University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses July 2019 Pakistani Pro-Democracy Movement: From the 1960s to the 2000s Sofia Checa University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Asian History Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Checa, Sofia, "Pakistani Pro-Democracy Movement: From the 1960s to the 2000s" (2019). Doctoral Dissertations. 1616. https://doi.org/10.7275/nf80-pe75 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1616 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. PAKISTANI PRO-DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT: FROM THE 1960s TO THE 2000s A Dissertation Presented by SOFIA HAMDANI CHECA Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY May 2019 Department of Sociology © Copyright by Sofia H. Checa 2019 All Rights Reserved PAKISTANI PRO-DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT: FROM THE 1960s TO THE 2000s A Dissertation Presented by SOFIA HAMDANI CHECA Approved as to style and content by: ____________________________________ Dan Clawson, Chair ____________________________________ Joya Misra, Member ____________________________________ Millie Thayer, Member ____________________________________ Obed Pasha, Member __________________________________ Anthony Paik, Chair Department of Sociology DEDICATION To my parents: Mercedes Checa Molina & Dr. Abbas Jafar Hamdani ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Dan Clawson, chair of my dissertation committee, for his guidance and continued support through this long process. Thank you for being so generous with your time, for always providing me with extensive and thoughtful feedback on my drafts, giving me deadlines when I needed them, letting me be when I didn’t, and for always assuring me that I was indeed capable of finishing this project – I can’t thank you enough. I am also deeply grateful to my committee members Joya Misra and Millie Thayer. Thank you for your many discussions, thoughtful feedback, your guidance, friendship and continued support throughout my time in the department. Thanks also to Obed Pasha, my outside committee member, for his guidance and feedback, and for cheering me on. Thank you to friends in the sociology department who gave me feedback on my work along the way including Vanessa Adel, Irene Boeckmann, Jillian Crocker, Todd Evans, Melissa Fugiero, Jennifer Hill Geertsma, Kathleen Hulton, Dana Huyser de Bernardo, Elisa Martinez, Rachel Rybaczuk, and Jackie Stein. And a special thanks to Joya Misra for helping create spaces, via different writing groups, where I could meet with my colleagues and get this feedback. Thank you to the Department of Sociology for supporting me for many years. I could not have finished this project without the help of so many people in the department who helped and taught me over the years. A special thank you to Juliet Carjaval, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Beth Berry, Janice Irvine, Katelyn Martin, Heather Cassidy, Cindy Patten, Randall Stokes, Don Tomaskovic-Devey, Maureen Warner, Wendy Wilde, Jonathon Wynn, and Bob Zussman. The department awarded me a travel grant and a professional development grant for which I am truly grateful. These grants helped pay for my travel for my fieldwork and for transcribing my interviews. Thanks also to so many of my colleagues in sociology for helping me grow as a sociologist. My fieldwork in Pakistan would not have been possible without the help of so many people. Thank you Mamá for travelling with me and taking care of Rafi so I could do my fieldwork – what would I do without you! Thank you Shabana for feeding us and for v helping take care of Rafi. Thank you, Sahar Shafqat, Saadia Toor, Uncle Ashfaque, and Aamir Riaz for helping me widen the scope of my fieldwork. And thanks to many other activists whose names I will keep anonymous to protect their identities: thank you for being so generous with your time; for opening up to me; for helping me get in touch with other people; and to many, for your inspiring dedication to democracy in Pakistan. Thanks also to Aiza Azam and Usman Shaukat for your help in transcribing the interviews. Thanks to Easthampton High for letting me take a year off so I could focus on my writing. Thanks to Nellie Taylor and Cat MacDonald for their support and to my many students who kept the pressure on by continuously asking me when they could call me “Dr. Checa.” Thanks also to Montenegro for its beauty, hospitality, and new friendships, that made the last stretch of this process as beautiful as could be. Thank you, Kathleen Hulton, Vanessa Adel, Swati Birla, Annette Hunt, and Elisa Martinez for your camaraderie – my time at UMass would not have been the same without you. And thank you Saadia Mansoor and Fatima Altaf – my slob kebabs – for seeing me through my periods of self-doubt. Fatima, I guess I should thank you for steering me towards sociology in the first place! Finally, a big thank you to my family. Thanks, Iftikhar and Assad, for cheering me on. Thank you, Fatima, for being my biggest cheerleader ever and for always being there. Thank you Mamá and Papa for everything. Thank you, Mamá, for always assuring me that I could do it. Thank you, Papa, for always remembering to ask about the progress of my research, even when you didn’t remember how many kids I had! Arslan and Rafi, there’s so much to thank you for that I wouldn’t know where to start, so all I’ll say is this: A., there’s no way I could have done this without you. As always, you were right: I eventually did it! And Raf boy: thank you for always helping me stretch my mental muscles, both metaphorically and literally. I bet those head squishes went a long way. I’m just glad you didn’t finish your PhD before I did! vi ABSTRACT PAKISTANI PRO-DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT: FROM THE 1960s TO THE 2000s MAY 2019 SOFIA HAMDANI CHECA, B.Sc., FEDERAL GOVERNMENT COLLEGE M.B.A., QUAID-E-AZAM UNIVERSITY M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Dan Clawson This dissertation is an attempt to understand the differences in the nature of the pro- democracy movement in Pakistan from the 1960s to the 2000s, with a focus on the latter. The dissertation is composed of three different papers. The first paper is an analysis of the changing civil society in Pakistan. I argue that in order to understand why the two movements were so different, we need to look at not just a snapshot of the civil society, but its evolution over the years. Rather than thinking of civil society as a static collection of different groups and organizations, this research analyzes it as a combination of groups (or structures) as well as processes that changed over time. The second paper is a study of the stark urban-rural and class divides that exist in the country, which I argue, lead to people having different opinions about voting, politicians, and electoral politics in general. A big part of this story is the alignment of the Pakistani military’s business interests with certain sections of the society. Both these factors – the changing civil society as well as the urban-rural and class divides – have implications for who vii participates in the movement and the demands being made. The final paper examines the diversity within the prodemocracy movement of the 2000s, which makes it rather unique compared to other movements analyzed in the social movement literature. I analyze diversity within the movement in terms of the wide array of ideological leanings of movement participants as well as the different kinds of coalitional models that co-existed within the movement: loose coalitions, pragmatic coalitions, Frenemies, and opposing movements. The research is based on interviews conducted with activists who were involved in either or both movements as well as an analysis of blogs, newspaper articles and other secondary sources. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................v ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................... vii LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................. xi LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... xii CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ...........................................................................................................1 1.1 The Prodemocracy Movement of the 2000s ......................................................7 1.2 The Why and How ...........................................................................................10 2. CIVIL SOCIETY IN PAKISTAN – A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ......................20 2.1 Why Study Civil Society .................................................................................23 2.1.1 The Pakistani Political Scene – A Brief Overview ...........................28 2.2 What is Civil Society .......................................................................................32