In One Hand the Gun

In true Manichean fashion, liberals have summoned the specters of the Mahatma – both Brown (Gandhi) and Black (Martin Luther King Jr.) – to ask why Palestinians trapped in the world’s largest concentration camp cannot simply protest non-violently. Perhaps they missed the memo on the 2018 Great March of Return, where unarmed demonstrators were maimed by Israeli snipers deliberately targeting their knees. Or that countless nonviolent activists continue to languish in Israeli prisons. The irony is striking: the Western world venerates its own violent anti-colonial uprisings – celebrating “the shot heard round the world!” – and yet when Black and Brown people seek emancipation, the West expects – nay, demands – pacifism and non-violence.

In South Asia, October 7th resurfaced memories of anticolonial internationalist struggles, sparking mass demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine. From Lahore in the north to Kerala in the south, feminist, left-wing and communist organizations rallied to stand alongside Palestinians against the forces of imperialism, drawing the ire of their own neocolonial states in some instances. The deepening affinity between settler-colonial Israel and Hindu-fascist India fueled crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protesters, while mainstream media relentlessly propagated shared Islamophobic tropes that dehumanized Palestinians and Kashmiris. 

This issue explores armed resistance from the vantage point of South Asia, deliberately steering away from reductionist debates on the morality of violence. Under international law, Palestinians already possess the legal right to resist their subjugation by any means necessary, including armed struggle. Recall that Nelson Mandela, yet another Mahatma in Western eyes, refused to condemn the Palestinian armed struggle for liberation (one wonders how many today would confront him with the question, “Do you condemn Hamas?”). More importantly, violence is not the antithesis of non-violence, as the liberal darling Hannah Arendt explained in her essay On Violence. Violence, Arendt observed, “is by nature instrumental” and “can always destroy power.” The configuration of this instrument has historically been shaped by the colonizer. As Marx wrote in his reflections on the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny: “it is a role of historical retribution that its instrument be forged not by the offended, but the offender himself” – a realization that Fanon also came to.

Where Arendt saw the barrel of a gun as only ever a destroyer of power, anti-imperialist revolutionaries like Fanon and Mao saw it as a productive conduit for power. Against assumptions that these figures glorified violence for its own sake, they understood it as part of a broader arsenal of strategies and tactics – an instrument to be employed judiciously in the struggle to build a decolonized society. In his own essay On Violence, Fanon opens with the declaration that “decolonization is always a violent act.” As long as enemies of liberation existed, violence remained an unavoidable necessity. You can’t peacefully consent your way to liberation. The history of uprisings, rebellions, and anti-colonial movements across the Global South is testament to this. 

October 7th catalyzed this special issue, prompting us to delve into the debates surrounding revolutionary violence and seek answers in the subcontinent. Thanks to the glorification of Gandhi and his non-violent tactics, South Asia occupies a prominent place in the alleged success story of pacifism. Yet it is also a region where numerous national liberation and anti-imperialist struggles show that revolutionary violence has often been a key instigator and driver of history’s so-called locomotive. Our goal is to present the political and historical contexts that necessitated such revolutionary violence in lesser-known liberation movements across South Asia, from Balochistan to Bangladesh.

The issue presents three main perspectives on revolutionary violence. First, violence as a tool of national liberation movements resisting asymmetric colonizing and imperialist powers, domestic or foreign. Second, violence as a component of socialist strategy, employed alongside electoral participation and mass organizing, to overthrow an imperialist-backed capitalist state. And third, violence as self-defense by communities abandoned by the state and facing majoritarian violence fueled by xenophobia or communalism. The featured articles do not fit neatly or exclusively into any single category; instead, they traverse the murky boundaries between these different dimensions of violence. A unifying thread across the contributions is the state’s relentless effort to obscure the violence inherent in the dominant, capitalist order – violence it disguises through various rhetorics – while simultaneously branding any resistance against it as constitutive of violence.

The case of revolutionary socialist Siraj Sikder makes the last point abundantly clear. In his analysis of the rise and fall of the Maoist East Bengal Workers Party and its armed wing, led by Sikder, Mir Rifat Us Saleheen highlights the imperative felt by East Pakistani communists as early as 1968: that only an armed struggle could end East Pakistan’s exploitation as an internal colony of West Pakistan. Yet the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971 did not mark the culmination of this struggle. Sikder and his comrades continued their fight for emancipation, participating in both armed resistance against the state’s paramilitary forces and in mass worker movements to challenge the entrenched power of the bourgeoisie. Saleheen revisits this history to draw lessons for future movements in Bangladesh, especially in light of the Monsoon Revolution, which ousted the dictator Sheikh Hasina but left hundreds of unarmed protesters dead at the hands of the state.

Similarly, Munnavir Ali presents an alternative history of “terrorism” in the Malabar hinterlands of colonial India. Ali challenges the prevailing narrative that frames the uprisings of Muslim peasants against their landlords and British rulers as acts of communally motivated terrorism. Through a detailed reconstruction of this history from a communist perspective, Ali recasts these uprisings through a logic of class struggle. Acknowledging the class dimensions of these struggles serves, Ali suggests, as a crucial counter to contemporary Hindutva forces, who are actively rewriting these histories to inflame communal divisions.

While much of this issue examines armed liberation movements in South Asia, the story of the Bradford 12 highlights the history of South Asian resistance to empire, imperialism, and white supremacy within the belly of the beast. Nuvpreet Kalra interviews Tariq Mehmood, one of the infamous Bradford 12, who tells us how the UK government stood idly by as skinheads and fascists terrorized Black and Brown communities. When these communities organized for self-defense, they were actively criminalized by state authorities. Mehmood traces a direct line from the anti-colonial resistance against British rule in the Indian subcontinent to the diaspora’s fight for self-defense in the UK, emphasizing the internationalist currents that continue to bind communities once subjugated by the British Empire.

Noaman Ali extends this internationalist thread in his study of the Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP), historically one of Pakistan’s largest communist parties, and its approach to revolutionary violence. Drawing lessons from socialist and national liberation struggles as wide-ranging as Allende’s Chile, the PLO’s Palestine and Mao’s China, the MKP in the 1970s approached revolutionary violence as a strategic rather than moral question – armed struggle was assumed to be a legitimate tool for national liberation. The MKP grappled with the balance between military tactics and popular organization and mobilization, situating this within other political and strategic concerns. These included assessing the class character of Pakistan’s national liberation struggle, particularly the class composition and interests of its leadership. The party also confronted the endurance of colonial structures in postcolonial countries, deliberating on the appropriate strategies to combat these structures and the comprador ruling classes whose alliance to imperialist interests and personal enrichment undermined national development.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’s (LTTE) armed movement emerged in the face of similarly enduring colonial structures and ideologies in postcolonial Sri Lanka. Jude Lal Fernando shows how the country’s British-imposed unitary political structure and its Sinhala supremacist ideology categorized Tamils as alien to the island-state, laying the groundwork for their dehumanization and, ultimately, their resistance. Through its armed resistance and efforts to build the Tamil Eelam state, the LTTE, Fernando argues, disrupted the historical process of genocide. But he also emphasizes that the Tamil Eelam liberation movement extends beyond Tamil self-determination. It is also tied to the pursuit of peace – within Sri Lanka, across the Indian Ocean, and in the world at large. Jettisoning methodological nationalism and the binary of violence versus non-violence, Fernando frames the Tamil liberation movement’s armed resistance as integral to achieving a just global peace.

Decades of state violence and exploitation by the Pakistani state has pushed the Baloch movement for national liberation to its current boiling point. Militant attacks on Pakistani security forces and infrastructure are commonplace and deadly, the province a garrison state. Meanwhile, a political movement led by Baloch women is giving voice to the pain felt by millions across Balochistan, and even resonating beyond its borders. The veteran militant and intellectual, Mir Muhammad Ali Talpur, and an anonymous senior left activist reminds us in their interview that the Baloch are struggling for nothing less than decolonization. They trace the movement’s evolution from its Maoist roots to its current form, examine its relationship with the Pakistani left and other nationalist movements, and clarify the extractive role of Chinese capital and geopolitical chess in sharpening the Baloch question. 

In an interview with Saidiya Hartman, poet Amiri Baraka remarked that violence is the shortest path to social change. Does this render words powerless? History proves otherwise – words have ignited armed resistance, fueled revolutions, and continue to hold the power to define violence as revolutionary or reactionary.  The targeting of Palestinian writers and journalists shows that words have never been more powerful. However, unmoored from an ideological basis, violence risks devolving into vulgarity and wantonness, the kind Fanon described as both inflicted by colonizers and festering within the colonized.

But it is also the power of words that inspire and sustain revolutionary sacrifice. As Mian Saleem Jahangir of the MKP famously observed, a revolutionary must wield both the gun and the pen – “Mere ik hath andar qalam hai, te doojay hath bandook” (in one hand I hold a pen, in the other I hold a gun). For this issue, Sara Kazmi translates poetry from the Ghadar Party and Punjabi Maoists, situating their verses within their revolutionary histories and struggles. In her deft and lyrical translations, words come alive with that original fervor that once struck fear in the hearts of oppressors. 

Soham Patel likewise probes the power of words in his study of Eqbal Ahmad, the renowned Pakistani writer and activist. In revisiting Ahmad’s oeuvre and decades of activism, Patel finds that, beyond all the academic jargon and niche debates, the intellectual’s responsibility is to take an unwavering stand against imperialist attempts to deny the Palestinian genocide and delegitimize the diverse forms of resistance against it. Eqbal reminds us where we – and our prose, poetics, and politics – must stand in our time of monsters. 

Regrettably, progressive activists have often participated in their own defeat by portraying violence as antithetical to life. To invoke Martin Luther King against Malcolm X, or Gandhi against Bhagat Singh, as is often done, is to reinforce a tired moralistic binary between violence and non-violence, a binary that sanitizes histories in the service of capital and empire. Our issue ultimately seeks to transcend this binary, instead positioning violence as a constitutive feature of politics, whether revolutionary or reactionary. For many, armed insurgency was as evident and legitimate an option as armed counter-insurgency was for the states they confronted – a strategy often pursued not as an antithesis to life, but as a commitment to it. 

In solidarity, 

Editorial Committee
Jamhoor

Issue 9: In One Hand the Gun: Militancy in South Asia