iii) (2022), oil on canvas. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Reportage Colombo Tamil Sri Lanka Indian & Sri Lankan Tamil Communities Sinhala Nationalism Sri Lankan Civil War Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam JVP Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna National People’s Power alliance Marxist insurrection NPP Democracy Leftist Economic Crisis minority discrimination Poverty Impoverished Histories Sajith Premadasa Dissanayake Dissent Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 16th Jul 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

ARTIST Mon M MON M is an organizer, writer, and illustrator from Bangalore, India currently organizing around surveillance, ending jail expansion, and prisoner support programs in Lenapehoking/New York City. Her work focuses on undoing the reformist creep of progressive criminal justice institutions and policies, as well as on abolitionist feminist strategies for ending the carceral state, and anti-caste solidarity within the South Asian diaspora, as a Savarna individual. She is a co-author of 8 to Abolition , as well as a founding co-organizer of the National No New Jails Network , and Free Them All for Public Health . ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE