Communism in Pakistan

Politics and Class Activism 1947-1972

Kamran Asdar Ali

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857739957
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Pakistan today stands at a critical juncture in its short history of existence. While muchhas been written about Pakistan, little is known about Communism or left-leaning politicsin the country post-Partition which played a key role in shaping Pakistani politics today. KamranAsdar Ali here presents the first extensive look at Pakistan's communist and working class movement.The author critically engages with the history of Pakistan's early years while paying special attentionto the rise and fall of the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP), from Partition in 1947 to theaftermath of Bangladeshi independence in 1971. Since its formation in 1947 as a homeland for SouthAsian Muslims, Pakistan has been a configuration of shifting alliances and competing political and social ideologies. Pakistan has experienced three military takeovers and is plagued with geopolitical conflict - from Kashmir to Baluchistan, Waziristan - and while these aspects of Pakistan make headlines, in order to understand the complexities of these events, it is vital to understand the state's relationship throughout history with its divergent political and ethnic voices.One dominant feature of the state, along with its emphasis on the Islamic nature of its polity, has been the non-resolution of its ethnic problem - while the history of Pakistan is often viewed through the lense of unified Muslim nationalism, the author here also explores the history of Pakistan's often tense relationship with its various ethnic groups - Baluch, Pathan, Sindhis, Punjabis and Bengalis.
Shedding light on a vital and little-researched aspect of Pakistani history, this book shows that military coups, Islamic radicalization and terrorist activities do not constitute the sum total of Pakistan's history; that it, too, has had a history that included the activities of communist intellectuals and activists.

PART I

سب تاج اچھالے جائیں گے
سب تخت گرائے جائیں گے
بس نام رہے گا اللہ کا
جو غائب بھی ہے حاضر بھی
جو منظر بھی ہے ناظر بھی
اُٹھے گا انا الحق کا نعرہ
جو میں بھی ہوں اور تم بھی ہو
اور راج کرے گی خلق خُدا
جو میں بھی ہوں اور تم بھی ہو

Sab taj uchale jaiNge
Sab takht giraiN jaiNge
Bas naam rahe ga allah ka
Jo ghaib bhi hai hazir bhi
Jo manzar bhi hai nazir bhi
Uthe ga ana al-haq ka nara
Jo mai bhi huN or tum bhi ho
Aur raj kare gi khalq e khuda
Jo mai bhi huN or tum bhi ho

All crowns will be thrown away
All thrones will be upturned
Only the name of the almighty will remain
The one who is visible and the invisible
The one who is the viewer and the view
And the call of ‘I am the truth’ will rise
Truth, that we all are
And Gods people will rule the earth
God's people, that we all are.*

CHAPTER 1

DIVIDING BRITISH INDIA

او میرے مصروف خدا، اپنی دنیا دیکھ ذرا
اتنی خلقت کے ہوتے، شہروں میں ہے سناٹا

سورج سر پہ آپہنچا، گرمی ہے یہ روزِ جزا
پیاسی دھرتی جلتی ہے، سوکھ گئے بہتےدریا

فصلیں جل کر راکھ ہیں، نگری نگری کال پڑا
او میرے مصروف خدا، اپنی دنیا دیکھ ذرا

O mere masroof khuda, apni dunya dekh zara
Itini khilqat ke hotai, shahro mai hai sanata
Sooraj sar phe aa phauNcha, Garmi hai ya roz-e-jaza
Piyasi dharti jalti hai, sookh gaye behte darya
Faslain jal kar raakh huiN, nagri nagri kaal para
O mere masroof khuda, apni dunya dekh zara

O my Busy God:
Just look at this world of yours –
so well-peopled and yet the cities are silent.
The sun has reached its peak,
it's a hot Day of Reckoning:
(the) parched earth aflame,
rivers dried up as they flowed,
crops burned to ashes,
famine fallen on village and town.
O my Busy God:
Just look at this world of yours.¹

The partition

They sat on their haunches with their rifles and spear between their legs. On the first steel span of the bridge a thick rope was tied horizontally above the railway line …

The engine was almost on him. There was a volley of shots. The man shivered and collapsed. The rope snapped in the centre and he fell. The train went over him, and went on to Pakistan.²

Sa'adat Hasan Manto, the short story writer, starts his story ‘Toba Tek Singh’ with the assertion that after British India's partition the respective governments of India and Pakistan decided that inmates of mental asylums should be exchanged.³ So mentally ill Muslims in Indian hospitals were to be transferred to Pakistan and Hindu and Sikh patients in Pakistani asylums would be sent to India. Manto's representation of Partition's ‘insanity’ in this and other stories is now well known in literary and popular circles. It is by now also well known that the violence that followed the partition of British India was unprecedented in its scale and method. As the violence in South Asia during the last few months of 1947 became a reality, social turmoil forced many, like Manto's mentally ill, to cross the still porous borders towards unsettled lives in new and unseen lands.

***

Such stories take us back to the long summer and autumn of 1947 when the province of Punjab burned as millions were uprooted from the ancestral lands and forced to flee across the newly formed borders to previously unknown areas. The Communist Party of India (CPI) in its communiqués during that time vehemently condemned the killing and held the British responsible for the breakdown in law and order. The CPI argued that the British had instituted governor rule in the Punjab province five months prior to the division of the country and hence its security services and bureaucracy should have been prepared for all eventualities and not allowed religious extremists on all sides of the political spectrum to take advantage of the situation. This partition violence, according to the Party, was a conspiracy to weaken the newly emergent nations and create discord among their people at the moment of independence. The party also blamed the extremists on both sides, the rulers of princely states, the large landowners and industrialists, all of whom, for personal gain, gave support to communalist tendencies and stoked the fire of hatred. The CPI, however, praised the national level leadership of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League who, in their statements and actions, sought to stop the violence.⁴ Yet to their dismay the Party, like everyone else, was a helpless bystander witnessing its most cherished goals of communal harmony in shreds, with no power to stop it. This chapter tells the story of how CPI itself ‘partitioned’ into two parties.

The party and Pakistan

روٹی کپڑا اور دوا، گھر رہنے کو چھوٹا سا
مفت مجھے تعلیم دلا میں بھی مسلمان ہوں واللہ
پاکستان کا مطلب کیا لا الہ الا اللہ

Roti, Kapra aur Dawa, Ghar Rahne ka Chota Sa
Muft Mujhe Ta‘alim Dila, Mai bhi Musalman HuN Wallah
Pakistan ka Matlab Kiya, La Ilaha Illalallah

Provide me with medicine, clothing, bread;
a smallish house in which to live.
Grant me free education, Lord,
for I am a Muslim, too.
What is the meaning of ‘Pakistan’
if not that there is no God but You?⁵

The Communist Party of India (CPI) came into existence in the mid-1920s.⁶ Since the mid-1930s, after an earlier period of supporting radicalized violent politics that brought about severe repression by the British colonial government, it had entered a phase of united front politics that sought to bring together all anti-imperialist sections of society. At this time the CPI regarded the dominant leadership of the Indian National Congress as consisting of non-revolutionary landlords and bourgeois. It argued that Congress's creed of non-violence impeded the growth of mass revolutionary struggle that could eventually threaten the very existence of feudal elements and capitalists who led the national party. Yet, from the mid-1930s the CPI aligned itself with the progressive section within Congress that consisted of people like Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964),⁷ Subhas Bose (1897–1945(?)),⁸ and Jayprakash Narayan (1902–1979),⁹ who, according to the CPI, were trying to lead Congress in a potentially revolutionary direction. The CPI, which till then was an illegal organization, collaborated with the Congress by helping it reach out to trade unions and peasant organizations, while itself benefiting from Congress's popularity, as the premier nationalist party, to get access to the Indian masses. To this end, using a united front from below tactic, CPI members sought representation within Congress committees from the grassroots to the all-India level. Within this context, the Communist Party, like the Indian National Congress, treated India as a single nation that was collectively engaged in the struggle for independence. The Muslim League, and its demand to divide India into two nations (Hindu and Muslim), was condemned as a reactionary communal organization of elite Muslims.¹⁰

However, by the early to mid-1940s the Communist Party had started to rethink the issue of Muslim separatism being put forward by the newly invigorated Muslim League. Under the leadership of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the All India Muslim League (AIML) passed the Pakistan Resolution at its annual session in March 1940 in Lahore. The Resolution argued that no constitutional plan for India's freedom would be acceptable to the Muslims unless those geographically contiguous areas that had a Muslim majority population in the north-western and eastern parts of British India were given the status of independent states where the constituent units would be autonomous and sovereign.¹¹ This became the basis of the policy for Muslim self-determination or separatism (depending on which political side one belonged to). The CPI's support of this ‘Muslim Question’ came in the aftermath of its policy of opposing the All-India Congress and their Quit India Movement.

Considering itself as representing Indian national sentiment, the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) met in August 1942 in Bombay under the leadership of Maulana Azad,¹² passed a resolution to oppose the British government's war effort and asked for immediate independence prior to extending India's support as a sovereign nation. On 8 August, at a public meeting, Mohandas Gandhi called for non-violent civil disobedience to force the British to quit India. The British responded with widespread arrests of the Congress leadership which led to strikes and disturbances (at times violent) in different parts of the country, leading to further repression and arrests of thousands of Congress workers.¹³

Although all communist members of the AICC voted against the resolution, it was passed by an overwhelming majority. The CPI vote was reflective of how by 1942, primarily due to the invasion of the Soviet Union by German forces, it had reversed its earlier line on the world war and moved from calling it an ‘Imperialist War’ to a ‘People's War’. It now linked itself to the international drive against Germany's fascist regime. The CPI, going against nationalist trends and breaking its alliance with Congress, had called for a national front in the anti-fascist war, even if this meant collaborating with the British for the course of the war. Keeping in mind the nationalist sentiment (Congress), however, the CPI also started a national unity campaign to bring all political forces closer to its own anti-fascist position. Within this tactical framework it periodically condemned the British for their imprisonment of nationalist leaders, yet also urged the Congress leadership to collaborate with the Muslim League and accept it as the representative voice of India's Muslim population. This elevation of the Muslim League to a position of parity with the Indian National Congress was of course not popular with the Congress leadership, yet it did allow the CPI to cement its arguments on Muslim, communal and nationalities questions in India.

The communists did eventually accept Pakistan as a reality: they arrived at this position through a tortuous route that constantly contradicted their own arguments on the nationalities question. The CPI's various positions on the Muslim question throughout the 1940s were partly linked to its developing sensitivity, as discussed in the Introduction, to the emergent language and region-based politics in India. It can also be analysed as the Party's desire to gain a foothold among Muslim masses, as its close working within the Indian National Congress had aided its gaining popularity among nationalists. Indeed, until the mid-1940s the CPI may have believed that by accepting the demand for an independent Pakistan it could allay fears of Hindu persecution and bring the Muslims together with Hindus for a joint struggle against a common colonial power. However, by late 1946 the CPI had started to change its position on the partition of British India and yet the Party did eventually accept the division in its Calcutta Congress held in February–March 1948.

This chapter will primarily focus on how the CPI divided itself into two constituent parties and, despite its deep reservations, came to accept the division of the country as one (among many) viable option for the future of South Asia. It will also frame the arguments for the forthcoming chapters, especially Chapter 2, in order to understand how the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP) under General Secretary Sajjad Zaheer's leadership operated in the early years of Pakistan's existence and put forward its own argument on the country's future political and cultural trajectory.

The Party Congress

From 28 February to 6 March 1948, 632 delegates assembled in Calcutta for the second congress of the Communist Party of India. The most important task performed during the meetings was the shift by the party towards a more radical political line that followed a critique of the reformist politics of the Party leadership during most of the 1940s. As much as these discussions were the main focus of the Party Congress, the delegates also took some time to divide the Party into two constitutive parts. The Communist Party of India would confine its working to the boundaries of the Indian Union, while the post-August 1947 separated territories of Pakistan would be free to form a different communist party.

At the Calcutta Congress, the ‘Report on Pakistan’ was presented by Bhowani Sen,¹⁴ who elaborated on the trends of discussion on the Pakistan question within the Party. After putting forward two opinions, one that emphasized that the Indian union was progressive and considered Pakistan politically reactionary, while the other held the creation of Pakistan as an advance in Muslim freedom from the yoke of Hindu domination, Bhowani Sen gave his own analysis of the situation. He argued that both India and Pakistan were dominated by reactionary capitalists and landlords who collaborated with the imperialists. He went on to criticize how the Muslim League had propagated the false theory of Hindu domination in order to retain the Muslim elite's vested interest against its wealthy and more powerful Hindu competitors. To achieve this goal, Sen continued, the Muslim League channelled the anti-imperialist momentum of the poor Muslim masses towards communal politics, and played into the hands of imperialist forces that wanted to keep both Muslims and Hindus enslaved. Hence, in his opinion the central task of future communist movements in India and in Pakistan was identical: to radically change the existing social order and struggle towards the creation of people's democratic states in both countries.

Sen's thesis was a culmination of a long series of articulations on the Muslim question and on Pakistan within the communist movement in India. As suggested previously, by the early 1940s the CPI had taken a major position on the Muslim question in India and drawn a connection linking the Muslim League's demand for a separate state to the ultimate independence from colonialism. Unlike the Indian National Congress, which was opposed to the division of British India almost until the partition of the territory itself, the CPI had in 1942 proposed to accept the Muslim separatist position within its thesis of the legitimate right of multiple peoples of the territory (British India) to secede from the Union.

The nationalities question and Indian communism

As mentioned in the Introduction, in September 1942 the CPI held an enlarged plenary meeting of its central committee at which a senior member of the Party, G. M. Adhikari,¹⁵ presented the resolution on Pakistan and Indian National Unity.¹⁶ The most critical section that pertains to the Muslim question was as follows:

Every section of the Indian people which has a contiguous territory as its homeland, common historical tradition, common language, culture, psychological make-up and common economic life would be recognized as a distinct nationality with the right to exist as an autonomous state within the Indian Union or federation and will have the right to secede from it if it may so desire … Thus free India of tomorrow would be a federation or union of autonomous states of the various nationalities such as Pathans, Hindustanis, Rajasthanis, Gujeratis, Bengalis, Assamese, Beharies, Oriyas, Andhras, Tamils, Karnatiks, Maharashtrians, Meralas, etc.¹⁷

If we carefully follow Adhikari's 1942 (published in 1943) assessment of the Pakistan question it is clear that the main influence on his thesis came from the debates on the nationalities question that occurred in the pre- and post-Soviet Revolution era in Russia and Europe. This discussion is important as it shows the influence on the evolving thoughts on the nationalities question in Indian communism and how Indian commun...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Concluding Thoughts
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Back cover