Ammar Ali Jan is an academic and political activist who was recently charged with sedition by the Pakistani state and fired from his job at FC College in Lahore. We seem to be experiencing a moment worldwide where people’s movements are coming together to challenge the nation state and develop a new language capable of articulating a future of their own choosing. It’s also a time of terrible state violence. So grateful for this voice from Pakistan.
Ammar Ali Jan: The sedition law was a very strange law brought by the British when this foreign entity that was ruling over India was deciding who, among Indians, was loyal or disloyal to India. This meant that anybody who was challenging the Raj, challenging the White Man’s rule, challenging the British, was deemed to be a seditious figure.
Interestingly, all major nationalist figures in colonial India at some point had a sedition charge against them. So Tilak had it, Gandhi had it, Abul Kalam Azad, Bhagat Singh and then Jinnah was a lawyer in sedition cases. This is something that went beyond the communal and regional divide. Anybody who opposed the system was declared seditious; by the 1930s-40s it became clear that the vast majority of India was seditious and the British had to leave.
It is absolutely horrifying that both India and Pakistan have maintained this colonial law. It is meant to suppress the people. During the colonial era it was viewed as the most odious of all the laws that the British had made and its continuations means that there is a continuation in terms of the logic of governance between the colonial and the postcolonial State.
The postcolonial elites deemed it necessary to maintain some of the weapons that the British had. They wanted to inherit these weapons in order to ensure that the mass movements or the popular demands from below could be disciplined and its increasing use over the last few years, both in India and Pakistan, shows that there is a very real crisis emerging for both these states.
They are unable to respond to the needs of the public – the economic needs, the needs for security, for housing, for health. Much of the infrastructure has collapsed. Much of the ideological basis for both India and Pakistan has collapsed. New movements are emerging and today both Indian and Pakistan do not have a language to understand what these new movements mean. The sedition law is not only a symptom of the weakness of these states. It is also a symptom of their inability to even comprehend the crises that they are confronted by. They simply call opponents seditious, RAW agents [in Pakistan], in India it is ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] agents or NGOs [Non-Governmental Organizations]. This entire vocabulary is made by these states against their opponents and none of these words are adequate in explaining what exactly is happening. That is where the paranoia of the State stems from. More here.