On the permanent emergency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Illustration: Jamhoor
On October 11, 2026, the federal government of Pakistan suspended the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and transferred control of the majority of the province to the Governor, who will administer it through an 11-member advisory council. In 12 districts, primarily including the newly merged tribal districts, a 48-member unelected council called the “Area Representative and Development Council” will displace the government. This comprises the so-called tribal maliks (chiefs)–anachronistic, patriarchal heads of colonially constructed tribes through the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR)–and other pro-state individuals.
This decision came following PTI’s latest call for a long march aimed at securing the release of Imran Khan from prison. Meanwhile, the federal government and military leadership have accused PTI of complicity and a lack of cooperation in addressing the surge in terrorism in the province.
This comes at a time of unprecedented political discontent and escalating crackdowns across Pakistan’s peripheral regions, including Balochistan, Azad Jammu and Kashmir, and Gilgit-Baltistan. Therefore, it is important for us to conduct a deeper inquiry into the center’s relationship with the peripheries to place what happened in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa within its historical context. I argue that the central government’s decision to dissolve the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa assembly further perpetuates long-standing relations of colonial domination within the Pakistani territory. This ascendancy assumes spatially heterogeneous forms, and has been subject to profound changes following the central government’s minerals deal with the United States.
The state’s historical, class-traversing violence cannot be explained by reductive, economistic analyses alone. I have written in Sabahoon about the relevance of the racial category within the ideology of central Pakistani nationalism. For the purposes of this article, I draw on Gramsci’s conceptualization of the totality of relations of force to understand the colonial subjugation of the peripheries. Accordingly, I examine the relations of social forces, which constitute the material and objective basis of analysis; the relations of political forces, including class-conscious organizations and parties; and the relations of military force, whether it is purely military or politico-military.
Many agree that Pakistan has never been decolonised, and that colonial violence has only intensified in the peripheries. The recent decision to impose emergency merely reflects, and further perpetuates, the colonial state’s refusal to grant Pashtuns representation. This is the fourth time an elected government has been abolished, with the first instance having occurred under Jinnah only days after the Partition of India. The (post)colonial state has regularly resorted to mass violence to reproduce its relation of dominance over the Pashtuns. The rulers have continually resurrected the draconian Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) to discipline the “unruly Pathans.” The Royal Air Force’s bombardment of villages in Waziristan in the 1920s to “decisively” enforce the British Forward Policy set the standards for the post 9/11 War on Terror. Similarly, 1857 mutineers’ execution in the Old Parade Ground, and the 1930 Qissa Khwani massacre continued to feed the libido for violence, from Babarra and the NAP rally in Rawalpindi to Khar Kamar and the Pashtun Qaumi Jirga (PQJ).
The list is long, and colonial violence has no past tense. Wars do not differentiate between classes either: the Bilours were industrialists; Usman Kakar was not poor, nor were Maulana Khanzeb and hundreds of others who died at the hands of namaloom afrad or “unknown assailants.”
Colonialism itself has metamorphosed into a new and more barbaric form, as evidenced by the genocide in Palestine, the US’s renewed interests in the region, and its brazen thuggery in Latin America. These developments have transformed the stakes for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and other peripheral provinces of Pakistan in the current conjuncture. The Pakistani military brass is aligned with the US in its mineral war against China. In a recent interview, Natalie A. Baker, U.S. Chargé d'Affaires for Pakistan, spoke enthusiastically about the technological importance of rare minerals worth trillions of dollars in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Baker also alluded to plans for an ‘ecosystem’ of roads, railways, and other infrastructure to transport these minerals. Similarly, ANP provincial assembly member Nisar Baaz, citing the assembly committee’s audit report, alleged that the army-owned Frontier Works Organization (FWO) has exported billions of dollars’ worth of copper mined in Waziristan since 2018, while the provincial government received only a fraction of the royalties. The Economist also reported on the state’s new plans to divide Pakistan into potentially as many as 160 administrative units. The center’s plan to further divide peripheral national units is a bid aimed at unchallenged resource extraction.
Dissenting voices are continually stifled. The two large nationalist parties, meanwhile, have become two wings of the center: pro- and anti-Imran Khan. Tens of millions from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa work in slave-like conditions in the Middle East and other regions, because the province’s own productive forces remain undeveloped. The Pak-Afghan border, a lifeline for the local economy, has been largely closed. On the other hand, war continues to remain lucrative for some. The middle class has made great fortunes from jihad, smuggling, and other informal means. A section of this middle class-led PTI won the 2023 elections in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, with the toiling masses also supporting it as a means of resisting the establishment, at least at the ballot box. Others in war-affected areas have turned towards more radical solutions, as seen at the Pashtun Qaumi Jirga (PQJ) in Peshawar in 2024.
Thus, the recent “suspension” of the PTI government continues the center’s political autocracy, driven by material and ideological factors. Apprehending spatially uneven colonial domination, however, requires a complex dialectical approach. Not only should we study the political and military relations between the center and certain provinces, but also the processes through which these relations overdetermine class contradictions within those provinces. As such, an articulation of the national contradiction must, at once, understand it as unfolding through the immediate contradictions between fundamental classes in these regions, the commonalities between these classes, and the historical relationship between social forces in the provinces, particularly as they relate to the center.
The origins of these social forces in their current form, and the conflicts between them, can be traced to the British introduction of private property in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, resulting in the creation of a landlord class. Peasants were required to pay rent to these landlords, subjected to forced labour, and regularly faced evictions from their land. In 1929, the anti-colonial and nationalist Khudai Khidmatgars (Red Shirts), led by small landlords, rose against the colonial apparatus’s patronage of large landlords. These small landlords, however, had a complicated relationship with the peasantry, who at times allied with more radical elements. Socialists such as Maulana Abdur Rahim Popalzai and some Red Shirts supported the peasantry when the Congress government led by Dr Khan Sahib sided with a large landlord in Ghala Dher, Mardan. Hundreds were arrested, including Maulana Popalzai himself. Dr Khan Sahib’s own son, Ubaid Ullah, also came out in support of the peasants and was arrested. The government offered limited land reforms, but failed to comprehensively end feudal relations and satisfy the peasants.
The landlord-peasant contradiction assumed renewed salience with the 1968 split in the National Awami Party (NAP), which led to the formation of the Mazdoor Kissan Party (MKP), under the leadership of Afzal Bangash and Sher Ali Bacha. The split followed the NAP leadership’s decision, under Wali Khan, to abolish the Kissan (peasant) committees in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. These committees had been formed by communists within the party in 1963 and had continued to agitate against the landlord class. The call for their abolition was informed by Wali Khan’s support for certain landlords in the province, in opposition to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which had rapidly been gaining political momentum across West Pakistan and would later establish itself firmly in the center. Bolstered by landlord support, the NAP, meanwhile, was able to form a coalition government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The breakaway MKP launched an armed struggle in Hashtnagar, which subsequently spread to other parts of the province and targeted the landowning class.
Hundreds of peasants sacrificed their lives in the course of this struggle. However, this strong but limited movement generated new contradictions between spontaneous elements and leadership, wage workers and peasants, and class struggle and national struggle. In response, Sher Ali Bacha proposed forming three new fronts for advancing the class, national and democratic struggles simultaneously: urban workers, rural (agricultural workers), and wealthy peasants who had won lands over the course of the Hashtnagar struggle. These fronts, however, were never formed. Together, they were intended to counter the Punjabi bourgeoisie’s accumulation in banks and industry, as well as its exploitation of natural resources in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The national contradiction, too, unfolded within the terrain of this movement. While the peasants struggled heroically, Bhutto, in his quintessential realpolitik style, attempted to consolidate his own interests–and in doing so, further those of the center as well. Alongside pitting Baloch opponents against Baloch NAP leaders, he also supported the peasantry against the nationalist NAP in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. While travelling in Malakand during a peasant agitation, Wali Khan narrowly escaped a shooting incident in which his driver was injured. MKP leader Afzal Khamosh recently acknowledged in his book that peasants had opened fire on Khan’s vehicle, believing it to be transporting arms to landlords. Khan would subsequently attack the MKP and the peasants for failing to distribute land among landless wage workers.
Later Marxist scholars have also treated Sher Ali Bacha and Afzal Bangash as heretics without adequately engaging with the movement’s stagnation, the peasants’ reluctance to distribute the land, or their unwillingness to wage a struggle against colonial domination. The political itineraries of the MKP leadership, however, demonstrate the enduring significance of the national contradiction: following a split in the MKP, both Sher Ali Bacha and Afzal Bangash rejoined the nationalist parties. Bacha later wrote that the national contradiction in Pakistan was an objective contradiction, and that the MKP therefore could not function as a countrywide party. His Pakhtunkhwa Mazdoor Kisaan Party actively opposed Zia’s martial law regime, before joining forces with the nationalists to form the Pakhtunkhwa Mili Awami Party (PKMAP).
The national question–as these instances demonstrate–has tested the Left in the past and will continue to do so. As long as this contradiction remains violent, it will continue to overdetermine the relations of social forces in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as well as the province’s relations with other forces in the center. The current moment, therefore, requires a renewed assessment of the national contradiction: the terrain upon which it plays out today, the histories that have informed its development and transformation, and the possibilities that remain latent within these dynamics.
Asfandyar Shinwari is a PhD candidate in Politics at the University of Edinburgh. He works on labour politics in Peshawar and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.