SINDH is in the throes of arguably the biggest mass movement since the MRD in the 1980s. Opposition to the damning of the Indus river has animated its politics for decades, but the six-canal project has lit a fuse that has forced the PPP to backtrack and adopt a more confrontational public stance with the PML-N. If things intensify, the very existence of the current hybrid regime could be threatened.

Beyond palace intrigues, there is much at stake. The popular media tends to reduce opposition to the so-called Green Pakistan Initiative to a binary of `Sindh versus Punjab`, implying that corporate farming in general and the six-canal project in particular enjoys widespread backing across Punjab. But this is simply not true.

Neither is it true that the average person in Sindh views the ongoing struggle as directed at a monolithic Punjab. Indeed, the president of the Karachi Bar Association, which has recently led a series of dharnas across Sindh, is himself of Punjabi ethnicity.

On April 17, celebrated as the International Day of Peasant Struggles, a wide cross-section of progressive political parties and peasant organisations mobilised thousands of farmers for a falsa in the otherwise sleepy Punjabi town of Dipalpur in district Okara. Demands included immediate cancellation of the six-canal project, and protection for small growers who are literally being wiped out as the government eliminates all pro-poor subsidies in the farm sector.

The falsa was not allowed to take place by the district administration. No explanation was offered, although anecdotal evidence suggests that both local authorities and those much higher up the political food chain were afraid that the gathering would take the colour of the historic Okara military farms struggle of the early 2000s. That movement was the first of its kind in central Punjab to openly challenge the establishment`s economic empire, whilst also denting the then rosy image of the Musharraf dictatorship.

Twenty years later, small and landless farmers in Punjab are more agitated than ever, and at least some of them are willing to close ranks with mass movements in the ethnic peripheries. A segment of the peasantry is being dispossessed by suburban sprawl and real estate `development`. DH As and Bahria Towns are small in comparison to government behemoths like the Ravi Riverfront Urban Development Project, which is both taking lands from farmers and ravaging the already dilapidated Ravi river.

Then there is the wider anti-farmer bent of IMF-backed austerity policies, which yet another finance minister is currently rub-ber-stamping in Washington. Take, for example, government-guaranteed minimum support prices that once upon a time allowed small wheat farmers to meet the costs of production. With support pricing mechanisms having been largely abolished, farmers are now at the whims of mill owners and middlemen.

A wide cross-section of Punjabi society may take more time to imbibe the antiestablishment sentiment that pervades the ethnic peripheries, but the class war that has been waged against the rural and urban poor in Punjab by successive hybrid regimes means that glitzy slogans like corporate farming do not enjoy popular acclaim.

Indeed, most of this country`s people, including small and landless peasants in Punjab, know that corporate farming is a catchphrase for big landowners and state personnel to engage in wanton land grabs.

In the late 2000s, a renewed class consciousness gripped Western societies in the wake of the global financial crisis. As a result, a wide cross-section of the popula-tion started to see themselves as the `99 per cent` who were being ruthlessly exploited by the ruling `1pc`.

The left populist wave that followed has since experienced defeat at the hands of Trumpism and its offshoots.Pakistan has not experienced a left populist wave at the countrywide level since the 1970s. But today, the potentialities for a politics of the `99pc` are arguably greater than ever.

Like in Sindh, where the six-canal project is simultaneously an assertion of Sindhi nationalism and class rage, in KP, too, popular mobilisations like the Ulasi Pasoon as well as the PTM draw attention to mineral and other natural resource grabs. When these movements demand peace, they also offer a vision in which working masses` livelihoods are not subjugated in the name of national security and geopolitical games.

More and more people in Gilgit-Baltistan and AJK are also demanding fundamental economic and political freedoms that have remained suspended for decades. And then there is Balochistan, where mass opposition to natural resource grabs and other forms of economic exploitation as well as state repression are at a fever pitch.

The politics of the 99pc is gestating. The status quo trembles. • The wnter teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.