Unworthy Victims: Pakistani Women Confronting State Terror

Here, we have a devastating indictment of state terror in Pakistan by our indefatigable comrade, Khadijah Shah – the prominent Pakistani public figure and political activist. 

After being violently harassed, abused, and jailed for eight months by Pakistan’s military and civilian parasitical kleptocratic elite, Shah was not deterred and after finally being released from prison, courageously began to politically organize even more fiercely. Indeed, she is relinquishing her American nationality (an act unthinkable by our ‘Lifestyle Left’) so that she can be directly participate in Pakistani political life. Since being released from jail, she has been working tirelessly to free thousands of female political prisoners languishing in the country’s dungeons, as well as being tenaciously involved in rehabilitation work for the women and their families who have been subject to unspeakable forms of repression over the past two years.

Khadijah Shah is precisely the type of Pakistani woman that our good friends at Democracy Now (DN) will never invite. Shah’s putative ‘false consciousness’ has prevented her from being a card-carrying member of the dozens of sectarian ‘Left’ groups in the country – the privileged folks that DN privileges even more by excluding anyone else.

Hence, the Pakistani liberal-left has deemed Shah unworthy of offering a ‘true’ woman’s perspective since she is ostensibly a ‘self-hating’ woman whose delusional self has led her to join at least 75 percent of the Pakistani population as critical – not blind – supporters of former Prime Minister Imran Khan. As is displayed in the photo here, the ‘Movement for Justice’ has not allowed the past two years of brutal harassment, mass murder campaign, torture, and disappearances to intimidate them from, once again, mounting some of the most massive demonstrations and rallies in the country’s history – despite the violent police state crackdown and more of the same: mass arrests, beatings, and so on.

On the one hand, women like Khadijah Shah are sacrificing everything (including the ultimate price, their lives) to fearlessly fight the Pakistani establishment’s war on women. On the other hand, the liberal-left aristocrats sitting in their silos are planning their ‘revolution.’ The actual mass movement of ordinary women confronting the tyrannical Pakistani regime is, sadly, of no concern to the country’s mainstream women’s and human rights movement…at least until the former renounce their perspectives and politics and make a blood oath of absolute loyalty to the mosaic of Trotskyist, Maoist, and Stalinist bourgeois conclaves. 

Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID). He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).