Degree

BS (Social Sciences & Liberal Arts)

Faculty / School

School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS)

Department

Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts

Date of Award

Spring 2026

Date of Submission

2026-07-25

Advisor

Parmal Ahmed, Lecturer, Department of Social Sciences

Committee

Ramsha Siddiqui, Lecturer, Department of Social Sciences

Project Type

SSLA Culminating Experience

Access Type

Restricted Access

Keywords

Communist Party of Pakistan, resistance, microhistory, oral history, Zia-ul-Haq, Jam Saqi case, Sindh, hari committees, memory, left politics

Abstract

This thesis examines how members and associates of the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP) conceptualized, practiced, and remembered resistance during the period of the party’s most intense confrontation with the Pakistani state, roughly 1967 to 1983, with particular emphasis on the martial law regime of General Zia-ul-Haq. Departing from the dominant structural explanations of the decline of the Pakistani left- explanations that foreground state repression, Cold War geopolitics, and Islamization - this study adopts a micro-historical and oral-historical approach, placing the lived experiences and personal narratives of individuals at the center of analysis. Drawing on original oral history interviews with Sohail Sangi, a former CPP student-front in-charge, co-accused in the Jam Saqi case, and pioneer of Sindhi resistance journalism; with Sania Saeed, an actor raised within the underground party’s social world as the daughter of CPP member Mansoor Saeed; and with Ahmed Ali Khan, a veteran journalist and former BBC Urdu Service broadcaster who moved through the left’s trade-union and student milieux in both wings of the country as a sympathizer who never joined the party, the thesis reconstructs the everyday textures of clandestine political life: the ten-minute rule of underground appointments, the smuggling of Marxist literature, the hari committee offices of rural Sindh, the torture cells of Zia’s military camps, and the drawing rooms in which children learned that talk of equality was dangerous. The thesis argues that personal narratives do not merely illustrate the structural account of the left’s decline; they complicate it, revealing continuities of commitment, informal networks of solidarity, and forms of ideological persistence that structural analyses render invisible.

Pages

45

Download

The full text of this document is only accessible to authorized users.

Share

COinS