The sharp division between social, cultural, and intellectual histories is unsustainable and can only be a matter of emphasis. Kamran Asdar Ali's book Communism in Pakistan: Politics and Class Activism 1947–1972 brings the three together in a subtle and refreshing reading of left mobilizations in the country and the region.
Ali uses biographies, literary writings, letters, and archival material, as well as interviews with leaders, activists, and their family members, in the way a pointillist may paint a panoramic view. There is a lot of detail, but it all adds up to a broad overview of the transformations in communist thought and action in South Asia, bringing together developments in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. We see how many committed left activists shaped their lives in accordance with their ideals; we appreciate the wider global context, the regional debates, and the national power struggles; we are immersed in friendships, rivalries, and betrayals; and we feel the heartbreak of a mother whose son dies in police custody.
Perhaps because of the range of sources he uses, Ali is more generous towards the many actors—communists and their opponents—than is usual in works on the left. Indeed, in the case of Pakistan much of this writing has sought to apportion blame: who is to blame for the decline of a once viable left politics in the country? In contrast, Ali does not start by assuming a teleological viability or necessity. He shows the severe limitations under which the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP) started its operations and the differences with the Communist Party of India (CPI) in leadership, possibilities, and trajectories (chapters 1 and 2). At the same time, he demonstrates the deep impact it had, despite the many restrictions, on individual lives and the cultural and political debates of the newly formed Pakistani state from 1947 to 1952.
One important beneficiary of Ali's approach is Sajjad Zaheer, the first general secretary of the CPP. Zaheer has been dismissed by critics as an upper-class intellectual who assumed party leadership expecting to lead the “backward” Muslim masses of Pakistan, and who had no association with the workers that he spoke about. Soon after being released from prison in 1955, Zaheer left Pakistan and never came back. Supporters have often pointed towards the oppression by the state that the CPP faced. Ali avoids this debate and instead shows, first, the shared social bonds between the CPP leaders and sympathizers and the state in Pakistan. He traces the relationships by marriage, friendship, and family between important state functionaries (senior police officers, judges, politicians) and Zaheer in particular. Second, he pays attention to the relationship and ideology of the CPP and CPI during this period. The CPP was set up as a subsidiary of the CPI, meant to follow the ideological line of the CPI. The CPI meanwhile was facing internal confusion with rapid changes in party line on questions of radicalism, focus of activism, and earlier collaboration with the British. While not shying away from acknowledging Zaheer's authoritarian streak and his social connections, Ali shows deftly the terrain that Zaheer was trying to navigate.
Ali then concentrates (in chapter 3) on Zaheer's area of strength, cultural politics, with a fascinating discussion of the differences within the progressive literary circles. He argues that the later dominance of Islamic discourses in Pakistan has led us to forget the many alternatives that were debated and discussed in the early years of the state's formation. The very form and shape of Islam and its relationship with the future of the country was open to interpretation. By focusing on the discussions between and about Zaheer, Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi, Sadaat Hassan Manto, and Hasan Askari, Ali shows the many different combinations of religious identity with class politics that were being explored by these writers.
This intellectual and political diversity was, however, severely constricted early on by a state that was increasingly willing to ally with the United States in the quickly solidifying politics of the Cold War. The Rawalpindi Conspiracy case (chapter 4)—in which the government alleged that prominent left thinker Faaiz Ahmed Faaiz and CPP leaders, including Zaheer, were plotting with senior army officers to lead a coup to tilt Pakistan into the Soviet sphere of influence—was useful to the government for crushing dissent at home while bargaining for crumbs from its American and British “allies.” Based on his interviews and archival research, Ali builds a compelling case that there was no conspiracy: that an idea had been floated by General Akbar and some other army officers, but rejected by the CPP.
Moving into the late 1950s and 1960 with a chapter on the young CPP activist Hassan Nasir (chapter 5) and the resonances of his death across the decades, Ali touches briefly upon the emergence of China-inspired left parties and the competition that the CPP faced. However, his key focus is on documenting Nasir's death in police custody.
The final chapter grapples with the ethnic and linguistic diversity of the working class in Karachi while focusing on the Bhutto regime's brutal response to workers' protests. Bhutto, after his election on a socialist platform, moved quickly to crush “the strength of the street with the strength of the state.” This betrayal, coupled with the separation of Bangladesh from Pakistan, forms the end of the period that Ali set out to capture.
This is an important and accessible book, and of interest to those exploring questions of memory, history, and political change, as well as scholars of Pakistan and of international communism.
