Volume 8, No. 7, July 2026
Editor: Rashed Rahman
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Between the late 1960s and early 1970s, Maoist ideas gained considerable popularity and influence in left politics and the labour movement, and made an impact on Pakistani mainstream politics that was out of proportion to its political strength in the overall balance of power. Neither class structure nor the ideological and political composition of the state apparatus warranted any such advantage to Maoism. Clues to it are to be found in the peculiar power game over security and influence going on at that time between several states in that region and, perhaps, more crucially, in the internal political situation surrounding the rise to power of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1971-77), his fall, and the coming into power of an Islamist regime under General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.
Introduction
Pakistan came into being on August 14, 1947 as a result of the failure of extended negotiations, mainly between the Indian National Congress (a secular-nationalist party predominantly under modern-educated Hindu leaders) and the Muslim League (ML – an exclusive communal party headed by modern-educated Muslims) to evolve a formula over sharing of power in a united India (Ahmed 1996, 91-96). The partition of India was attended by the biggest forced migration in recent history. More than one million (current estimates suggest a figure as high as two million) Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs lost their lives and some 14 million fled their homes in search of safe haven: Hindus and Sikhs to India and Muslims to Pakistan.
The Industrial Sector and the Labour Movement
Pakistan received only 9.6 percent of the total number of industrial units (1,414 out of 14,677); 5.3 percent of the electric capacity (72,700 kilowatts [kw] out of a total capacity of 1,375,000 kw); 6.5 percent of the industrial workers (206,100 out of a total of 3,141,800), and only 10 percent of the known mineral deposits (Gankovsky and Gordon-Polonskaya 1972, 99-100). Most of the industrial units were small scale, usually simple home-based production. The share in medium and large-scale production was especially small. For example, out of 451 textile factories and 160 sugar factories, only 16 and five, respectively, were located in Pakistan. None of the 91 jute or the 35 steel mills were to be found in Pakistan. Out of a total workforce of 1,073,000 employed in the medium and large-scale industries, only 25,400 had been employed in areas that came to constitute Pakistan (Mahmud 1987, 6). In the small- scale units, some four million people were employed. Many of them were village artisans. Another 1,686,000 worked as rural proletariat (Gankovsky and Gordon-Polonskaya 1972, 128).
Altogether the industrial sector engaged only a small percentage of the total population of 75.7 million. The expulsion of non-Muslims from Pakistan resulted in the flight of entrepreneurial skills, capital and many skilled workers, because it was mainly urban Hindus and Sikhs who had taken to modern education and industry. However, both East and West Pakistan were mainly producers of agricultural goods. In West Pakistan, the Muslims were either landowners or peasant-cultivators of various types, while in East Pakistan, a large number of landlords were upper-caste Hindus and the peasantry was predominantly Muslim. More crucially, as a result of Partition, the working class and peasant movements which hitherto had been linked with movements and organisations elsewhere in the Subcontinent, were suddenly left isolated and without adequate leadership.
Radical working class agitations and peasant uprisings had begun to appear in India from the beginning of the 20th century. Some were inspired by general anti-colonial patriotism, while others came increasingly to be associated with the communist movement. The Sikh peasantry was – for a number of cultural, historical and socio-economic reasons – more receptive to radical ideas than Hindus and Muslims, and a disproportionately large number of activists and militants had emerged from amongst Sikh ranks in Punjab (Josh 1979; Singh 1994). The departure of these cadres meant that the left movement had to be put on its feet anew. At the time of Partition, no formal decision to split the Communist Party of India (CPI) had been taken. It was not until the annual congress at Calcutta (attended by delegates from Pakistan) in December 1948 that such a decision was reached. It was also decided that some prominent communists of Muslim background should emigrate to Pakistan so as to help organise the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP). It is interesting to note that the CPI had supported the demand for a separate Pakistan, describing it as a popular movement of the Muslim masses for national self-determination (Adhikari 1944).
Consequently, in the 1945-46 election campaign, Muslim communists played a significant role in casting the demand for Pakistan in typical class struggle rhetoric, which especially targeted Hindu moneylenders and traders. Islamic slogans demonising Hindus and Sikhs as infidels and exploiters were thus used to arouse hatred against non-Muslims. Pakistan began to be projected as a peasant paradise where the debts to the moneylenders would be abolished and ‘land to the tiller’ would become the basis of economic reform. Ironically, when the ML launched such a campaign in 1945, its own character as a party of the Muslim intelligentsia or salariat had been transformed into a party dominated by Muslim landlords, who decamped from their regional parties and joined the ML (Talbot 1996).
However, in independent Pakistan, hostility towards communism became a centrepiece of state ideology. The battery of religious rhetoric that during the election campaign was directed at Hindus and Sikhs was now turned against leftists, and class struggle was denounced as inimical to Muslim brotherhood and solidarity. In future, all sections of Muslim society were to work together rather than confront one another on the divisive basis of class (Mahmud 1987, 6). A popular discourse drawing on notions of an Islamic order and an Islamic state began to be churned out by Muslim ulema (clerics). Quite simply, the argument that came to characterise the discussion on the ideological foundations of Pakistan was that since it was an Islamic state, therefore there was no place for atheistic ideologies in such a polity (Ahmed 1987). Thus, for example, in 1948, when dockyard workers in Karachi went on strike to protest for better working conditions, the highest Muslim cleric, Shaikh-ul-Islam Maulana Shabbir Ahmed Usmani, issued a fatwa (religious ruling) that Islam did not uphold the right to strike and that the dockyard workers had been misled by communist saboteurs (Ahmed 2005).
On January 14, 1948, pro-communist labour leaders came together to form the Pakistan Trade Union Federation (PTUF). The government reacted by applying restrictive acts and laws, such as the pre-Partition notorious Public Safety Act from 1926, to detain and arrest some of them (Gankovsky and Gordon-Polonskaya 1972, 135). The radical trade unionists advocated the standard Leninist strategy of a prolonged, multifaceted class struggle under the leadership of the working class and its vanguard party. The labour movement was to combine economic struggle for better wages and other rights with the overall politics of the CPP. In more immediate terms, they emphasised that the working people should put aside their ethnic, religious and linguistic differences and join hands on a class basis. The CPP put forward the following immediate political objectives: Pakistan’s withdrawal from the British Commonwealth; discontinuation of dependence on imperialism; confiscation of foreign economic interests, and nationalisation of key industries and their placement under the collective ownership of workers. Further, agrarian reforms based on the confiscation of landlord estates and their distribution among the peasants was to be carried out (ibid., 136). Such a programme was assailed by the right-wing press as un-Islamic. Although neither the CPP nor the radical trade unions had a mass base in Pakistani society, they were able to influence public opinion effectively at the time of the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. It was a period when Britain’s influence on the Pakistani ruling elite was being superseded by that of the US.
The Question of Land Reform
Notwithstanding the fact that emancipation from the yoke of the moneylender had been a very strong appeal in both East and West Pakistan, the creation of Pakistan provided much-needed relief from the debt burden to not only the peasantry but also Muslim landlords. In East Pakistan, the ML abolished the zamindari system in 1951 and carried out a radical land reform that provided relief to millions of Muslim tenant-peasants; the main losers were the Hindu landowners, most of whom had shifted to Indian West Bengal after the Partition. Those still around left after the abolition of the zamindari system. In West Pakistan, where the Muslim landlords constituted a strong political class, efforts to carry out land reforms were scuttled by the provincial governments. In Punjab, some leftist landlords such as Mian Iftikharuddin and Mian Mumtaz Daultana proposed land reform, but were overruled by their colleagues in the provincial ML government (Naim Ullah 2003). In Sindh particularly, the pro-landlord bias became the basis of the government-appointed Sind Hari Commitee report, which declared the landlords as benefactors of the peasants. However, one of the members of the committee, Masud Khaddarposh, a civil servant, wrote the famous dissenting note against the report, taking up cudgels on behalf of the Sindhi tenant-peasant, the hari. He presented in graphic details the abject poverty and utter social degradation of the hari. His dissenting note was made public by the Sindh government. A number of ulema critiqued his dissenting note and called him a socialist and an atheist. They wrote a pamphlet, Ishtrakiyat Aur Zraati Masawaat (Socialism and Agrarian Justice), in which they supported absentee landlordism and the absolute right to own property. Khaddarposh filed a defamation case against them alleging that he had proof that the ulema had been bribed by the government to write the pamphlet against him (Shafique 2010).
The Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case and the Repression of the Left
In early March 1951, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan announced that his government had uncovered a plot involving some officers of the armed forces and leading members and sympathisers of the CPP to overthrow the government. It was alleged that the conspirators intended to ‘create commotion in the country by violent means and to subvert the loyalty of the Pakistan defence forces’ (quoted in Gankovsky and Gordon-Polonskaya 1972, 175). The accused were alleged to have met several times in Rawalpindi to plan the insurgency. Among the civilians arrested were: Sajjad Zaheer, the general secretary of the CPP; Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a famous poet and editor of the radical Lahore-based English-language newspaper, The Pakistan Times, and Muhammad Husain Ata, a prominent trade union leader. The accused were tried in camera by a special tribunal. Although the defendants were not allowed to have a defence counsel or to summon witnesses, the charges could not be proved against them. The court, however, sentenced the civilians to four years in prison and a fine of Rs 500 each. The military officers received various sentences ranging from three to seven years. General Akbar Khan was sentenced to a long exile of 12 years. Repression of the left increased dramatically afterwards (Zaheer 1998).
In December 1995-January 1996, I interviewed a number of veteran communists and radical intellectuals in Lahore. Among them were C R Aslam, Tahira Mazhar Ali Khan and Mian Minatullah.1 Later, in the summer of 1996, I talked to Abid Hassan Minto who was visiting Stockholm at that time.2 They all admitted that a number of meetings had taken place between the military officers and Sajjad Zaheer, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Muhammad Husain Ata. However, the CPP had found the whole idea highly adventurous and impractical and therefore decided not to take part in any such action. Furthermore, their decision had been conveyed to the military officers.
The communists and pro-communist intellectuals continued to play a part in Pakistani politics through their support to the autonomy movements of the dominated provinces of Balochistan, East Bengal, North West Frontier and Sindh. In the provincial elections held in East Bengal in March 1954, a United Front constituted by a number of parties opposed to West Pakistani domination won 223 seats out of a total of 237 seats reserved for Muslims (Sayeed 1980, 40). These developments created panic among the ruling ML government. It retaliated by alleging that the United Front and the CPP were involved in a conspiracy to undo the unity of Pakistan by supporting secessionist movements.
Consequently, a ban was imposed on the CPP in July 1954. Its offices were closed, records and publications impounded and all assets confiscated. Although a direct ban was not imposed on the PTUF, its activities were subjected to further restrictions, and a countrywide crackdown on party cadres and labour and peasant leaders and activists took place. On the general political, intellectual and cultural fronts, harassment and intimidation of leftists was intensified (Callard 1957, 73-74).
Pakistan Joins Western Military Pacts
Given the polarisation in international politics in the wake of the Cold War, Pakistan’s repression of leftists won it considerable acclaim from the US. Pakistan joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) in 1954 and the Baghdad Pact in 1955 (later, Central Treaty Organisation [CENTO]). The Americans were provided bases for spy aircraft near Peshawar in northern West Pakistan. As a result, Pakistan began to receive substantial economic and military aid from the US (Venkataramani 1984, 243, 342). The Americans even started providing substantial financial and educational support to the reformist trade union movement in Pakistan (Mahmud 1987, 8-9). In overall economic terms, Pakistan’s alignment with the US in international politics furnished it with much-needed capital and technological know-how essential for industrialisation and development. In 1952, the Pakistani government introduced various protectionist measures in consonance with the requirements of the prevailing developmentalist doctrine of import substitution. Some of the traders who had amassed considerable capital but were reluctant to invest it in industrial production because of foreign competition could now start investing in light industry. Consequently, during 1954-55, many new industries and factories were established. This meant naturally that the industrial workforce also increased.
In October 1958, the Pakistani armed forces, led by the Commander-in-Chief, General Mohammad Ayub Khan, overthrew the civilian but unelected government of Feroz Khan Noon and imposed martial law. A view that the military was a major modernising agent in Third World countries, especially if a country lacked functioning democratic institutions and an autonomous national bourgeoisie, enjoyed significant currency in the conventional development literature produced during the 1960s. It was theorised that the armed forces tended to recruit and educate men along modernist lines. Such personnel acquired the modern notions of efficiency, discipline, planning and could thus lead the people towards change and development (Huntington 1968; Pye 1962, 69-89). The regime of General (later, Field Marshal) Ayub Khan was an apt example of such a developmentalist regime. Operating within an anti-communist ideological framework, it sought vigorously to promote the industrial sector (on an import substitution basis) and to modernise agriculture (Waseem 1989, 192-230). Land reforms with a very high ceiling were introduced: 500 acres of irrigated and 1,000 acres of unirrigated agricultural land in West Pakistan, and in East Pakistan, the ceiling was actually raised from 80 acres to 120 acres. The objective was clearly to create a strong class of prosperous farmers rather than liquidation of landlordism by distributing land among poor peasants.
The overall ascent of the economy – which included steady economic growth and a considerable increase in employment opportunities in the industrial sector – was suddenly interrupted by a war between India and Pakistan in September 1965. Except for opposition from some pro-Moscow leftists, the general impact was one of increasing chauvinism and jingoism. From 1966 onwards, political agitations and demonstrations began to emerge in different parts of Pakistan. The working class indeed had many grievances against the regime. Quite simply, while the capitalists had prospered, the workers had not. Inevitably, unemployment, inflation and other maladies began to afflict the economy. On January 31, 1967, railway workers at Lahore, led by the veteran labour leader Mirza Ibrahim, went on a massive strike (Mahmud 1987, 58-61). Thereafter, riots spread to many other sectors of industry. University students also joined the agitation. By 1968, agitations could no longer be curbed by state violence. In March 1969, Ayub Khan stepped down from power. A new martial law regime under General Yahya Khan took over.
The Pakistan-China Rapport
Pakistan’s defence planning has always been based on the assumption that the main threat to its security comes from India. Membership in the Western defence pacts had helped Pakistan acquire modern American weapons by convincing the US that it would serve as the frontline state in South Asia against the spread of communism. However, after the 1962 Sino-Indian war, there was a strategic shift in US policy on the question of combating communism in South Asia. Prime Minister Nehru had requested US intervention during the war to prevent Chinese advance towards India (Maxwell 1970, 435). It made the Americans reconsider their strategy in South Asia. Instead of Pakistan, India began to be considered as the bulwark against the spread of communism in South Asia. During the India-Pakistan war of 1965, the US imposed an arms embargo on both states but it hurt Pakistan most as it was almost entirely dependent on US armament. It was clear that the Western powers would not risk destabilising or weakening India: it was considered a democratic counterweight to Chinese communism in the region (Bhutto 1969, 48-92). On the other hand, the Chinese government had expressed strong moral and political support for Pakistan during the latter’s war with India in 1965. China had even threatened India.
The 1960s was also a period when the Sino-Soviet political and ideological animosity (which had been brewing for a long time) came to a head. It culminated in an irrevocable split in the international communist movement in the early 1960s. In almost all countries outside the Soviet bloc, the communists split up into pro-Moscow and pro-Peking (present name Beijing) parties. While the pro-Moscow parties advocated peaceful strategies for advancing the socialist cause, their pro-Peking counterparts stood for militant armed struggle (Banerjee 1984, 70-74). Given the exigencies and compulsions of patriotism and nationalism in modern politics, a communist party that looked towards the same ideological centre (either Moscow or Peking) for inspiration as the one with which the state in which it was based had good relations, enjoyed the advantage of working more freely than one associating with a centre with which the state had estranged relations. Thus, while being pro-Soviet in Pakistan was considered unpatriotic, being pro-Chinese was not. In India, the situation was the reverse.
Under the circumstances, Ayub Khan’s foreign minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had worked out another power equation: Pakistan was to develop closer ties with the People’s Republic of China (Bhutto 1969: 131-161). The latter responded warmly to such overtures, since it own policy was dictated by an overriding concern to prevent the spread of Soviet influence in regions close to its borders. In turn, the Soviet Union backed India in different manners, including military and economic aid. The US looked upon the Sino-Pakistan courtship with apprehension, but its paramount concern to contain Soviet influence in South Asia suggested that the emerging relation between China and Pakistan could be a useful counterweight.
The emerging Sino-Pakistan liaison provided a leeway for a new type of radical politics in Pakistan. For China, it was an opportunity to propagate its revolutionary standpoint. It began to send Marxist literature, especially based on Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung thought, in large bulk to Pakistan. It was available in bookshops all over the country. Since the Chinese revolution had been waged in a largely agrarian milieu and the peasants had constituted the vast majority of the People’s Army that fought not only the Japanese as well as the pro-landlord nationalist forces led by Chiang Kai Shek, the romance of a peasant revolution captured the fancy of Pakistanis of a leftist bent of mind. Consequently, a peculiar revolutionary ideology began to take shape in which Maoist ideas could be mixed with hostility towards the Soviet Union condemning it as a social-imperialist capitalist restorer, as Mao preached (Chairman Mao’s Theory 1977).3 If one added anti-India rhetoric, a sufficiently confusing and contradictory theoretical concoction was ready. The authorities were willing to tolerate such developments as long as they remained confined to small groups and did not threaten the status quo in any serious manner.
ZA Bhutto’s Populist Politics and the Maoists
It was in these volatile circumstances that Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had fallen out with Ayub Khan after the 1965 war, began to peddle a left-leaning populist line in domestic Pakistani politics. In its external manifestation it was based on anti-India rhetoric and cultivation of Chinese friendship. Bhutto was the mastermind of the 1965 Operation Gibraltar under which Pakistan dispatched thousands of infiltrators into Indian-administered Kashmir with a view to foment rebellion. That undertaking proved a disaster when India retaliated by attacking Pakistan along the international border in Punjab on September 6, 1965. The war ended quickly in a stalemate. Upon the invitation of the Soviet Union, Ayub Khan and Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri met in Tashkent to discuss peace. The Tashkent Agreement formally brought to an end the hostilities between the two countries as their leaders pledged their commitment to peace and a peaceful resolution of conflicts. However, the Indians did not make any concession on Kashmir. Bhutto was part of the Pakistani delegation. Upon returning to Pakistan, he successfully projected himself as one who was displeased with the agreement, thereby shifting the blame on Ayub Khan for the 1965 military fiasco (Gauhar 1998, 393-394).
That clicked very well with the jingoistic mood that the Pakistan Information Ministry and the Pakistan Military Information Service had created about Pakistan winning on all fronts. Thus, in the popular mind, Bhutto became a champion of anti-Indian nationalism that held a strong appeal in Punjab. His public meetings began to attract huge crowds. In December 1967, he founded the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). The place chosen to announce its founding was Lahore, the capital of Punjab. Many intellectuals, lawyers, journalists, workers, peasants and students flocked to his PPP. Many Maoists, such as the labour leader Mairaj Muhammad Khan and radical trade unionists also entered the PPP fold. However, many powerful landlords and some smaller industrialists also joined it (Waseem 1989, 301-305). The ideology of the PPP was a blend of radical rhetoric borrowed from Maoist jargon, nationalist fervour directed against India, democracy and Islamism. Not surprisingly, the element that distinguished the PPP’s ideology from that of the Maoists was the notion of Islamic socialism. It generated controversy and confusion both within the PPP and outside.
While the radical wing of the PPP made it its battle cry for social revolution, the more moderate sections denied that it meant anything more than a concern for social justice in accordance with Islamic traditions and modern social-democratic values. Outside the PPP, right-wing ulema and the propertied classes mounted a powerful campaign to damn the notion of Islamic socialism. Meanwhile, Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s popularity had plummeted after the 1965 war with India. After several months of agitation in both East and West Pakistan, he abdicated, and a caretaker martial law government of General Yahya Khan took over in March 1969, primarily to hold the first general elections in Pakistan.
Break-up of Pakistan
Pakistan broke up in December 1971 after the East Pakistan-based Awami League won an absolute majority in the Pakistan parliament in the 1970 general elections – winning 162 seats out of 300. It had a majority to form the government, but this was overruled by the West Pakistan power elite. Negotiations between the military government, the Awami League and the PPP failed. It is widely acknowledged that Yahya Khan and Bhutto joined ranks against Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of the Awami League. On March 25, 1971, the army struck with all its might against what it perceived was a veritable all out rebellion. From early March 1971, Awami League cadres had begun to attack West Pakistanis in East Pakistan, and many cases of murder and rape were reported. The Pakistan military’s crackdown proved to be even more vicious and gory. The result was a long civil war that culminated in the intervention of the Indian army on behalf of the Bengali resistance. The Pakistani army was defeated, and East Pakistan became the separate independent state of Bangladesh in December 1971.
ZA Bhutto in Power
The defeat and humiliation suffered by the Pakistani army in East Pakistan precipitated an immediate fall of the military regime of Yahya Khan. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto became the new President (later, Prime Minister) of Pakistan on December 20, 1971. As noted earlier, Bhutto’s rise to power had been made possible by a massive upsurge of popular support. In the 1970 election, the people of West Pakistan, especially of Punjab and Sindh, had given him a mandate for fundamental change. However, as has happened many times in modern history in all parts of the world, leaders can make tall promises to the people in order to get into power, but afterwards apply all means to ward off threats to such power. A scion of the parasitic landlord segment, Bhutto represented the anxieties of a class that saw the emergence of an industrial bourgeoisie (during Ayub Khan’s period) as a challenge to its traditional hold over politics. The volatile political situation of the late 1960s and the popularity and attraction of Maoist ideas at that time in many parts of the Third World, including Pakistan, created a situation that Bhutto took full advantage of. Such a reaction was reminiscent of what Marx and Engels had observed more than a century earlier in The Communist Manifesto about the landlord classes of Western Europe: “In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy were obliged to lose sight, apparently, of their own interest, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus the aristocracy took revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe” (McLellan 1977, 491).
In the case of Pakistan, Bhutto had not only managed to frighten the bourgeoisie but also had succeeded in coming into power. He had indeed played the role of a catalyst in the mass upsurge. The movement was now bigger than anything he could have imagined. It had, so to say, assumed a life of its own. However, Bhutto had neither the intention nor the means to carry through a social revolution. The PPP government was extremely concerned about the emergence of an autonomous and militant labour leadership. Nevertheless, some progressive measures were announced on February 10, 1972, in the new labour policy. Both a carrot and a stick were in the offing. Its progressive features were the following (Ahmed and Amjad 1984, 92-93):
However, the granting of such rights was subject to the establishment of industrial peace and order. It was stated that since an elected government was in power, gherao (siege) and kabza (occupation) were not to be tolerated any more. Further, all agreements reached through gherao and kabza were declared null and void. In future, illegal strikes were not to be tolerated. Those guilty of ordering illegal strikes could be disqualified from taking part in trade union activities. The government also made it clear that any future manifestation of street power was to be met with the might of the state (Mahmud 1987, 19-22).
Notwithstanding such express preconditions announced by the government, the coming into power of the PPP had unleashed a revolutionary wave that gained its own momentum. Some radical trade union leaders intensified militant activities. Gherao and kabza were attempted in many industrial areas of Punjab and Sindh. The workers established their own management committees. In some industrial areas and residential colonies, the workers virtually took over the task of administration, including law and order and prompt provision of relief and justice (ibid., 61-64). Indeed, the outbreak of strikes in the industrial area called Site and at Landi-Korangi, both in Karachi, was crushed ruthlessly. Some workers died as a result of police firing. Also, at Kot Lakhpat in Lahore, the growing workers’ power was suppressed brutally (ibid.).
Bhutto’s Land Reforms
In the agricultural sector, land reforms were introduced. The ceiling on individual ownership was lowered from 500 acres to 150 acres. Also, in future, ejection of tenant-cultivators by the landlord could not take place unless a court order had been obtained to that effect. The land reform, however, connected ownership to the individual and not a family. Consequently, within the same landowning family, the right to retain land on a large scale remained possible legally. Also, through legal subterfuges, land was fictitiously transferred to loyal retainers. The government justified individual ownership of land on the basis that it was consistent with Islamic law! At the same time, the government ordered stern action against Maoist groups active among the peasants. They were now subjected to repression and atrocities of all sorts. The government began increasingly to rely on traditional police terror and other such punitive means to crush the various militant units present in different parts of the country. Consequently, the various radical groups and Maoist factions began to abandon the PPP platform (ibid., 20-24).
The Pakistani Maoists
As argued earlier, Maoist ideas of a peasant revolution through armed struggle had begun to attract Pakistani leftists in the wake of the Sino-Pakistan concord that both governments greatly emphasised. It had meant the inflow of Maoist literature and Chinese influence in left politics as well. From the second half of the 1960s, radical revolutionary Maoists established their presence in the trade unions and university campuses, sometimes as part of the PPP but mostly as independent outfits. The Pakistan International Airlines trade union was firmly with Maoists, and their student wing, the National Students Federation (NSF), emerged as a powerful force on the Karachi University Campus. In Punjab, the National Students Organisation (NSO) represented Maoist ideas. The NSO represented the Maoist tendency among the students of the Punjab University. Elsewhere, too, in newspapers and among poets and fictional writers, some identified themselves as Maoists. Common to all of them was hostility towards the Soviet Union and India.
The Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP)
Peasant resistance to the landlords went back to the early 20th century. Because of the efforts of the Sarhadi (Frontier) Gandhi, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the eviction of peasants was stopped, and that provided some relief. However, peasant evictions intensified soon after Partition. It began with the elected government of Dr Khan Sahib, a brother of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, being dismissed from office by Governor-General Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who amended the India Independence Act to clear the way for a friendly government under the ML. The new provincial ministry headed by Abdul Qayyum Khan was installed in office on August 23, 1947. The new government was pro-landlord, and when, in 1948, the peasants began to reorganise to protest evictions that had intensified with the change of government, they were severely repressed. For the next 20 years, there was no further effort to organise the peasantry against the landlords.
In 1957, leftists of different hues had come together to form the National Awami Party (NAP). It was a multi-class party that stood for the interests of the weaker provinces against an all-powerful Centre. Later, NAP split into pro-Moscow and pro-Beijing factions. The West Pakistan-based wing, led by Wali Khan (son of the Frontier Gandhi Abdul Ghaffar Khan), came to represent pro-Moscow leftists, while the East Pakistan-based faction, led by Maulana Bhashani, professed pro-Beijing leanings. Taking their cue from the Chinese, especially Mao’s peasant revolution, some communists broke away from NAP (Wali Khan) and founded the Mazdoor Kissan Party (Workers and Peasants’ Party) in Peshawar in 1968. The leader of the MKP was Afzal Bangash, a lawyer, but also a communist activist of North West Frontier Province (NWFP). The reception to a party devoted to the amelioration of the peasantry was very positive. Since the NWFP was the only province of Pakistan in which traditionally not only the landlords were armed but also the peasants, the change of leftist politics from reformism and compromise to revolution and change was a significant development in Pakistani politics.
Hashtnagar and other armed struggles in NWFP
Consequently, in 1968, the MKP initiated another resistance movement against the landlords. The focal point of the earliest peasant struggles were in Hashtnagar, a rather large area of the most fertile part of Charsaddah district, NWFP. Afzal Bangash described the struggles in Hashtnagar in the following words: “The party’s main focus was on the peasantry, inspired by the struggles of the Chinese, Vietnamese and African people. It achieved immediate success in the NWFP of Pakistan, where spontaneous struggles between peasants and landlords were already taking place due to Ayub Khan’s land reforms and imposition of farm machinery. The MKP provided the organisation and leadership needed by the peasant rebellion, and in turn, the movement gained tremendous following in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The movement was not only facing the private armies of the landlords but also attempts by the state to stop it by force” (Afzal Bangash, n.d.).
As a result, there were militant confrontations between landlords and peasants in the NWFP in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1970, Major (retd) Ishaq Muhammad from Punjab joined it along with his supporters (Salim 2008, 43-44). Major Ishaq, as he was generally known, was one of the accused of the 1951 Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. He spent several years in prison along with some other communists. Fighting continued during the military regime of General Yahya (1969-71). From 1972 onwards, in the NWFP, a coalition government led by NAP (Wali Khan) and an Islamist party, the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), was in power while Bhutto’s PPP ruled at the Centre and in Punjab and Sindh. Bhutto wanted to install a friendly government in the NWFP because his relations with Wali Khan were hostile. Bhutto and the MKP leaders, Afzal Bangash and Major Ishaq, reached an understanding that his government in the Centre will not support the NAP-JUI government in NWFP against the MKP and that the latter could initiate peasant resistance to the landlords in NWFP. This author knows about the understanding because both Afzal Bangash and Major Ishaq were staying with him during this period. Afzal Bangash was, in those days, sought by the NWFP police and had gone underground. Both Bangash and Ishaq stayed in a flat in Satellite Town, Rawalpindi, which I and some young men working in Islamabad and Rawalpindi had rented.
In any event, the landlords reacted with considerable force against the MKP and peasant revolutionaries. The NAP-JUI government supported the landlords. One of the most spectacular clashes between the peasantry and the state took place in July 1971 at Mandani. A heavily armed force consisting of 1,500 policemen clashed with a smaller force of MKP cadres and poor and landless peasants. Another struggle took place when nearly 8,000 police and militia fought MKP fighters and the local peasants (ibid., 44). During this time, the party’s vice-president, Maulvi Mohammad Sadiq, was assassinated. Despite all the odds against them, the MKP and its peasant soldiers fought bravely, and as a result, an area of approximately 200 square miles was declared liberated by the MKP. It inspired similar movements all over Pakistan (‘The Rebel Road’).4
In Punjab, the MKP was involved in similar initiatives in the western and southern regions where big landlordism was strongly entrenched. However, here state authority rested with the PPP, which was also in power at the Centre. Moreover, the Punjab peasantry was essentially unarmed. Therefore, the objective situation for an armed resistance to the landlords’ men was considerably weaker. Consequently, the police repression that was let loose proved too strong for the unarmed MKP cadres and peasant activists. Many of them were jailed and tortured. As noted earlier, most of the landlords in the Punjab were already in the PPP and held positions of power and influence. Therefore, peasant resistance to oppressive landlords could be directed mostly against those who were in opposition to the PPP. Elsewhere, the police and the PPP government colluded to keep the MKP away from places where its landlords possessed land and enjoyed local influence.
Bhutto’s fall from government in 1977 brought into power a rabidly right-wing government under General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. After Pakistan joined the Afghan jihad in 1979, militant Pakhtuns were absorbed by the campaign to oust the Russians from Afghanistan. In the rest of Pakistan also, leftists were greatly marginalised as the state embarked upon comprehensive Islamisation of the state and society. On the other hand, the Pakistani Maoists came out in support of the communist-led April 1978 revolution in Afghanistan. When the Soviet Red Army marched into Afghanistan, the Maoists did not oppose that intervention; this despite the fact that China actively supported the US-Saudi-Pakistan military campaign against the Afghan communists and the Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
The MKP Ideology
The MKP was not a traditional communist party, though there was a hardcore communist group consisting of theorists, trade union activists, and peasant leaders and organisers that made all important decisions. The MKP declared itself an anti-imperialist party, open to all progressive individuals. The MKP did not invest any faith in parliamentary and bourgeois forms of democratic struggle. Therefore, it did not participate in the general elections in 1970 and again in 1977. On the other hand, it supported the Bengalis and condemned military action in East Pakistan. It looked upon the emergence of Bangladesh as a case of national liberation, though within the party, there were strong views about the Indian military intervention in the civil war. After the breakup of Pakistan, the MKP focused primarily on class struggle. Some efforts were made to establish itself in Sindh and Balochistan, but nothing substantial came out of such efforts. In some trade unions in the main industrial hub and port city of Karachi, MKP cells were established, but the MKP remained largely a party of two provinces: the NWFP, where it had the strongest support, and Punjab.
In international politics, the MKP allied itself with China and supported its line in international politics as well as on the question of the revolution in Pakistan. The peasantry was declared as the main force of the revolution, armed with Marxism-Leninism and Maoism. It also expressed solidarity with Indian Maoists whose revolutionary activities in the late 1960s and early 1970s, emanating from a West Bengal village, Naxalbari, spread like wildfire in many parts of India. At MKP meetings and street demonstrations, the Naxalite slogan, “Hamro Bari Tumro Bari, Naxalbari, Naxalbari” was raised at MKP meetings along with its own slogan, “Hamara Nagar Tumhara Nagar, Hashtnagar, Hashtnagar” (Your abode and my abode is Hashtnagar).
Major Ishaq wrote a number of articles and plays dealing with the oppression of the people in general, while highlighting in particular the very sad plight of the indigenous people. His play, Mussali (indigenous people who converted to Islam but were treated with contempt because of their untouchable past) in Punjabi, was shown to eager audiences in many parts of Pakistan. The Punjabi faction led by Major Ishaq was openly anti-Indian and subscribed to the view that the Soviet Union was a social-imperialist superpower. That position was not shared by all senior members of the Punjab MKP but was nevertheless the stand of the dominant faction under Major Ishaq. The Afzal Bangash faction was more practice-oriented and somewhat wary of taking an open stand against the Soviet Union.
The MKP split into different factions in the late 1970s. Major Ishaq and Afzal Bangash became bitter rivals, both accusing each other of betrayal of the revolution. Following the death of Chairman Mao, China abandoned its revolutionary fervour. That had a profoundly demoralising effect on the Pakistani Maoists. The Pakistani state did not function even as a formal bourgeois democracy, and the few years of Maoism’s popular appeal were a product of a regime coming into power under ZA Bhutto that was pro-China and also flirted with ideas of socialism. In July 1977, ZA Bhutto was overthrown in a bloodless military coup led by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.
General Zia-ul-Haq (1977-88) and the Afghan Jihad
General Zia-ul-Haq was not only anti-communist like his military predecessors, but he was also infused with a millenarian zeal to convert Pakistan into a chaste Islamic state and society. Therefore, the ideological and cultural inspiration for the anti-left crusade (jihad, more correctly) was now premised upon an obscurantist and anti-intellectual type of Islamic fundamentalism. The influence of fundamentalism among the Pakistani armed forces had been growing gradually as the older officers brought up in the colonial tradition retired and new ones were raised in the more immediate context of wars with India and the worldwide resurgence of political Islam. The social base of recruitment gradually broadened so that middle and lower middle-class families raised in traditional Islamic puritanism and mannerism joined in significant numbers (Jones 1985, 70-72). General Zia declared thus: “I have a mission, given by God, to bring Islamic order to Pakistan” (quoted in Noman 1988, 141). Women and religious minorities bore the brunt of the Islamisation enforced by the regime. During this period, Pakistan also served as a frontline state in the struggle against the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan.
The Islamist regime was determined to crush the leftists of all varieties and with whatever means necessary. An Export Processing Zone Ordinance was issued in 1980, which prohibited all organisation of labour in special areas where foreign capitalists could set up production (Pakistan Mein 1994, 14).5 On an overall basis, trade unions and peasant committees were severely repressed. Strikes and other protest actions during this period were met with considerable force (Mahmud 1987, 24).
General Zia perished in a plane crash on August 18, 1988. During 1977-88, when he ruled Pakistan with an iron hand, repression against the left was conducted with concerted ideological and political zeal. Marxists of all varieties were reduced to a shambles. As far as the Maoists are concerned, the about-turn of China on economic doctrine that virtually made capitalist enterprise the pivot around which its prosperity was to be built and was achieved, proved too shattering and demoralising. The disintegration of the Soviet Union sealed the fate of orthodox Marxism in the world. An era seems to have come to an end. In Pakistan, where the left was never a major force in politics, the cumulative damage inflicted by these two cataclysmal events drove the leftists to the margins. However, neo-liberal capitalism and the concomitant globalisation did not benefit the mass of people in many parts of the world. Therefore, the bases for popular resentment remained unchanged and unmitigated.
Concluding Remarks
In contemporary Pakistan, the Maoists survive in several small factions. There are also a number of MKPs. The Maoists continue to pledge a commitment to a peasant revolution based on Mao Tse Tung’s thought. They cooperate with other leftist and democratic forces in the struggle for workers’ and peasants’ rights. In recent years, they took part in some peasant resistance struggles on military farms, but Maoism is not an important force in Pakistani politics today. In India, an upsurge in Maoist armed struggle has taken place, and the Indian state’s power and authority have been challenged in hundreds of districts. In Pakistan, militancy was hijacked by extreme right-wing movements such as that of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. The Taliban are recruited from the same tribal and peasant backgrounds as were the MKP revolutionaries in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The only difference is that a Taliban is told that his reward is guaranteed in the next life, in paradise, where unlimited supply of milk and honey and the 72 doe-eyed damsels that Allah has promised to all shaheeds (martyrs) would be his if he is willing to sacrifice his life for jihad.
The egregious inequities and, inevitably, the inequities that exist in many parts of Asia and Africa notwithstanding, staggering economic growth render the objective situation ripe for extremist ideologies and politics. As long as the state and society are not seriously involved in a fairer distribution of goods and services, we can expect more violence to rectify injustice against real and imagined culprits.
Notes:
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The writer is Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, Stockholm University and Visiting Research Professor, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.
Courtesy India Quarterly 66(3) 251-265