Thread by @langahwhotweets

When you're a preeminent social activist and a leading progressive light, language matters. We are not the periphery. We are the core, the absolute heart, of the indigenous culture, the music, the cuisine, the way of life that the Indus basin has to show to the world. 1/n

https://twitter.com/ammaralijan/status/1422865385473421317

We are still this primarily agricultural country's bread-basket. We produce the food and generate the food security that enables this country of a massive 220 million people to sustain all exogenous shocks like global recessions, finanical mkt collapses & economic downturns. 2/n

It is our toil, our wealth, our daily struggles that enable the ostentation of glittering metropolises. It is our raw materials that feed into industry & export helping big cities get bigger & richer. It is our blue collar labor in the ME that brings in cherished remittances. 3/n

I will even wager that we provide the economic base on which lifestyles of academic pursuit, of waxing philosophical & intellectual, of making arts & poetry, of vocal politics of dissent, of the shadow-boxing between the luminaries of the rightist & leftist elites, is built. 4/n

We are poor, yes. But not because we were born in a poor land. Our wealth is not at our disposal, in true neo-colonialist fashion. We are under-developed and we've been kept that way deliberately bcos our footprint in the corridors of power is limited since the Raj. 5/n

We are uneducated but what will education do for us, with the quality of education disparity so vast between Upper & Lower Punjab? Our education does not make us competitive. We have been kept in a state of relative economic weakness, cos our numbers enable... 6/n

...the elites from the "core", as you'd define it @ammaralijan, to be well-represented at all fora of power. And our own comprador elites are their eager partners, but where have we seen that before? Ah yes, all of Punjab under the Raj. Only the sahib is brown now. 7/n

So no, we are not the periphery. We are the base on which the superstructure of cosmopolitan/metropolitan lives rests. We are what this place has been for centuries, before TNT & the ascendancy of fundamentalism. We are the cultural & geographical heart of the country. 8/n

And we are not citizens of a periphery, we are pretty much central to the entire Pakistani project. We are just dispossessed, disenfranchised and marginalized citizens. From a person of your stature and caliber, a recognition of the duality represented in our... 9/n

...simultaneous centrality & marginality is essential. In a just society, all citizens are equal, regardless of where they're born or where they live or the language they speak. It is this principle that we need to uphold & implement. And we need to resist and overthrow,... 10/n

..much less reaffirm, the dispensation where some places are the core and others are just peripheral hinterlands meant to serve the core. And that begins by recognizing that we are not as peripheral as the high & mighty would wish us to be. In this, we seek allyship. 11/11

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