Wikipedia

Draft:Ammar Rashid

Ammar Rashid
عمار رشید
Born
Ammar Rashid

August 16, 1986
NationalityPakistani
Alma materLahore University of Management Sciences
Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK
Occupation(s)Researcher, writer
Years active2007–present
Known forRevolutionary music, political organizer of Awami Workers Party[1]

Ammar Rashid (Urdu: عمار رشید; born August 16, 1986) is a Pakistani researcher, writer, political worker and organizer of the left-wing party Awami Workers Party.[2] He ran for the National Assembly seat NA-53 in the Islamabad capital territory for 2018 Pakistani general election.[3][4][5][6]

Politics

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Political orientation

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Rashid is a proponent of democratic socialism. He has written on and expressed support for policies like rural and urban land reform,[7] labour-intensive and ecologically-sustainable industrialization, progressive tax and public finance reform,[8] labour unionization,[9] climate justice, [10] pro-public-health food regulation,[11] and gender desegregation.[12]

The Emergency Times

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Rashid's involvement in political activism started in 2007, when he was a student at LUMS, during the Lawyers' Movement, initiated by Pakistani lawyers against the military dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf following his declaration of Emergency and attempt to sack the Supreme Court. On November 7, 2007, Rashid along with 1,000 students of his university, came out to protest the emergency rule imposed by Musharraf's televised emergency announcement on November 3, 2007.[13]

Major Pakistani news networks had been taken off air at the time of the Emergency, so Rashid took the initiative to start a newsletter named “The Emergency Times” (November, 2007 - June, 2008) to coordinate student and civil society protests, narrate their demands, and provide students a platform to speak about democracy and organize against emergency rule. The newsletter described itself as “an independent Pakistani student information initiative providing regular updates, commentary, and analysis on Pakistan’s evolving political scenario.” The newsletter and its linked mailing list became one of the key means of organizing and coordinating student and civil society protests against the Emergency rule during the media blackout.[14][15]

Awami Workers Party

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Rashid is a leading member of the Awami Workers Party (AWP) since the party was founded in 2012. He served as general secretary and information secretary AWP Rawalpindi-Islamabad from 2014 to 2016.[16][17] Rashid was elected as President of Awami Workers Party Punjab in its third Congress held on January 17, 2020 in Faisalabad.

As political worker for AWP, Rashid was involved in the struggle for the right to affordable housing and shelter in Islamabad in 2014-2015, in which he organized legal and political resistance to the evictions of people from katchi abadi (informal settlements) driven by the Capital Development Authority (CDA).[18][19] On July 30, 2015, the Capital Development Authority (CDA) along with police, local administration and rangers, demolished hundreds of dwellings of an informal settlement in Islamabad’s I-11 sector Islamabad.[20] On August 2, 2015, to stop the forced evictions in Islamabad, Rashid along with Aasim Sajjad Akhtar and residents from Islamabad's katchi abadis, filed a constitutional petition in the Supreme Court to stop CDA’s eviction campaign and called on the apex court to enforce the right to housing.[21][22] It was requested in the petition that the court declare the residents of katchi abadis of the federal capital entitled to the benefits conferred under Articles 9, 10A and 25 of the Constitution. The petition asked the Supreme Court to declare that "the state is bound to provide the residents of katchi abadis shelter as per the Constitution and the National Housing Policy 2001.” On August 26, 2015, the Supreme Court of Pakistan ordered the federal government and other departments to stop further demolition of houses in Islamabad's katchi abadis.[23][24]

When CDA claimed it needed to demolish informal settlements as their growing Christian population would threaten the city's Muslim majority. Rashid responded that "the move was old-fashioned bigotry against minorities and working classes and that the administrative body has no right to be making decisions about the religious demography of Islamabad.”[25][26][27]

On 28 January 2020, Islamabad police arrested Rashid, along with three other members of the Awami Workers Party, Ismat Shahjahan, Nawfal Saleemi and Saifullah Nasar, member of the National Assembly Mohsin Dawar, and 23 other protesters from the National Press Club Islamabad at peaceful demonstration for the release of Pashtun peace activist Manzoor Pashteen. Rashid and the other protestors were accused of entirely concocted charges of sedition against the state while Ismat Shahjahan and Mohsin Dawar were released on 29 January, the Additional District and Sessions Judge refused to grant post-arrest bail to 23 protesters and sent them to jail. Rashid and the protesters appealed the decision in the Islamabad High Court where they were granted bail by Chief Justice Athar Minallah on February 3, 2020. The Chief Justice, summoned the Islamabad City Magistrate, to provide an explanation for placing sedition and terrorism charges on peaceful protesters.[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39] On February 17, 2020, to comply with IHC orders, Islamabad Deputy Commissioner Hamza Shafqaat informed the court that all charges against the 23 protesters had been dropped.[40][41][42][43]

General Elections 2018

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Rashid contested for the 2018 Pakistani general election on National assembly seat NA-53 in federal capital Islamabad.[44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51]

His electoral campaign revolved around an agenda of “social justice, democracy, gender equality, secularism and environmentally sustainable development”.[52] Rashid vowed to revive left-wing politics by bringing back ideological convictions to politics.[53]

His election manifesto focused on solving Islamabad's water crisis, increasing the minimum wage in line with inflation, policies for low-income housing, and allocation of 10% of GDP for education.[54][55]

Revolutionary Music

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Rashid is also a musician. His music is a mix of acoustic, classical, folk and rock, and he regularly performs revolutionary songs[56][57] and poetry at protests, rallies and events organized by his party, trade unions, students[58][59] and women’s groups[60][61] and progressive people’s movements.[62][63][64]

During his campaign for the 2018 Pakistani general election, Rashid released a campaign song and music video titled ‘Chehre Nahi Samaaj Ko Badlo’ (Change society, not just the faces in charge), which he produced along with fellow leftwing Pakistani musician and academic Shahram Azhar.[65]

Along with other AWP members, he has organized several political schools to raise awareness about social, economic and political structures of inequality along with methods of organizing progressive political resistance in Pakistan.[66][67][68]

Articles

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Rashid has published and continues to publish regular articles on student politics, development, feminism, political economy, environment etc. in newspapers and magazines (Daily Times (Pakistan),[69] Al-Jazeera,[70] TRT World,[71] Dawn News,[72] The Express Tribune,[73] The Guardian,[74] Pakistan Today[75]). He has also published his research in journals like Third World Quarterly,[76] and the Journal of the Pakistan Medical Association,[77] among others.

References

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  9. ^ "No country for labour". Daily Times. 1 May 2017.
  10. ^ Rashid, Ammar (20 September 2019). "Towards climate justice in the spirit of internationalism". DAWN.COM.
  11. ^ Rashid, Ammar (3 January 2021). "SOCIETY: THE BATTLE FOR HEALTHY FOOD". DAWN.COM.
  12. ^ Rashid, Ammar (5 March 2018). "Asma Jahangir's funeral and the ideology of gender segregation". DAWN.COM.
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  73. ^ "ammar.rashid, Author at The Express Tribune". The Express Tribune. Archived from the original on 2019-11-30. Retrieved 2019-11-01.
  74. ^ Rashid, Ammar (8 August 2016). "Feminism is breaking through the rigid patriarchy in Pakistan". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 3 November 2019. Retrieved 3 November 2019.
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  76. ^ Akhtar, Aasim Sajjad; Rashid, Ammar (3 August 2021). "Dispossession and the militarised developer state: financialisation and class power on the agrarian–urban frontier of Islamabad, Pakistan". Third World Quarterly. 42 (8): 1866–1884. doi:10.1080/01436597.2021.1939004. ISSN 0143-6597.
  77. ^ Rashid, Ammar; Amjad, Saba; Nishtar, Mohammad Kassim; Nishtar, Noureen Aleem (May 2020). "Trans-Fatty Acid (TFA) elimination in Pakistan: A situational analysis". JPMA. The Journal of the Pakistan Medical Association. 70(Suppl 2) (5): S1–S30. ISSN 0030-9982. PMID 33144736.


Category:Living people Category:Pakistani Marxists Category:Awami Workers Party politicians Category:Pakistani socialists Category:1986 births

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