BY all accounts, the world is fast urbanising. It is said that half of the planet’s population now lives in cities; this number will rise to two-thirds by 2050. Countries such as ours which are home to the majority of the world’s people are experiencing rapid change, notwithstanding the caricatures proffered by the mainstream intelligentsia.

Some Pakistani scholars, through sheer force of will, have managed to get the point across about urbanisation in this country; by some estimates, half the country’s people now live in urban settings. I generally share the growing consensus about the changing social landscape and the fact that we need to acknowledge this and then conceptualise the country’s new political economy.

Yet the fact that Pakistan is urbanising doesn’t mean that rural areas are no longer a major component of our social reality. Not only does more than half the population still rely on the agrarian sector for livelihood, a vast number of urban dwellers who comprise the category of migrants are still tied to the countryside.

Rural areas have been rendered increasingly marginal through the course of the modern transformation in so-called advanced societies; yet even there they have not disappeared.

‘Peasant’ life will morph into something different in societies like ours as well, but we ought not to assume that it will disappear entirely.

This is an important point for many related reasons.

First, an increasingly large proportion of the most deprived sections live in rural areas.

Second, the prototypical village is at one and the same time the repository of the most retrogressive social norms and the vestige of a less individualistic and alienated era.

Third, the political attitudes of rural Pakistanis tend to be quite distinct from those typically depicted as ‘public opinion’.

All too often even nuanced analysts focus exclusively on the poverty of rural areas as if it is a defining characteristic. While it is imperative to constantly remind ourselves of the exploitative relationship between city and countryside, there are distinctly progressive aspects of rural life that offer a counterweight to the dismal prognosis with which we are so regularly confronted.

In my experience, notions of collective interests and struggles to secure them still survive in villages in a way that they do not in urban areas. To this day labouring classes in rural areas, divided as they may be — particularly by caste and gender — forge movements against landlordism, the excesses of the market and the tyranny of the state apparatus (including law).

Of course, the mythical trinity of ‘zan, zar, zamin’ which can be traced back to the colonial period has spawned significant atomisation, yet in comparison to the prototypical urban setting relatively progressive forms of collective action remain visible in rural areas.

Relatedly, there is nothing like the demeaning of politics that is such a defining feature of urban discourse. Working people living in villages, alongside the urban poor, come out to vote more than any other constituency. More generally, even if coherent alternatives do not exist, the idea persists in rural areas that politics can be a means to improve one’s lot.

It is worth dwelling on the fact that most militant movements in the contemporary world — including in this country — find a mass base in rural areas. Some might attribute this to the fact that ‘illiterate’ villagers are easily taken advantage of, but I would suggest that we consider the hypothesis that literacy and political consciousness are not necessarily positively correlated (even if one opposes any particular brand of militancy).

The fact that rural areas are still hotbeds of anti-systemic politics should force those who scoff at the idea that revolutionary transformations are still possible to reconsider their views. Indeed, if the religious right is willing to mobilise rural populations in the name of upending the existing social order, those who call themselves progressives ought to think hard about why they have vacated this space to arch-conservatives.

A major argument made by scholars who talk of an ‘urban’ Pakistan is that urbanity refers to a particular way of life that can be sustained even in environments that appear rural (or peri-urban). One way to understand this is that being urban means to be more integrated with structures of economic, political and cultural power. In contrast, being rural means a lower standard of living and a lower level of co-option.

This is surely why insurrectionary tendencies remain more pronounced in rural areas all over the world. There is no teleology here; rural-ness is just as likely to entail subservience to status quo as it is a challenge to it. But so long as there are people who are rustic and proud, there’ll be both a form of social organisation and political disposition that departs from urban common sense. That can only be a good thing.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.