SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Alternative Politics and Dominant Narratives: Labour in the Movement of 1968 in Lahore

In 1968 in Pakistan, an apparently spontaneous, largely urban movement spilled out on to the streets with students and labour as its main militant centre. It rallied around the figure of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto of the Pakistan People’s Party who promised a pro-worker government and ushered in Pakistan’s first democratic regime. Scholarly analyses saw the groups who supported him as the conglomeration of ‘new’ interest groups who he then betrayed by cracking down on labour and capitulating to the demands of landed politicians, ulama and the military.  This paper begins with the contention that the problem with such analyses is the place that they give this movement as a footnote in the history of the rise of the PPP. Tracing the antecedents of this movement through an analysis of the politics of labour in Lahore, this paper argues that the marginalisation of labour in the politics of Pakistan is a process that can be traced to the 1950s. The older activists and trade unionists who became part of the nascent Pakistani state at Partition, struggled against state repression and legislation aimed at depoliticising their organisations and strategies. Against the background of this longer history, the culmination of the movement was the replacement of these groups with a new set of political intermediaries who were loyal to the PPP and its new agenda.