Watching Shahbaz Sharif and then Imran Khan over the weekend hold million spellbound with their rhetoric about “revolution” and the “throne of Lahore” was painful: this is a city with a vibrant Left, and yet, popular space and the revolution jargon were meekly ceded to the very people a revolution should target. Everyone and their uncle in Pakistan are in election mode now, except the Left.
Largely fractured over egotistical conflict – albeit one given the façade of a class struggle – the Left in Pakistan is the strongest in Punjab, and perhaps has been since the founding of Pakistan. The communists had been working in what is now known as Pakistan and Bangladesh much before Partition; in 1948, the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP) was formed in Calcutta by the then monolithic entity, the Communist Party of India. The rationale quite simply was that a new country needed its own communist party – a decision that reflected the communists’ assumption that Pakistan was here to stay, at least much longer than Jawaharlal Nehru’s expectations.
The communists were not all “aliens” though; despite a number of cadres with Muslim names having been sent from India, the CPP also had in its ranks some stellar working class leaders. Mirza Mohammad Ibrahim, a Lahorite trade union leader working in the railways, was among the founding members of the CPP. The first ‘indigenous’ member of the party from Karachi was Tufail Abbas, a young boy who proved his mettle as a student activist and was inducted into the party proper as due acknowledgement of his intellect and activity. Abbas currently heads the Pakistan Mazdoor Mahaaz (PMM), perhaps the largest Left formation in Karachi, and is affectionately known among his party and unions as “Baba-e-Mazdoor”.
But by 1954, the party and its associated organisations and unions were banned by the government on charges of treason. The leftists did not want Pakistan to ally with the United States, which led to the now infamous Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. Thus began decades of persecution and violence, the physical marks of which many an old cadre is willing to show. The leftists then headed en masse for the National Awami Party (NAP), but that too was banned in 1958 after Ayub Khan assumed power. Despite losing half the party in 1971, the communists are perhaps yet to recover from this ban.
Of course, while the Left has been unable to act even as a pressure group in Pakistan, there is a particular vibrancy in Left politics. On the one hand are the glorious struggles of the peasants in Hashtnagar (Charsadda), the equally vibrant Kissan Committee, workers of the Railway Workers Union, even Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Tonga Workers Union, the women’s Tehreek-e-Niswan and many other fronts. But on the other hand, Left politics have been marked and marred by frequent creation of new parties, and their subsequent splitting up.
The Mazdoor Kissan Party (MKP) – a once-colossal party which was formed when two of the greatest ideologues at the time, Afzal Bangash and Major Ishaq Mohammad, decided to join forces – would rival the Muslim League in terms of the number of factions and sub-factions. Bangash and Mohammad split over ideological differences – and hence, so did their parties – but political conditions necessitated reuniting after a few years. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the MKP and CPP merged together to form the Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party (CMKP).
There was some good news last year though with the formation of the Workers Party of Pakistan (WPP): one faction of the CMKP decided to join forces with Abid Hasan Manto’s National Workers Party. Another major and respected group, the People’s Rights Movement (PRM) led by Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, also became part of this merger. The new party was called the Workers Party of Pakistan. It is also because of these efforts that the National Students Federation (NSF) was revived into a working condition, and allied with another, the Progressive Youth Front (PYF), is now at a stage where leftist activists are not scared anymore of openly operating in universities in Lahore.
The faction of the CMKP that didn’t become party to this merger is led by Dr Taimur Rahman (of Laal fame); the CMKP argued that they didn’t want to be part of a party that was not overtly communist in its outlook. While the CMKP exerts some influence among some trade unions and peasant groups, these organisations are not yet part of the party, or any other group, proper.
Other notable parties in Lahore include Labour Party of Pakistan, led by Farooq Tariq, and the CPP faction led by Imdad Qazi.
The Left’s present is a reflection of the strategic and tactical mistakes made by leaders in the ages gone by and even today. In fact, while the point of charting the alternative political landscape is not to emphasise how fractured Left politics is in Pakistan, it is an exercise in understanding where Left parties lost their political culture to parochial and bounded interpretations of democratic centralism – the same organisational structure replicated first by the Jamaat-e-Islami, and then by the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, to create vibrant and active parties.
One of the bedrocks of the principle of democratic centralism is for all cadres to engage in criticism and self-criticism. Yet, whenever disputes cropped up, leaders chose to engage and argue up to a certain point, before setting off on their separate paths. This phenomenon is not particular to Pakistan, but certainly, it is taken to an extreme in Pakistan as leaders tend to turn to different labels (revisionism, ultra-Leftism, opportunism, counter-revolutionary) to castigate fellow comrades.
Perhaps the nature of Leftist politics makes labeling easier, given the variance in interpretations of classical texts. In doing so, however, theological status is awarded to classical texts and messianic attributes given to the veteran leaders. Those who agree are in, those who don’t were never meant to be part of Left politics in the first place.
The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf started its journey in April 25, 1996. Its support base was given hope two days ago, more than 15 years after the party’s inception. But for the blessings of those in power (and not government), the PTI wouldn’t have dared enter Lahore. This is a luxury that the Left does not enjoy. The irony, though, is that the very people the Left claims to represent are ready for a revolution, any revolution, which depends on their mass support but not as ideologues. Unfortunately for them, the intellectual thrust of the Left is to want people to become cadres before a revolution comes about. At this pace, a fifth generation of establishment-backed “hope” will enter Lahore much before the vanguards of revolution in Lahore wake up and go about for a stroll.
The writer is a Karachi-based journalist. Connect with him @ASYusuf on Twitter