The rage of men with no future led to the lynching of Priyantha Kumara | Fatima Bhutto
From fragile leaders to invisible workers, anger is shimmering throughout the serpentine politics of Pakistan and India
On the morning of 3 December, Priyantha Kumara, the 49-year-old export manager of Rajco Industries, asked his workers to remove a sticker from a machine in their factory in Sialkot. Kumara, a Sri Lankan, had lived in the industrial town in Punjab since 2010, when he and his two brothers had come to Pakistan in search of better economic opportunities. The Kumaras worked hard, kept their heads down, and like migrants the world over had managed to build honest lives out of their lonely labour.
The sticker in question had been put up by supporters of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a hardline Islamist party that in April 2021 was declared a militant organisation by prime minister Imran Khan’s government. Khan has been nicknamed Captain U-Turn by his opponents, and proceeded to remove the ban on the TLP a mere six months later, bending to the fundamentalist outfit when they took to the streets in a dharna or protest. Khan himself had popularised the dharna as a form of political strategy during his opposition days, and though the TLP’s agitation was violent, killing as many as six policemen as they rampaged through the streets of Lahore, Khan responded by taking them off the terror list.
Fatima Bhutto is a Pakistani author of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Runaways was published last year by Verso Books
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