Surkh Salam: Class Struggle in Pakistan

Among many other atrocities committed in historiography of Pakistan is the complete erasure of the class-based, participatory and radical struggle of the Marxists/left-wing and that of Communist Party of Pakistan. CPP was preceded by Communist Party of India and it also is another tragedy that the class based emancipatory struggle of CPI is obscured or erased in the communitarian struggle of AIML and the identitarion struggle of All India Congress. The history and struggle of pre-independence class-based movements is a mesh of intriguing escapes, underground activism and fatal brushings with the colonial powers which presented an alternative to the revivalist politics of communitarism and of the myth of one-united India of the nationalist politics.

There was another struggle more encompassing and merging the question of national autonomy to that of class politics. And unsurprisingly, its leaders were underground or in jail and the movements banned more than once. There were lively discussions on the role of violence as the Ghaddar movement (for which around 8,000 Sikh communists came back to India leaving their lives abroad) to the well-known cases of Bhagat Singh and Subash Chandra Bose.

To the linear narrative of Pakistan as to be the manifest destiny of the Muslim masses and India to be the enemy beset on annihilating it there was an alternative offered. In the earlier years both the arch-enemies trembled at the prospect of a new kind of emancipatory politics. Both the enemies worked together to root out a common threat of a united movement which aimed at taking history in its own hands. The leaders of CPI came from India and their stay in Pakistan is another tale of surviving the authorities and organizing the masses.

What is captivating is the leaders of the party and the movement were in Pakistan not because they had to but because they wanted to, leaving a life of comfort and well-connected families. Sajjad Zaheer, the head of CPI lived either underground or in jail during his stay in Pakistan. He brought Sibt-e-Hasan, renowned intellectual, to Pakistan. Before independence there was progressive writers movement and which came with socially provocative, progressive, radical themes, things that the Ashrafia won’t touch. Progressive Writers Movement ran parallel to the class-based collective emancipatory politics which give a sensibility based on empathy and which raised the social consciousness through art and literature.

Remembering the past is not a lost cause of nostalgia. The participatory, progressive and transformative political projects and movements of today need to excavate from the ruins of past, memories of similar kind of movements. Historiography serves the power. Collective memory may be as a constructed one as history but memory can be transformative. And especially in an environment where amnesia rules, and where selective forgettry enforces the narrative and discourse of the power, then rememberence of all and sundry becomes a moral imperative. Milan Kundera in, “The book of laughter and forgetting,” said that, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The present is made by yesterday and tomorrow will be made by today. Remembering collective emancipatory struggle of yesterday will give a sense of continuity to the struggle of today. Thus, a tomorrow, a different conception of a future, an alternative destiny as opposed to the one prescribed will be possible.

Lets sing songs of the yesteryears for a better tomorrow:

Uthe ga ana al-haq ka naara
Jo main bhi hun aur tum bhi hu
Aur raj karey gi khalq e Khuda
Jo main bhi hun aur tum bhi hu