WHY HDP WILL FAIL AS A POLITICAL PARTY

Hazara Democratic Party, or HDP, was formed in 2004. It represents or tries to represent the Hazara people of Quetta. This essay will try, with some historical precedence, with some logical reasoning, argue that, as a political party HDP will meet its doom sooner or later, that the party ideology doesn’t line up with the demands of the modern age.
In other words, just because your ideology is only for one specific ethnic group, a single outsider vote can tip your hold unto power, which shows how fragile your ideology is.
The official party slogan for HDP from its Wikipedia page is: “to work for their [Haazaras’] rights and justice.” Ignoring the grammar problems with the page, which I’m going to try and rectify myself in the near future, there are some points that I want to unpack here, which may or may not convince you of the failure of building a political party on the grounds of ethnicity.
The idea of segregation, very much the vogue in the 20th century, has fallen out of use. Segregation, or apartheid as it was called, meant that housing, schools, and social institutions in general, are divided along racial and ethnic lines. the African Americans lived in separate neighborhoods, whose children went to African American-only schools who then worked, or most of the times didn’t work at all but those who did, worked in places that were separate from white Americans. During the American president Woodrow Wilson’s regime, no black was given any place in the government. And Franklin D. Roosevelt sent about 10,000 Japanese Americans to concentration camps.

There’s this AskHistorians thread on where the questioner asks what the endgame of apartheid was, to which the answer goes:
Kind of. The establishments of homelands/Bantustans were implemented in the mid twentieth century, and the “endgame” was to eventually push Blacks out of what was considered as White South Africa.
And that’s what exactly what you see with HDP with its alleged claims to get a province only for Hazaras. For a more in-detail discussion, do also look at this thread, which I find very interesting.
Logically, this sort of social organization has a major flaw — you divide your own people and make use of only a subset of them, which is an economically limiting thing to do. This is one of the points that can raised against a political party in the farfetched land of Quetta. If you stand for elections, if half of the Hazara population voted for you, and another half for another party, with the addition of one single Qandari — you lose. You cannot hope for all of the Hazaras to vote for you, because statistically, that’s a false presumption, holding everything else constant. In other words, just because your ideology is only for one specific ethnic group, a single outsider vote can tip your hold unto power, which shows how fragile your ideology is.
Let’s come to this history of how apartheid systems as a way of governance went in history — the most notorious of which examples, is South Africa. To be short, Mandela and his group of activists ended 85 years of white rule in the country. In America, it was with the help of Martin Luther King Jr. and others who oversaw the end of segregation.

While the Soviet bloc never really had this kind of ‘partitioning’ of its peoples along ethnic lines. a Kazak or a Tartar had the chance to rise at the top just as anyone else had. Well, at least the door was open, there was no apartheid to bar their way of doing things. That’s what communism is, that the masses whoever they are, are the real source of power. This idea did get corrupted, of course. I don’t personally have a soft spot for communism, at least the kind that revealed itself in the 20th century.
So this apartheid system was more of a western capitalist thing, which later in history got abandoned, since it didn’t tap into the collective manpower that humans are capable of.
A Qandari or a Punjabi has as much the right to rule over a Hazara-dominant population, provided that he or she has won the confidence of the majority of Hazaras. Obama might be black, but what he did as a politician was good not for his own race, but for his people, who were the people of America.

Embedded secretly in this idea of ‘rights of Hazaras’ is also a form of tribalism. Let me expound on this with the old story we all learned in school: a farmer is going to die; he calls his three sons to his deathbed to give a final piece of advice. He tells his sons to go collect a bunch of sticks, ties them together and gives the eldest one the bunch to break, he can’t do it, passes it to the other sons, they can’t either. Father tells his sons to untie the bundle and break the sticks one by one, all the three sons simultaneously. They succeed. Moral is, united we stand, divided we fall.

A Qandari or a Punjabi has as much the right to rule over a Hazara-dominant population, provided that he or she has won the confidence of the majority of Hazaras. Obama might be black, but what he did as a politician was good not for his own race, but for his people, who were the people of America.
Let’s ignore the fact that the farmer ignored his daughters completely, which is one flaw in the story. But here’s what’s really wrong with this anecdote, it endorses a form of tribalism, that the three sons and not anyone else should come in between their affairs. One of the sons can go study medicine and become a doctor, and quits his rights to the farm land, while his second son becomes, let’s say an entrepreneur and moves to some other country where he can set up his own business. Everything is left to the third son, who then employs some talented people into his team, mechanizes the fields, and breaks the bundles of problems, not with his brothers, but with his people in the company.
The modern world has gone away from the autoarkic apartheid ideology that HDP embodies today as a political party, that shuts everyone else down. A Qandari or a Punjabi has as much the right to rule over a Hazara-dominant population, provided that he or she has won the confidence of the majority of Hazaras. Obama might be black, but what he did as a politician was good not for his own race, but for his people, who were the people of America.
Now, as a social movement, I think HDP would be more successful, because that’s what most of the successful movements in history have been. The Civil Rights was initially a social movement, so was feminism, and animal rights. I won’t mention gay rights here because most of my readers here may get apprehensive to, still, it is a social movement. And if that’s what HDP wants to become, they’ll have to sit and think about it before implementing this idea.
This ends the first part of what I intend to be a series of essays on critiquing some of the stuff that I’ve encountered in real life. The next essay will probably be how keeping history in perspective; a religious political party can also fail.
