On Friday September 29, the Pakistan Academics Collective organized and hosted an academic panel discussion, titled, ‘Pakistan: Democracy without a Politics of the People’ at the New School for Social Research in New York.
One of the specific aspirations behind this invitational dialogue was, and remains, an effort by the Collective to carve out a space for progressive conversation about the people of Pakistan, and their ambitions for representation. The Collective’s Friday panel sought to bring together academic, legal and journalistic voices to debate Pakistan’s current polycrisis, its effects on state-society relations, and the way ahead for the country’s some 250 million citizens. Through this event, the Collective sought to initiate meaningful analysis about challenges posed by systemic inequalities to Pakistan’s democratic health beyond everyday news reporting or conventional media narratives. The motivation for bringing this panel together was to analyze the implications of the dangerous democratic backsliding and the crisis of civil liberties, that is being witnessed in Pakistan at the moment. In addition, given the recent revelations in The Intercept highlighting clear evidence of the US’s complicit intervention and facilitation of this crisis, we also wanted to address the terrible human cost of such intervention by bringing in diverse stories from Pakistan. Some questions we asked: Why are these stories important? Why should they matter to the world? What is really at stake in this crisis in Pakistan? And importantly, how do we move forward?
SherAli Tareen, an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin and Marshall College and the author of “Defending Muhammad in Modernity” and “Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship after Empire” spoke about state power and its paradoxical effects, while highlighting the need for collaboration and alliance building within the Pakistani academic community. Hussain Nadim, a Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellow at Jackson School of Global Affairs, Yale University, brought an insiders perspective to the current crisis in Pakistan, given his role as the head of the Islamabad Policy Research Institute at a very critical juncture. Khurram Hussain, an Associate Professor at Lehigh College, addressed various critical present day concerns in the context of the Pakistan postcolonial history. Soufia Siddiqi, an assistant professor of education policy based in Lahore, shared ground perspectives on civic voice and the transforming public sphere in Pakistan’s current political environment. Based on primary fieldwork with youth protesters, her presentation showcased a new vocabulary taking root in public discourse, with its implications for the role of experiential learning in state-society evolution. In doing so, Siddiqi’s work adds a much-needed vox populi to otherwise grand narratives discussing the Pakistani state and its future. Siddiqi is also currently working on a project for the New University in Exile Consortium on the subject of constraints on academic freedom in Pakistan and challenges faced by academics in Pakistan. Among the speakers were also lawyers Khadija Siddiqi and Ali Ahsan, who highlighted the technicalities of the grave violations of citizens’ legal rights in the absence of a rule of law. Veteran Pakistani journalist, Wajahat S. Khan, was especially invited to moderate the event at the behest of fellow journalist and colleague Murtaza Hussain from the Intercept. Both journalists brought provocative perspectives to the discussion, ranging from challenges to journalism in Pakistan to the logistics of Western Intervention in the region.
The event was also attended by members of the New University in Exile Consortium, Transregional Center for Democratic Studies , Scholars at Risk and the Center of Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University.
– The Pakistan Academics Collective is an independent, non-partisan network of scholars based in Pakistan and around the world, with no affiliations to any political parties or interest groups in Pakistan.
Some discussion from our event:
– Hussain Nadim’s views about the youth bomb.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K86-j01M3YT1IY6JhkmGS70bC_Vtspre/view?usp=sharing
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