A RED LETTER DAY IN NASEERABAD.

NASEERABAD -- It may come as a surprise that an intellectual and rather cerebral activity is taking place in a backward and conservative area of interior Sindh. In Naseerabad tehsil, Qamber, Shahdadkot district, a wedding hall is decorated with red flags. An energetic audience of several hundred people attentively listens to Fatima Majeed, a resident of Karachi's coastal area of Ibrahim Hyderi, as she laments on stage about the displaced fishermen of her area who lost their livelihoods as the result of the Indus Delta destruction.

People outside the hall are busy browsing at bookstalls, while others are posing for selfies with portraits that adorn the walls of the hall. These portraits are of Hyder Bux Jatoi and other revolutionaries including Sobhu Gianchandani, Karl Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.

First organised in 2017, this annual event known as Hyder Bux Jatoi Socialist School is named after Hyder Bux Jatoi, a revolutionary, leftist and peasant leader, who left his government job as a deputy collector in 1945 to devote all his time to the farmers' plight.

Jatoi kicked off a class war for the rights of the peasants and labourers by joining the Sindh Hari Committee, which he headed till 1970. He pioneered the slogan 'Hari Haqdaar' and based on the same motto, he also started Sindhi and English dailies.

The school is organised through donations by local activists, farmers, labourers, and citizens, and supported by the Awami Workers Party to pay tribute to the peasant leader. They believe that such schools are an important step to facilitiate and promote intellectual thinking.

It is modelled on the 19th century Socialist Sunday Schools in Great Britain which arose in response to a widespread feeling as to the inadequacy of the orthodox Sunday Schools as a training ground for the children of Socialists. The purpose of the socialist schools was to supply the socialist movement with fearless, capable and conscientious thinkers.

The Naseerabad 'school' aims to highlight the problems of the working class and the sessions include discussions on topics such as farmers' rights, feudalism and capitalism, empowering women in politics, indigenous communities' displacement, and the struggle of oppressed people.

This year, the theme was climate change as Sindh had borne the brunt of excessive rains and catastrophic floods. Fatima Majeed in her session 'Encroachment, climate crisis and the coastal belt of Sindh' put forward the case of fishermen and the...