The Debates We Never Wrote Down: A History of the Pakistani Left
Ramis Sohail

There is, to date, no comprehensive history of the Pakistani left – not in English, not in Urdu, not in Punjabi. What exists instead is a scattering of biographies and organisational memoirs: a party’s own account of itself, a leader’s account of his own life. The overall trajectory — how the left fractured, re-formed, and fractured again across seven decades — has never been written down as a connected story.
This absence has a cost. When people ask why the Pakistani left is so divided, and what the divisions are actually about, the left’s own members often cannot answer with any precision. Lacking documented history, the explanation on offer tends to be personal: “it was a leadership problem”, “everyone just went their separate ways”, “it was ego”. This is not merely simplistic – it is largely false. Compare this to the Indian left, where the history of the Communist Party of India (CPI) alone fills a long shelf where the literature on the Russian and Chinese revolutions, and even on smaller formations like the Tudeh Party, is vast. Nothing comparable exists for Pakistan, and the gap has produced a strange amnesia: a left that assumes its own past held no disagreements serious enough to think through.
The deeper problem is that when parties split – inside Pakistan, and especially in the political climate since 1991, when the left everywhere was in retreat – the split is rarely narrated through its actual theoretical content. Ad hominem attack and personal grievance fill the space where debate should be. But thought does not advance by personal insult; it advances dialectically, through contradiction. Bolshevism itself emerged from a serious intellectual confrontation. Lenin’s and Plekhanov’s earliest works were written against the Narodniks. Where a disagreement is deep and theoretically serious, the wider society benefits from it eventually, the way all of intellectual history benefited from the difference between Hegel and Marx. Personal feuds produce nothing for anyone.
What follows, then, is not an attempt to cover every group or every figure – that would be impossible in a single essay, and no account of this length can do justice to a history this tangled. It is an attempt to trace which disagreements were substantive: on strategy, on the national question, on the character of the state, on the relationship between class and nation. These are the debates worth recovering, because they are still, in large part, unresolved.
Origins: an accidental encounter with Bolshevism
The standard story told inside Pakistan is that the country’s Muslim population inherited almost no organised communist tradition, because most experienced CPI cadres were Hindu or Sikh and left for India at Partition. This is true as far as it goes, but it obscures a stranger and more interesting origin story – one in which Muslims were central to the founding of communism in South Asia from the very start.
The current runs back through the Khilafat Movement, the campaign to preserve the Ottoman caliphate after the British moved to dismantle it. When the Khilafat Movement failed – the Turks themselves abolished the caliphate, and Kemal Atatürk emerged as the nationalist hero who modernised Turkey rather than restore an old feudal order – a splinter current within it, the Hijrat Movement, resolved to fight British rule directly. A group of these young men sold what they had, crossed into Afghanistan hoping King Amanullah would arm them against Britain, found him unwilling to jeopardise his own settlement with the British, and, undeterred, decided to press on toward Turkey through Soviet Central Asia to ask the Turks for weapons instead.
They walked directly into the Russian Civil War. Passing through the fighting between Lenin’s Reds and the Tsarist Whites, they grew curious, stayed to observe, and met Bolshevik organisers who explained that the goal was not only to end feudalism and capitalism but the entire colonial order – British rule, French rule, all of it. Lenin, they were told, had written a full thesis on why the colonial system had to end. Persuaded, this same group – which included M N Roy, Abani Mukherji and Muhammad Shafiq among others – attended a meeting in Tashkent on October 17, 1920 and resolved to return to India and found a communist party.
Their conversion mapped onto Lenin’s Theses on the National and Colonial Question, presented that same year at the Second Congress of the Comintern, where Lenin and Roy disagreed sharply on how communists should relate to nationalist movements that were not themselves communist. Lenin’s position – over Roy’s objection that no movement anywhere actually met the criteria for support – was that communists should back genuinely anti-colonial, revolutionary-nationalist movements even where they were not communist, provided any communist organisation within them, however small, retained its independence rather than dissolving into the nationalist body. He named Sun Yat-sen’s 1911 revolution in China, Iran’s Constitutional Revolution and the Indian independence movement as cases of real significance, and tied the colonial question inseparably to the agrarian question: no national liberation could succeed without land reform, since colonialism had fused itself to the feudal landlord class in each colony.
Returning organisers made contact with existing communist circles in Bombay, Bengal, Madras and Lahore, and in December 1925 these groups convened in Kanpur to found the CPI. The British moved before the party had even properly formed, opening the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case in 1924 to arrest its leadership, then the Meerut Conspiracy Case (1929-33), which culminated in the party’s formal ban in 1934 under the Criminal Law Amendment Act. From 1934 until 1942, the CPI operated entirely underground – and it was in this period, working clandestinely, that it laid the foundations of India’s trade union movement, kisan (peasant) movement, and student and progressive movements, at enormous personal cost to its cadres.
The national question, and the thesis that is routinely misrepresented
By the mid-1940s, as the Muslim League’s political fortunes rose, the CPI was compelled to take a position on the national question it had previously left underdeveloped. The Indian National Congress’ operating thesis, developed by liberal intellectuals from the late 19th century onward – including Gopal Krishna Gokhale, whose star student was Muhammad Ali Jinnah – was that India constituted a single nation, later refined into an idea of “composite nationalism”: one nation accommodating vast internal diversity of language, religion, and ethnicity. Against this, Muslim League intellectuals advanced the two-nation theory, later taught as the ideological basis of Pakistan itself: that Hindus and Muslims constituted two separate nations. Both theses, on close examination, grafted a religious identity onto what is properly a national one – a category error, since nationality is historically constituted through shared language, shared history, and shared upbringing, none of which map cleanly onto religious affiliation.
Against both, the CPI’s leadership produced what became known as the Adhikari Thesis. It is frequently – and, on any honest reading of the document, incorrectly – cited by Pakistani liberals hostile to the CPI as evidence that the party supported Partition. It did not. The Adhikari Thesis was the first systematic argument in Indian political thought that the Subcontinent contained neither one nation nor two, but 17 distinct nationalities. Its proposed basis for unity – including Hindu-Muslim unity, but not limited to it – was the application of a single consistent principle to every nationality: equality and democracy. Where a nationality had a Muslim majority, as in western Punjab or eastern Bengal, that was a demographic fact about that nationality, not a basis for defining nationhood by religion.The thesis explicitly rejected both the one-nation and two-nation theories as false.
Genuine equality, on this thesis, required that no nationality exploit or dominate another culturally, linguistically, or politically – conditions Pakistan itself would go on to violate repeatedly. And following Lenin directly, the thesis held that nationalities retained the right of self-determination, including secession, if equality could not be achieved: no nationality should be held inside a state by force. The CPI’s actual proposal, in other words, was not partition but a different route to unity than the one the Congress was pursuing – a route the CPI believed would have prevented Partition rather than produced it. But the CPI remained a small party, banned for most of its early existence, and its position could not compete with the mass followings of the Congress and the League. Partition proceeded, accompanied by catastrophic violence in Punjab still remembered today.
Founding a separate party, and its first decade of repression
In 1948, meeting in Calcutta for its Second Congress (the first had been in 1925), the CPI recognised that a party headquartered in Delhi or Calcutta could no longer direct communists operating inside a separate state, and resolved that Pakistani cadres should organise an independent Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP). Its first general secretary was Sajjad Zaheer – “Banney Bhai” to those who knew him – an Oxford-educated intellectual and a founder of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, whose influence shaped a generation of writers including Faiz Ahmed Faiz and later Habib Jalib, Ahmad Faraz and Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi. The Progressive Writers held that their pens should serve a double purpose: freedom from Britain, and building a socialist consciousness alongside it. Because Zaheer had no prior base inside Pakistan, the state moved against him before his roots could establish themselves. An FIR was registered against him before he had even physically arrived in the country.
The party nonetheless built a network of fronts in this period: the Democratic Students Federation, founded by Dr Sarwar; the Democratic Lawyers Association, later headed internationally by Nelson Mandela; the Democratic Women’s Association, led by Tahira Mazhar Ali, whose husband Mazhar Ali Khan was among Pakistan’s most significant journalists and editors; the Pakistan Trade Union Federation, built from the old All-India Trade Union Federation cadre under Mirza Ibrahim, a formidable railway workers’ leader in Lahore; and the Progressive Writers’ Association itself, under Zaheer and Faiz. Faiz went on to edit both Imroze, a major Urdu paper, and the Pakistan Times, an English one – testament to the intellectual standing the left commanded even under state hostility, before Ayub Khan’s government later nationalised the Progressive Papers group specifically to strip it from communist control.
Less remembered is the East Pakistan Communist Party, considerably larger than its West Pakistan counterpart given the intensity of peasant and worker agitation in Bengal, and operating with only loose coordination with the West given the absence of any real-time communication infrastructure. East Pakistan’s communists became part of the United Front, a coalition that also included the Awami League, the Krishak Sramik Party and Nizam-i-Islam Party, formed principally to contest the terms of trade West Pakistan had imposed on East Pakistan through the 1950s. In local elections the CPP-aligned candidates performed well – including Mirza Ibrahim, who in one especially telling episode won an election from inside prison, having been unable to campaign at all. The Progressive Writers, including Faiz and Hameed Akhtar, campaigned on his behalf, and after his victory the government simply ordered a recount and declared his opponent the winner.
The United Front’s strength alarmed the state sufficiently that a separate track of repression opened in West Pakistan. Major General Akbar Khan, embittered that Liaquat Ali Khan had withheld full military support for the Kashmir operation, began sounding out sympathetic officers and sought a meeting with Sajjad Zaheer – arranged through Faiz, whom the army officers knew personally from his own wartime service. The meeting, in Rawalpindi, produced no concrete plan and dispersed inconclusively; but word of it spread through the army regardless, and in 1954 the state prosecuted it as the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case, convicting all 11 defendants and, for a period, seeking the death penalty for Faiz. He escaped execution not through legal vindication but through a political accident – a change of government meant the tribunal that convicted him was itself later declared improperly constituted. Nehru separately intervened to secure Sajjad Zaheer’s release to India rather than execution, on condition he never return to Pakistan; he never did.
One Unit, Suez, and the birth of the National Awami Party
Pakistan’s structural politics through the 1950s were shaped by an unresolved dispute over how a bicameral legislature, split between population-based representation and province-based representation, would function when East Pakistan alone held a demographic majority. The proposed solution – One Unit – dissolved Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, and the NWFP into a single “West Pakistan” province, paired on equal terms with a single “East Pakistan” province, eliminating provincial autonomy altogether and alienating nationalists across the smaller provinces who had specifically been promised autonomous statehood under the 1940 Lahore Resolution (commonly, and misleadingly, called the ‘Pakistan Resolution’, though the word Pakistan appears nowhere in it).
Almost simultaneously, in 1956, the Pakistani government’s response to the Suez Crisis – tacitly aligning with Britain, France and Israel against Nasser’s Egypt – provoked a wave of domestic outrage. These two grievances, provincial autonomy and foreign policy alignment, coalesced into the National Awami Party (NAP), which absorbed Mian Iftikharuddin’s Azad Pakistan Party (itself heavily communist in membership, having absorbed many CPP cadres after the party’s ban) along with GM Syed’s Sindh-nationalist faction, Abdul Samad Khan Achakzai’s Pashtun nationalist current, Ghaus Bakhsh Bizenjo’s Baloch nationalist current, and Bacha Khan’s Khudai Khidmatgar tradition, later led by his son Wali Khan. NAP was thus, from its founding, a coalition of two overlapping but distinguishable currents: anti-imperialist socialists and communists on the one hand, and provincial nationalists opposed specifically to One Unit on the other, with Maulana Bhashani, a genuine religious scholar (not, as sometimes caricatured, a figurehead installed by communists) who had himself played a real role in Pakistan’s creation and who led Bengal’s peasant movement, as the coalition’s most prominent figure.
Ayub’s coup and its actual target
The 1958 coup is conventionally narrated without reference to its immediate political trigger: fear inside the establishment that NAP stood to win the 1959 general election. Ayub Khan’s government responded by banning every political party without exception – left, right, and religious alike, Jamaat-i-Islami and the still-unformed communists. Hasan Nasir, secretary of the CPP’s Karachi committee, born into the Nawab family of Hyderabad Deccan but organising among Karachi’s katchi abadis, was arrested and tortured to death – a fate suffered inside Lahore Fort, chosen specifically because its scale muffled the sound of prisoners’ screams from the city outside. In 1962, Ayub introduced the Basic Democracies system – an indirect electoral college of roughly 80,000 ‘Basic Democrats’, disproportionately loyal to the regime, who then elected the president – engineering his own continuation in office while retaining a veneer of representative government (this was the electoral college, not a general franchise, that Fatima Jinnah contested against him).
The China factor and NAP’s fracture
Ayub’s downfall unfolded alongside a geopolitical realignment that would split NAP itself. Following the 1962 Sino-Indian border war, China sought to counterbalance an India the US was actively courting as a proxy against China. Washington’s calculation, quite explicitly, was that India’s population could be armed and mobilised against the People’s Republic. China’s countermove was to cultivate Pakistan, India’s own rival, on the logic that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
This produced a genuinely strange political configuration inside NAP: a faction that was simultaneously pro-Ayub, pro-China, and left, reasoning that Ayub’s Basic Democracies bore some resemblance to Soviet-style structures, and that opposition to Ayub was itself a CIA-orchestrated plot meant to punish his tilt toward China. This faction, aligned with Bhashani, sat out the 1968-69 anti-Ayub agitation entirely. Against it stood a pro-Soviet faction under Wali Khan, concentrated in West Pakistan and considerably stronger there. A third current, also pro-China but firmly anti-Ayub, went on to found the Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP): its leadership, principally Afzal Bangash and Major Ishaque Muhammad, admired China not for its alignment with Ayub but for the Maoist model itself – organising armed peasant uprisings in the countryside. The National Students Federation, emerging in the late 1960s under Rashid Hasan Khan, was likewise pro-China but strongly anti-Ayub, and swept university campuses so thoroughly that even Jamaat-i-Islami’s student wing was routed. A further pro-China current, the “Professors’ Group”, did substantial trade union organising in Punjab without ever consolidating into a single party, and a separate current — the “Jabal Group” or “London Group” — drew more on the National Question, eventually merging its organising with Khair Bakhsh Marri’s movement in Balochistan.
1970-77: entryism into the PPP, and the Bhutto experiment
Much of the student movement that broke Ayub’s government in 1968-69 subsequently flowed not into the CPP, nor the MKP nor NAP, but into the newly formed Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). NSF leaders including Rashid Hasan Khan and Mairaj Muhammad Khan played a foundational role in building the PPP and warming up its rallies before Bhutto spoke. The party’s original 1967 constitution, seldom reread today, was considerably more radical than most of the PPP’s own present-day members would recognise.
The left’s PPP experiment soured quickly once in office, as labour strikes escalated and the state deployed police against striking workers. Dr Mubashir Hasan, the party’s first general secretary, resigned along with much of the left cadre that had built the party. Meanwhile the MKP, operating as NAP’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa “Mazdoor Kisan Group” before formally separating in 1970, launched a peasant land movement in Hashtnagar. Because Bhutto’s chief political rival was NAP, and because NAP dismissed the MKP publicly as Bhutto’s “B-team” undermining its own movement, NAP deployed the Frontier Constabulary against the Hashtnagar peasantry – a confrontation in which hundreds of peasants were killed before the MKP ultimately secured the land in question.
Bhutto’s own record resists easy caricature in either direction – not the wholly cynical operator his critics describe, nor the socialist his own rhetoric claimed. His government nationalised 34 major industrial and corporate units in 1972, including the Saigol Group and Adamjee and Wali holdings, without compensation; 26 vegetable ghee and cooking oil industries in September 1973; and 285 smaller agro-processing units in 1976. The pattern in what was nationalised – large-scale industry and food processing specifically – reflects standard capital-accumulation logic rather than socialism: suppressing food prices suppresses real wages, which raises the rate of profit, a relationship Marx documents at length in Capital. Land reform under Bhutto capped individual holdings at 150 irrigated or 300 unirrigated acres, down from the 500-acre ceiling Ayub had set. Unlike Ayub’s reform, which the state purchased, Bhutto’s was confiscated without compensation. Foreign policy, meanwhile, moved toward genuine non-alignment: hosting Yasser Arafat, Muammar Gaddafi (whose Lahore visit is remembered by an entire generation), and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman at the 1974 Islamic Summit.
Set against this were serious continuities with the old order: continued repression of NAP, culminating in a 1973 military operation in Balochistan after weapons allegedly bound for Baloch nationalists were discovered at the Iraqi embassy, and the 1975 Hyderabad Conspiracy Case against Wali Khan and the Baloch nationalist leadership (which also implicated Marxist figures). Populist compromise with the religious right – the 1974 declaration of Ahmadis as non-Muslim chief among them – sat alongside all of it. The appropriate frame, on this reading, is Bhutto’s PPP as a national-bourgeois project comparable to Nasser’s Egypt or Nehru’s India: a genuine break from the colonial-comprador economic order, but never remotely a project in which the working class itself held power, and therefore never a substitute for socialism as such.
1971 and the question the left still argues about
The 1971 military operation in East Pakistan, which killed, depending on the source, anywhere from 30,000 (the Hamoodur Rahman Commission’s figure) to 3,000,000 (Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s figure), with widespread sexual violence documented as well, produced one of the clearest and most consequential splits on the Pakistani left over the National Question. NAP under Wali Khan opposed the military operation from the outset, a position increasingly recognised in retrospect as correct; Jamaat-i-Islami, by contrast, backed the operation explicitly, with its student wing organised into the Al-Shams and Al-Badr paramilitaries that assisted the army in identifying and killing Bengali intellectuals – killings the post-independence Awami League government later prosecuted as capital crimes. Substantial parts of the Pakistani left, including currents that had fought and gone to prison alongside Bengali nationalists, subsequently turned against the entire experience of allying with nationalist movements, concluding the whole approach had been a mistake – a conclusion the essay’s own account treats as an overcorrection rather than a sound lesson.
One Unit’s end, NAP’s dissolution, and why it could not be revived
With Bangladesh’s secession in 1971, One Unit’s underlying rationale – equal representation between two wings – collapsed along with it; the old provinces were restored, and with them the very grievance around which NAP had originally coalesced. NAP accordingly dissolved as a coherent formation, its factions splitting along the same Bhashani/Wali Khan lines that had already divided it: the Bhashani wing collapsed into Bangladesh’s own politics upon his death in 1976; the Wali Khan wing (having been banned before the Hyderabad Conspiracy Case) reorganised as the Awami National Party in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, while its Balochistan component became the independent Balochistan National Party under Bizenjo. Periodic calls to revive NAP since have gone nowhere, for a structural reason rather than a sentimental one: historically contingent circumstances produce particular political formations, and those circumstances do not recur simply because someone wishes them to.
Zia’s repression, and the participation debate
General Zia-ul-Haq’s 1977 coup, following the Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) movement’s alliance of landlords, big capital, Jamaat-i-Islami, and the military against Bhutto’s reforms – a coalition into which, unfortunately, some of the left’s own currents had drifted, most notably the ANP under Begum Nasim Wali Khan and Air Marshal Asghar Khan’s Tehreek-e-Istiqlal – opened a fresh period of underground organising and repression. The central strategic question inside the left during this period was whether to participate in Zia-era elections or in the anti-Zia Movement for Restoration of Democracy (MRD) at all. Major Ishaque’s line was total non-participation – no elections, no bourgeois coalitions, only the preparation of a people’s war – and he was arrested for it; Afzal Bangash argued for participation in both elections and the MRD, and was forced into exile in the UK rather than arrested. The NSF, having already broken from the PPP in 1972-73 on a similar non-participation line, saw its leader Rashid Hasan Khan arrested and tortured repeatedly. The Pakistan Socialist Party under president C R Aslam and general secretary Abid Hasan Minto was suppressed under both Bhutto and Zia. The still-banned CPP saw its leaders Jam Saqi and Jameel Naqvi arrested in what became known as the Communist Case of 1980, with Jam Saqi held for roughly 12 years. Nazeer Abbasi was tortured to death in custody. Whatever the differences between these currents, the shared experience of state violence across all of them is itself a fact worth recording plainly.
1991 and after: retreat, Trotskyism, and repeated fragmentation
The restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet bloc in 1991 produced inside the Pakistani left a period of genuine retreat and disorientation. A number of prominent Marxist intellectuals concluded Marxism itself was finished and moved into NGO work. It was in this climate that Trotskyism first gained real traction inside Pakistan, through Lal Khan and Farooq Tariq, both then PPP members returning from Amsterdam, who mobilised a faction inside the PPP before a portion of it broke away.The PPP-internal current became Tabqati Jeddojehad (Class Struggle), while the breakaway current, under Farooq Tariq, became Mazdoor Jeddojehad and later the Labour Party Pakistan. Their central critique of the rest of the Pakistani left was twofold: that it was Stalinist, and that it followed the bourgeoisie by remaining inside a “national bourgeois” party (the PPP) while claiming to be a workers’ party in which revolution could nonetheless develop from within – a thesis this account regards as having been empirically falsified – combined with a broader dismissal of every “actually existing socialism” in China, Vietnam or Cuba, as illegitimate.
The CPP, illegal from 1954 until 1991, became legal that year, and in 1994 merged with the MKP to form the Communist Mazdoor Kisan Party (CMKP) – a merger that fractured badly by its Sixth Congress in 2002. Through the 2000s, three left groups merged into the National Workers Party, on the thesis that classical Marxism required “creative application” for the present era; in 2010, a CMKP faction that had split off in 2002 joined this formation, briefly producing the Workers Party of Pakistan. In 2012, the Awami Jamhoori Forum – a discussion forum built by veterans of the old “Professors’ Group”, including Jameel Umar, who served eight years in prison under Zia for a single anti-dictatorship pamphlet – convened a large conference of some 12-15 left groups at Alhamra’s Cinema Hall, out of which the Awami Workers Party (AWP) formed, explicitly as a broad-tent formation open to the full range of left tendencies, including liberals, Trotskyists, Maoists, and various shades in between; only the CPP under Imdad Qazi and the MKP declined to dilute their explicit Marxist-Leninist identification within it. The AWP achieved real momentum for roughly a decade before fragmenting following Abid Hasan Minto’s retirement from active leadership – Minto having been one of the last living threads of continuity back to the original CPI/CPP tradition – with Farooq Tariq and Ammar Ali Jan both separately departing to found the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party.
Where the substantive disagreements stand today
Setting aside organisational history, three positions on the Pakistani left today rest on genuinely distinct theoretical foundations, not merely on personal loyalty or organisational inheritance. The MKP holds that Marxism-Leninism remains theoretically valid, that US imperialism constitutes the principal global contradiction and the centre of global counter-revolution, and accordingly takes a comparatively soft line toward Russia and China – a position for which it is sometimes accused of aligning with that “camp”. The CPP, following the Greek Communist Party (KKE), one of the most rigorously organised and theoretically consistent parties to have defended Marxism-Leninism after the Soviet collapse, holds instead that both Russia and China now constitute a new imperialist formation, which it terms Eurasian imperialism. The AWP’s remnants, by contrast, were built on an explicitly different premise from the start: a ‘broad left’ formation open to any tendency identifying as left, from liberals to Trotskyists to Maoists – a strategy genuinely successful for roughly a decade, though largely dissolved since Minto’s departure removed a rare figure with unbroken continuity to the pre-Partition left.
What the fragmentation should actually teach
None of this history supports the explanation the Pakistani left most often gives for its own condition – that its splits were, at bottom, personal. Consider the CPP’s own predicament after its 1954 ban: with the party name itself unusable, its cadres correctly judged themselves too few to sustain an independent formation and instead entered NAP to organise as an internal faction. That decision was defensible on its own terms. But once NAP itself split along Bhashani/Wali Khan lines, the communist factions embedded within it split along exactly the same lines – a bifurcation inherited from NAP’s fracture, not chosen independently by the left itself. Historically contingent circumstances produce particular political formations; they cannot be summoned back once those circumstances have passed, which is precisely why calls to simply “revive NAP” or unify the left by fiat go nowhere.
A second, related lesson concerns the persistent instinct to explain the past through good actors and bad actors – the cinematic reflex in which the sympathetic figure is flawless and the opposed figure is simply villainous. Reality does not sort itself this way. Most of the figures in this history occupy intermediate positions: capable of real contribution and real error within the same political life. The left’s repeated failure to calibrate its judgment accordingly – either absorbed wholesale into Bhutto’s populist rhetoric, or driven by opposition to Bhutto into an alliance with Jamaat-i-Islami inside the PNA, a coalition that in practice invited the military dictatorship that then hanged him – is a failure of exactly this kind.
The deepest problem, though, is theoretical thinness rather than any of the specific tactical errors above. Marxist thought in Pakistan remains severely underdeveloped in a very literal sense: Das Kapital itself has never been translated into Urdu, so that the book most invoked is, for most who invoke it, unread. Absent that theoretical grounding, political actors drift with whatever wind is blowing – toward nationalism in one period, toward populism in another, toward an uncritical workerism that treats whatever a worker happens to say as correct by virtue of who said it (a confusion of proletarian politics with proletarian sociology that has nothing to do with Marxism, which is a materialist science, not an identity politics), and more recently toward postmodernism – a tradition traceable through Heidegger, a Nazi Party member, filtered through Sartre, Foucault and Derrida into an academic fashion many mistake for radicalism. Conservative and religious tendencies, meanwhile, persist inside virtually every current of the Pakistani left to this day, largely unexamined.
The corrective this history points toward is not unity for its own sake, nor the recovery of any single lost formation, but depth: an actual grip on what was being fought over, and why, sufficient to stand in one’s own place rather than being carried by whichever political current happens to be prevailing at a given moment. That grip is precisely what seven decades of undocumented history have made difficult to acquire – and precisely what a written record, however partial, can begin to restore.