Socialist somersaults
This is the story of the Muslim socialists in the pre-partitioned India. What was their relationship with the communist Soviet Union and the imperialist British government? What was their ideological standing with regard to the Indian and Muslim nationalism? And lastly, how did they conduct socialist politics in the subcontinent? Answers to these and other related questions is the theme of Khizar Humayun Ansari’s book, “The emergence of socialist thought among north Indian Muslims (1919-’47).
WHO WERE THEY?
Several Muslims were attracted to the socialist ideology but the ones that constituted the leadership of the socialist movement were mostly writers belonging to the elite of northern India, who adopted Western education to avoid economic hardships. Majority of these Muslim intellectuals hailed from the princely states of Hyderabad Deccan and Bhopal as well as the British-Indian provinces of Punjab, Bihar and in particular the towns and cities of the United Provinces (UP). Parents of more than half of the notable Muslim socialists in one way or the other were employees of the British-Indian government, thus, dependent upon the British for their bread and butter. On the other hand, there were several whose families had a history of resisting the Raj. For example, Jan Nisar Akhtar’s great-grandfather, who was the chief justice of Delhi had signed a fatwa against the British in the War of 1857. Similarly, Josh Malihabadi’s grandfather had fought against the Raj in 1857 and when Harcourt Butler, the Governor of UP offered Josh the lucrative post of Deputy Collector, he refused stating that the British Government was “usurpatory”, therefore, accepting such employment was “against his principles.”Some others such as Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, Ehsan Danish, Khadija Mastoor and KM Ashraf got attracted to socialism due to the injustice prevalent around them. A significant number of socialists such as Sajjad Zaheer, Ali Sardar Jafri and Sibte Hassan were shias. About 20% of the socialist writers and around 40% of the organisers of the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) were also shias.
The son-in-law of Maulana Abdul Bari of Firangi Mahal “described Bolshevism as a purer form of spiritualism than even Islam itself.”
INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES
Either one is born into an ideology or consciously adopts it. The Muslim socialists were not born into this creed rather they consciously adopted it. As they were not born into it, therefore, there had to be some external influences that moulded their thought for socialist action. Interestingly, initially, the socialist influences that pulled them towards socialism were British and Russian. The British socialist writers firmly believed that socialist ideology could be used to change the world for the better. Sajjad Zaheer was impressed by Bertrand Russell and remained close to Ralph Fox, who was an acknowledged Marxist critic. Mulk Raj Anand and Ahmed Ali were patronised by EM Forster whereas Faiz Ahmad Faiz admitted being influenced by the radical thought of Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice. Similarly, while Ali Sardar Jafri was “enveloped” by Oscar Wilde; Saadat Hasan Manto was impressed by Maxim Gorki and Sohail Azimabadi by Trotsky. The British socialists like Ralph Fox and Cecil Day Lewis had set up study circles in England to initiate the young Indians into the socialist thought. The leading Muslim socialists learned the ABC of socialism in these study circles and on their return set up similar circles in Punjab and Aligarh.
ISLAMISTS TURNED SOCIALISTS
The other set of Muslim socialists were the ones who were Islamists in today’s jargon. When the Khilafat Movement rocked India and its leaders declared the subcontinent as “Darul Harb” (zone of war); about thirty thousand radical Muslims left their homes and hearths to migrate to Afghanistan but the cold shoulder given by the Afghan government compelled many to return while some moved to Soviet Russia, where they were recruited by the Indian Marxist MN Roy with the objective “to raise, equip and train” them to set up a socialist government in India. These Indian Muhajireen were trained by communist instructors from Moscow at the Indian Military School in Tashkent, however, most of them having low levels of education failed to grasp the scientific understanding of Marxism and just converted their allegiance from Islam to communism. The recruits that showed some promise were sent to the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. The indoctrination they received was in line with Lenin’s policy of supporting all those who were willing to fight against international imperialism. Request for help for the cause of initiating a socialist revolution in India was made by the Khairi Brothers before the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in November 1918, when they said, “The time had come for India to free herself, following what had been done in Russia…we pray Russia to hold out to us the hand of help that we gain freedom.”
Back in India, there was a mixed reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Molvi Ali al-Hariri of Lahore warned in his fatwa that any Muslim possessing communist ideas was “liable to be thrown in hell.” On the contrary, several prominent Khilafat Movement leaders supported the communist doctrine. For instance, the son-in-law of Maulana Abdul Bari of Firangi Mahal “described Bolshevism as a purer form of spiritualism than even Islam itself.” Maulana Azad Subhani of Kanpur preached that there was no difference between Islam and Bolshevism. Maulana Hasrat Mohani told a Khilafat meeting that as Bolshevism was anti-landlord, anti-capitalist and upheld social equality, therefore, it was “similar to the principle of the Muslim religion.” Two pro-Khilafat newspapers “Zamana” and “Muhammadi” presented the Bolshevik Movement as a friend of Islam and the oppressed.
Despite such support for communism in India, the Muslim socialists returning from India failed in their mission for several reasons. One, they failed to fully comprehend the scientific nature of the Marxist theory. Two, instead of organising the have-nots under the working-class leadership, they thought they could usher a socialist revolution by attacking the Raj with the Russian support. Three, there were personality clashes as to who should lead the socialists in India. Four, despite committing to communism, the Muslim socialists remained wedded to the Islamic ideas. A pertinent example is of the notable socialist Shaukat Usmani, who observed, “Islam preaches equality [and] so does communism. That is why I am a communist.” Some continued to practice Islamic morality despite embracing socialism.
Despite committing to communism, the Muslim socialists remained wedded to the Islamic ideas
RAJ AND THE SOCIALISTS
Buoyed by the romanticism of heralding a revolution, the Muslim socialists returning to India from Moscow had not realised the might of the Raj. Some of them renounced communism while others collaborated with the government in hunting down the fellow socialists. By the end of 1921, a majority of the returnees were arrested. The nascent socialist movement in India also fell victim to the Great Game because in March 1921 the Soviets signed an agreement undertaking not to use any means to encourage the peoples of Asia to any form of hostile action against the British Empire because Britain had threatened to break off trade relations with Moscow. Harsh laws were instituted to curb “the menace of Bolshevism” in the subcontinent. The trials of Kanpur, Peshawar and Meerut in the mid-1920s and early thirties broke the back of the socialist movement from which it could never fully recover. Although Moscow was bound by the agreement with the British not to support any anti-British communist movement in India; it did continue to assist the Indian communists through secret networks established by M N Roy. There is evidence that substantial funds and propaganda literature were funnelled by Russia to Ghulam Hussain, Shaukat Usmani and Muzaffar Ahmed, who established communist cells in Lahore, Calcutta, Madras, Bombay and the United Provinces by the end of 1922. Each communist was to first recruit five persons without each of them knowing one another and teach the Marxist teachings to each of them. Each recruit, in turn, was to enlist another five to the communist cause. In spite of the state’s crackdown, the Communist Party was founded in 1925 in Bombay which was ultimately banned in the mid-thirties.
THE SOVIET PUPPETS
When political activism became very difficult, the Muslim socialists decided to use literature as the vehicle to promote socialist ideas, thence was set the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) in 1936. The progressive writers wrote about all sensitive issues such as religion, sex, war, communalism, etc and to involve the masses laid the foundation of the “Revolutionary Mushaira”, one of which in Bombay in 1942 was attended by ten thousand workers and peasants. Though as intellectuals, they were committed to the cause of the oppressed; nevertheless, they were ignorant about the harsh lives of the wretched whom they aspired to represent because most of them were the product of the middle class upbringing. So, Akhtar Husain Raipuri proposed that the progressive writers must spend some time with the peasants and workers to personally experience the realities of the downtrodden but the idea was rejected by Faiz Ahmad Faiz on the grounds that sensitivity and imagination could serve the purpose and quoted the example of Marx, Engels and Lenin, who had non-proletarian background as “not one of them had ever worked in a factory even for one day,” yet successfully championed the cause of the poor.
Many Muslim socialists were compelled to join the League while others were made to write eulogies praising the League and expressing “the hope that an independent Pakistan would be the harbinger of a socialist future.”
One cannot deny the contribution of the Progressive Writers in creating mass awareness, however, they suffered from many inconsistencies in their ideas and actions which discredited them in the eyes of the public. This may not have happened had they been the independent masters of their destinies but sadly they acted as the puppets in the hands of their Soviet masters. They took several political somersaults in the decade before partition. For example, they opposed Britain for declaring an “imperialist war” (World War II) on behalf of India but when Hitler attacked Soviet Union and Britain became an ally of Russia; the Muslim socialists began to support the British war effort: the “imperialist war” having turned into the “people’s war” against the Nazi fascists. Renowned socialist intellectuals such as Ali Sardar Jafri, Kaifi Azmi, Zafar Kashmiri and Asrar ul Haq Majaz on instructions from Moscow urged the Indians to fight for the British imperialists. One socialist writer Makhdoom Mohiuddin wrote that “this war is a war of freedom… a war of the people of India…of the peasants and the workers.” Faiz Ahmad Faiz even went to the extent of criticising the Indian National Congress for starting the “Quit India Movement” against the British because in his poem “Siyasi Leader Kay Nam” (To the political leader), he glorified Soviet Union as a “web of light” in the world which would extinguish if the German fascists defeated Soviet Russia and her ally, Britain. As the Indian socialists had agreed in principle to support the British war effort; consequently, as a reward, not only the Communist Party of India was declared legal by the government in 1942 but they were also encouraged to join the British army and other strategic services such as the All-India Radio.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz joined the British Indian army and his imaginative propaganda techniques pleased the colonial masters so much that they awarded him the British Empire Medal. Other prominent progressive intellectuals who placed their services at the disposal of His Excellency the Viceroy by joining the radio service were N M Rashid, Saadat Hasan Manto, Majaz, Hafeez Jullundhri and even Muhammad Din Taseer. These actions of the socialists lowered their esteem in the eyes of the Indian nationalists, who belittled them in the Congress leaflets as “hirelings of the British Government” and even accused them of spying on the opposition figures for the Raj.
THE SOCIALISTS, THE CONGRESS AND THE MUSLIM LEAGUE
Well before the beginning of the socialist movement in India, the Congress and the Muslim League had established their place in the national politics. The socialists had to think as to what should be their stance towards the two parties. Clarity of thought is a prerequisite for the clarity of action. The decision-making power of the Indian socialists was controlled by the Soviet communists. Naturally, Russia took decisions that best suited her interests thus reducing the socialist movements around the world to nothing more than Soviet pawns on the global political chessboard.
Instead of joining hands with the nationalist Congress party against the Raj, the Sixth Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in September 1928 directed the Indian communists to organise a “single, illegal, independent and centralised party to wage a fierce ideological struggle against the bourgeois nationalism” whereas earlier on the Second Congress of Comintern in July 1920 had permitted cooperation with the Indian National Congress. The dissociation of the socialists from the Congress party made it easier for the British to “nip the movement in the bud” in 1929. Left with little options, the Muslim socialists began to join the Congress and the Naujawan Bharat Sabha. It were these entrants that constituted the “left wing” of the Congress party and eventually created the Congress Socialist Party within the Congress.
An even larger number of socialists joined the Congress when they were instructed by the Seventh Comintern in 1935 “to throw their weight behind the national liberation movement.” They were embraced with open arms by Jawaharlal Nehru, who himself, was trying to steer the Congress policies towards socialism. In the process, he appointed a Muslim socialist Mahmud-uz-Zafar as one of his private secretaries and Sajjad Zaheer as the head of the UP Provincial Congress Committee. The socialists had now become the Congressmen yet they continued to receive covert guidance from the Communist Party.
When passions cooled years after partition, Ali Sardar Jafri admitted that “on the question of Pakistan, we surpassed the most communal-minded Muslims.”
Somewhat similar inconsistencies remained the hallmark of the Muslim socialists in their dealings with the Muslim League. In the 1930s, they opposed the League for practising communal politics and acting as a willing tool in the hands of the British colonists. But after the League had passed the “Pakistan Resolution” in 1940, the Muslim socialists began to support the demand of a separate Muslim homeland for the Indian Muslims. This socialist somersault in favour of the League was justified on the basis of Joseph Stalin’s theories of State and Nationalities whereby the demand of the League was termed as a “new national urge” as well as in line with the Leninist theses on the National Question, which, when applied to the religious divide in India determined the status of the Muslims of India as a separate community quite distinct from the Hindus, hence, justifying the Muslim aspiration of self-determination. None other than Sajjad Zaheer declared the League as a progressive democratic party in which rested “the salvation of the millions of our Muslim countrymen.” The hammer of party discipline was used to force the members of the Communist Party to support the demand of Pakistan. Many Muslim socialists were compelled to join the League while others were made to write eulogies praising the League and expressing “the hope that an independent Pakistan would be the harbinger of a socialist future.”
In the run up to the demand of partition, some Muslim socialists such as Asrar ul Haq Maja led the League’s agitation reciting Pakistan ka milli tarana (national anthem) during the “Direct Action Movement” in 1946 while in the heat of the moment, the socialist intellectuals like Ibrahim Jalees and Nazar Hyderabadi joined the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, a communal party that demanded an independent Muslim state in Hyderabad Deccan. Pakistan ka milli tarana was a modified version of Makhdoom Mohiuddin’s Hamara Pakistan (Our Pakistan) and drew on the imagery of centuries old Muslim conquests of the subcontinent in which the Turks and the Afghans were presented as the “warriors of Pakistan” marching with green flags and representing the collective consciousness of the Indian Muslims. As partition began to emerge as a stark reality, the communal passions turned into savagery and at least one group among the socialists began to realise that they had unwittingly fuelled communal hatred so they started condemning the communal violence. Through literature, they attacked the beastliness of the Hindus, the Muslims and the Sikhs, who “tore out the breast-feeding babies, slaughtered innocent lives in their mothers’ laps, raped daughters in front of their fathers, brought out processions of women bereft of their clothing, carved Pakistan and Jai Hind on their private parts.” (p 281) However, when passions cooled years after partition, Ali Sardar Jafri admitted that “on the question of Pakistan, we surpassed the most communal-minded Muslims.”
This book of Khizar Humayun Ansari is unrivalled in its topicality, content and depth. Moreover, it is an encyclopaedic work containing short biographies of all those Muslims, who were either socialist or sympathised with the socialist cause. In addition, it is the “Who is Who” of all those Muslims who remained associated with the Progressive Writers Association in the pre-partition era. It is a complete work in itself, however, after reading it, one longs for the history of the socialist movement in Pakistan which has not been penned down as yet. Will Mr Ansari consider this idea?
