Have anyone read Tarqi Ali’s book. Can Pakistan Survive?: The Death of a State. He discusses about the moribund state.
The one-time fiery student leader who was packed off to Oxford by his parents to escape the wrath of the Ayub regime, and who continues to write books and actively participate in left activities around the world, is disenchanted with Pakistani politics, writes Ayesha Azfar
At the height of the Zia era when all pro-democracy voices had been stifled, getting hold of banned political literature was considered something of a feat. However, it rarely followed that the forbidden treasure carried a message of hope, or that it even temporarily banished the dark images of Pakistan’s longest and most brutal military dictatorship from the mind. Leftist intellectual and activist Tariq Ali’s ominously titled Can Pakistan Survive?: The Death of a State, a work that furtively found its way into bookshelves in the early 1980s, was no exception.
More than 20 years after its publication, the one-time fiery student leader who was packed off to Oxford by his parents to escape the wrath of the Ayub regime, and who continues to write books and actively participate in left activities around the world, remains disenchanted with Pakistani politics. “I think this country is headed for stagnation,” he says, “It’s a country very dependent on foreign largesse despite all the propaganda generated by Shaukat Aziz. There is no political vision within the two so-called secular parties. One (PML) is basically just a clique of opportunists. The other, the Pakistan’s People’s Party, still has some good people but its policies are totally determined by the whims of Benazir.”
Tariq Ali, who was recently in Karachi to attend the World Social Forum, was born in 1943 in Lahore to communist parents, Tahira and Mazhar Ali Khan — themselves the progeny of a feudal family. His memory of Pakistan’s formative years spans those defining moments in the country’s history which, had they been properly exploited, could have set the stage for a far more enriching political culture than the one in place today. He recalls how his home in Lahore was the meeting point of the Progressive Writers.
“The left was strong culturally in the realm of literature, and the other big thing it achieved was the Progressive Papers Ltd. You got the impression that the left must be strong because of this chain of newspapers,” he says, citing names of editors, among them his father Mazhar Ali Khan, Faiz and Chiragh Hasan Hasrat, whose ideological leanings led the Ayub regime to take over the papers. “Bhutto once told me that the decision to take over the Progressive Papers Ltd was one pushed by the American embassy that did not want a chain of anti-American newspapers in Pakistan.”
Elaborating on the literary traditions of the left, he points out that Faiz’s ghazals carried a political message that was heard by millions around the country. Before him, there was Iqbal. “It is sad that Iqbal is seen as a revivalist because he was a very brilliant poet, and some of the most radical poetry of the subcontinent was written by him in the twenties and thirties. It is sad that he has been mummified by the Pakistani state that treats him like an icon, which puts younger people off from reading him.”
Nevertheless, Tariq Ali concedes that the left has been weak in Pakistan, despite the sixties’ student movement that was “a big revolt that should not be underestimated. It was the only time,” he says, that the “country was united from below. It’s never been united from above which is why it broke up.” That movement, he says, was captured, ‘confiscated almost’ not by the traditional left organisations but by the Pakistan People’s Party, which, he says, has now become a dynastic political party.
Tariq Ali laments the absence of a common platform that could have lent cohesion to several pockets of resistance in the country. For instance, during the World Social Forum in Karachi, one saw, “A massive turnout by the peasants (Christians and Muslims) from the military farms in Okara who have been struggling now for years and years. The fact that the religious groups haven’t managed to get a toehold in (their ranks) is incredibly positive. What we lack is a political movement which can unify the country. You have growing anger amongst the minority nationalities at how they’re being treated. But nothing exists on a national scale which can give voice to this. This is where political parties in Pakistan have become totally degenerated.”
A large part of the current problems in Pakistan, he says, is linked to the absence of land reforms. “The key to modernising the country was to have serious land reforms which would destroy the power of the landlords forever. This has never been done. The only period when the peasant felt free — even though he was not totally liberated — was during the early years of the first People’s Party government. But that could only have been institutionalised by massive land reforms. Bhutto chickened out of it as most of the landlords joined his party.”
There is a hint of regret in his voice when he says, “Bhutto could have really democratised the institutions and instituted massive land reforms with popular support. Instead, many industries which should not have been nationalised were nationalised just because it appeared radical to do so. What would have been infinitely more radical was to impose drastic land reforms all over the country and bring the peasants out of the Middle Ages.”
Going further back into history, he points out, “**The Muslim League was a party predominantly based in what is now India. When it shifted to what is now Pakistan, its base was very weak. In India, it was a party of the middle classes. When it shifted here, there was no big support **. In Sindh and Punjab, there were coalitions of landlords. In Balochistan, likewise. In the Frontier, the Congress party had defeated the Muslim League in a Muslim majority area. The only way the leadership realised that it could stay in power was to get all the landlords from the landlord-dominated parties into the Muslim League.
“The 1946 manifesto of the Muslim League promised radical land reforms. How could they implement it when a wave of landlords came into the party and dominated it for the first 20 years of the country’s existence? If the country is run politically by an elite (consisting of) of landlords, backed by the military-civilian bureaucracy, then the one thing these people will prevent or find ways to circumvent are land reforms. I think it was a very clear issue of class rather than anything else.”
The problem still dominates today, and it is in the context of feudalism that Tariq Ali comments on the current wave of unrest in Balochistan. There is resentment in Balochistan at the way the central government operates without consulting the local people, he concedes, but “Akbar Bugti is essentially leading this struggle. I can’t take him too seriously. When it suits him, he collaborates with the regime, when it suits him he brings his supporters out. Struggles which are led by Bugti are often nothing more than attempts to blackmail the central government into making a deal. We have been too lax on this in the progressive movement. We have not understood that one of the problems in Balochistan is the structure of that society. Because we had radical leftwing sardars like Ataullah Khan Mengal and Khair Bux Marri, the left was very happy. On the other hand, it meant that there was no serious effort to challenge the structure of that province.”
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Despite a shared political history, the Indian experience has been different from Pakistan’s. “There are parts of India where there are long traditions of peasant struggle,” Ali says, naming Andhra Pradesh and Bengal as examples. “The Indian government imposed a set of land reforms which was successful. That means that India has moved forward compared to us.”
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But, one senses another answer as he discusses the absence of an intellectual movement in Pakistan exemplified by the terrible state of its universities with “some of the best intellectuals going abroad” and a barren cultural field.
In contrast, he cites Iran’s example, and the growth of an “incredibly vibrant intelligentsia. If you compare Iran to Pakistan, there’s no comparison. Nearly 30 years of clerical rule have not succeeded in wiping out intellectual traditions. You have novels and poems being written and a very poignant expression of the needs and views of the intelligentsia in the Iranian cinema which is more advanced than anything happening in the West. No cinema has developed in Pakistan. No one has attempted what was done in India by Satyajit Ray or Shyam Benegal. In our politics and culture, it has somehow not been allowed to develop.”
Are we fated to remain a moribund society then? “No, I think it could be temporary,” he answers. “One must never give up and imagine that things are going to get worse. History has a very strange way of surprising us. It’s difficult to predict exactly what surprises lie in store for us but I hope they are pleasant ones. Things emerge from the most outlandish places and so one should never give up.” Cheerful parting words. As Tariq Ali says, “Sometimes when you live outside, the picture is much clearer than when you’re inside.”