Daily Times

Following a judgment embellished with quotations from the Lebanese poet-philosopher, Khalil Gibran and the American jurist, Justice Louis Brandeis, we observe a fighting-fit prime minister clinging to office with all the legal means at his disposal. Around him and the Supreme Court that has sentenced him, there is a din of debate and argument, much of it highly partisan. With disputatious noises loud on the electronic and print media, we need to remind ourselves that the current controversies are merely a conflict between two sets of the elite. One is a political or the ‘elected’ elite (president, prime minister, parliament, political parties). The other is an administrative or ‘unelected’ elite (military, bureaucracy, judiciary, the professions), which is in the habit of exercising real power. While the conflict is not insignificant, the fact is that both elite groups are corrupt — financially, intellectually and morally. Neither can be seen as significantly advancing the cause of social justice in the land.

This dichotomy was earlier identified by Professor Hamza Alavi. It emerges from our colonial origins and remains very firmly rooted. This post-colonial state set-up has been challenged, both from the political Left as well as from the Right. It is the former that is my subject today.

The Left, in the sense of the socialist Left, is believed not to have been relevant to the early years of Pakistan. Certainly, the Left had lacked parliamentary representation. How could it be otherwise, when the first general elections were not held until as late as 1970? The results of those elections speak for themselves. The parties that swept the polls in every part of the country — the Awami League in East Pakistan, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) in Punjab and Sindh, the National Awami Party and Jamiat-e-Ulema-i-Islam in NWFP and Balochistan — were all populist, social democratic parties with strongly left-wing manifestoes.

In fact, the 1970 elections themselves were a product of the uprisings that had exploded onto the national stage earlier in 1968-69. The 1960s everywhere had been a period of intellectual ferment and the proliferation of left-wing radicalism. A New Left had appeared, disillusioned by the crudities of the Soviet totalitarian state and the benign blandness of the welfare bureaucracies of western Europe. The Chinese revolution and national liberation movements in the former colonies excited the imagination. Young people turned toward a variety of left-wing ideas. These included concepts like the Permanent Revolution of Leon Trotsky, the Perpetual Revolution of Mao Zedong and a wide range of pacifist-anarchist ideas. Initiated, among others, by Tom Hayden in the US, Tariq Ali Khan in Britain, ‘Red’ Rudi Dutschke in Germany and Daniel Cohn-Bendit in France, youth uprisings were to erupt in many countries across the world, including in Pakistan.

Here, the restless radicalism demonstrated by Pakistani youth in 1968-69 formed the core of a massive, generalised public revolt against the authoritarian Ayub regime. Across the country, there was serious agitation for rights, both political and economic. Workers gheraoed (surrounded) factories, peasants seized feudal landholdings, and students took over classrooms. The political Left was thrust into the forefront of change by the near-revolution engendered in Pakistan’s streets and villages.

The point is, all that had not happened out of thin air. There was an institutional base to this massive general uprising. This base comprised student unions, labour unions, peasant organisations, associations seeking regional rights, human rights organisations, and other associations and entities of the underprivileged and the disfranchised.

The uprisings of 1968-69 led to the collapse of the Ayub regime. The successor military regime rushed to develop new labour, education, agrarian and other policies. The former provinces were restored and Balochistan province created, as a prelude to greater regional autonomy. The first general elections were held, with the results already mentioned above.

But this triumphant apotheosis of the Left would prove short-lived.

The ink on the lists of successful candidates had scarcely dried when the parties representing the two wings of the country came into conflict over contradictory constitutional perceptions. This conflict was exploited by the military regime of the day, leading to the midnight massacre in Dkaka, which in turn triggered a civil war, ten million refugees, a million dead, war with India, military humiliation and the ‘Caesarean’ birth of Bangladesh.

The PPP regime that came to power in the country that now called itself Pakistan assumed the saviour’s mantle, ‘picking up the pieces, very small pieces’. Success was considerable at first and several outstanding accomplishments lie to its credit. But Bhutto’s overbearing personal style and vindictiveness, coupled with nationalisation measures so excessive as to go down to even cotton ginners and rice huskers, created too many enemies. His own swing to the right and mistreatment of his former comrades alienated even his supporters.

The fall of the Bhutto government brought in the satanic usurper, who snarled on the media about his commitment to what he called ‘an Islamic system’. The frightful institutions he promoted and the retrograde educational systems he erected have irrevocably poisoned the intellectual environment of the land and given birth to today’s bigoted, obscurantist political culture and its polluted fallout of violent insurgency, terrorism and cold-blooded mass murder.

On the other hand, so out of touch and moribund did the Left in general and the PPP in particular become that despite the massive wave of revulsion over Bhutto’s imprisonment and assassination, they were unable to mount any kind of public protest.

Today, 33 years later, the Left remains impotent, clinging to the shirttails of the PPP, which is in power yet again. Now, to support constitutionalism and democratic processes wholeheartedly is of course absolutely correct. To join the battle against violent, armed extremism is utterly essential. But to expect people-friendly policies or any semblance of real social change from the PPP or any of the parties presently in or out of parliament is foolishness.

The institutions of the intelligentsia and of the underprivileged have either been co-opted by the establishment or taken over by the hard Right. The Left, it seems, no longer has any stomach for the long march through the institutions that is essential to any programme of social change. More, even at the drawing-room level, there is no real discussion as to whether and how they should continue to support the PPP or whether to form another mass political party altogether.

The writer is a marketing consultant based in Karachi. He is also a poet