"We had read Marx, we had read Mao, we had read Fidel. But when we arrived in Chungi, we saw that people who had never heard these names knew Marx. They lived Marx." 

— Dr. Alia Haider

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.

— Bertold Brecht

Introduction: The Limits of Reformism

On November 29, 2019, students in over fifty cities across Pakistan took to the streets. The Students Solidarity March — the first mass student uprising in decades — demanded the restoration of student unions, an end to fee hikes, and the demilitarization of campuses. It was organized by the Student Action Committee, with the support of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement (HKM), trade unions, and peasant organizations. Thousands joined the rallies. Within days, the state responded. Sedition charges were filed against the organizers, including HKM founder Ammar Ali Jan and labor organizer Farooq Tariq. Ali Jan was declared “a threat to public safety” by the Deputy Commissioner of Lahore and detained under the colonial-era Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance. 

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

For the HKM, that impasse proved decisive. For years, the student movement had been dominated by the wealthier strata of Pakistani society — higher education remains largely beyond the reach of the Pakistani working class and peasantry. But a politics untethered from the actual conditions of working people's lives can do little to resolve the deep structural challenges facing Pakistani society. The transformation necessary to ensure a dignified life for Pakistan's people would not be delivered from above; it had to be built by and for the country's working class and peasantry. From January 2033, that recognition would carry the movement's organizers to the muddied streets of Chungi Amar Sidhu, an impoverished working-class neighborhood in Lahore — and from there, to the construction of a new kind of political organization.

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

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

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

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

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

The Struggle for Communism in Pakistan

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Student Movement to Working-Class Organization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The conference adopted a twenty-three-point program for agrarian reform. Its demands included the immediate: fixing minimum support prices for wheat, cotton, sugarcane, rice, and maize; purchasing wheat directly from farmers. And they included the structural: ending corporate farming and distributing government and private estate lands among peasants, small farmers, and the landless rural population; abolishing policies allowing the private sector to import and dump grain in competition with local producers; ending IMF- and WTO-led open market policies; restructuring the irrigation system; and fixing electricity rates at ten rupees per unit for small farmers. The program represented a coherent alternative to the government's Green Pakistan Initiative, which farmer organizations accused of displacing thousands of families from their land to benefit corporate interests. 

In the months that followed, the alliance between PKRC, HKP, and allied formations organized nationwide mobilizations — including on the International Day of Peasant Struggle in April 2025, with large-scale meetings in Depalpur in Punjab and across Sindh. These actions explicitly connected the agrarian crisis to broader patterns: the government's promotion of corporate farming, the construction of canals on the Indus River that threatened to leave lower riparian regions without irrigation water, and the structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF that had systematically favored large landholders and corporate interests over the small farmers who constitute the majority of Pakistan's agricultural population.

Underpinning these struggles was a structural economic analysis that the party advanced programmatically. Pakistan, the party argued, had “deindustrialized prematurely” — not because workers demanded too much, but because elites had abandoned productive investment in favor of speculation in land, mineral resources, stocks, and real estate. Recently, the party has joined the main opposition alliance in the country, the Tehreek-Tahaffuz-e-Aaine-Pakistan (Movement for the Protection of the Constitution) to build a broad front against the current military-backed government in Pakistan. After decades of isolation, the Left in Pakistan has stepped into the country’s mainstream politics. Yet, the focus of the party remains on building strong ideological cadres across the country as the basis for a deeper political transformation.  

Throughout these activities, the HKP maintained explicit internationalist commitments. The party organized regular protests in solidarity with Palestine and Lebanon, provided unconditional support to Iran's resistance against Zionist-imperialist attacks, fought against the new cold war on China, expressed friendship with Cuba and positioned itself within a broader analysis of Pakistan's place in the shifting global order. This internationalism reflected theoretical understanding that local struggles against exploitation connect to global patterns of imperialism and resistance. The construction of revolutionary consciousness requires understanding these connections rather than limiting political horizons to national boundaries.

Conclusion

The emergence and development of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party represents a significant contribution to contemporary understanding of revolutionary strategy within the conditions of twenty-first-century capitalism. The party's experiences in Chungi provide practical demonstrations that by studying the history of past struggles and applying the theoretical insights to contemporary conditions in ways that build the collective power of the working class remains the only viable path to structural change over the long run.

The HKP's strategic approach addresses fundamental questions that confront revolutionary movements operating within formally democratic political systems dominated by bourgeois parties and patronage networks. How can working-class political consciousness be developed within societies where mainstream political discourse systematically excludes class analysis? How can revolutionary organizations maintain long-term strategic vision while engaging with immediate material needs? How can local organizing efforts connect to broader transformative projects without losing grounding in concrete struggles?

Like many radical movements before it, the HKP has found answers in the patient work of community organizing, which it sees as dialectically inseparable from the long-term task of rebuilding and reasserting a working class subjectivity. The people are mobilized to clean a canal or build a clinic. In the process, they develop the skills, capacities, and confidence to change the conditions of their lives. This is how atomized individuals experiencing exploitation activate as political subjects who are no longer at the whims of the ruling class. This is the cycle of revolutionary construction; this is how socialism and democracy are built. It is not a simple process, nor does it depend on political subjects who come perfectly formed as ‘socialists’ or ‘communists’. It is, instead, a dialectical process, where people are shaped and transformed through the very act of political construction.