IT is New Year’s Day, 2050. Pakistan’s 400 million people make it the world’s third most populous country. A four-decade-long youth bulge is as intense as ever, with half of the labour force between the ages of 15 and 29. Daily life is a rat race, punctuated by climate breakdown events and insurgencies. The state plays Leviathan under the guise of order.

As thought experiments go, projecting 24 years into the future on the basis of where we find ourselves today is no grand act of imagination. Only government propagandists and some mainstream commentators still argue that ‘Pakistan is turning a corner’. Most serious analyses acknowledge that the pace of economic, political, and social decay is hastening. Why engage in such gloomy scenarios? They compel us, I think, to imagine trajectories which are not only hopeful, but even revolutionary.

The idea of revolution has taken a beating since the end of the Cold War. US imperialism has backed a host of ‘coloured revolutions’ to roll back the legacies of the historic socialist revolutions and national liberation struggles of what Eric Hobsbawm called the short 20th century.

Here in Pakistan, where the left has been criminalised from the get-go, the meaning of revolution has........

© Dawn