THIS book fills a void in the literature on Pakistan and does it with stupendous scholarship and insightful comment. It is objective, yet compassionate. The author, Kamran Asdar Ali, is Associate Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the South Asian Institute at the University of Texas, Austin. The sheer range of interviews he has conducted amazes one as much as the sources he has tapped. The genesis of the work lies in his discussions with his friends while he was a politicised student in Karachi. He has travelled far and wide.
In South Asia, archives are not as open as they are in the West, despite the help which the officials concerned generously extend. It is the state which impedes scholarly pursuits. Amazingly, many of our invaluable source materials are stored abroad. Some of the most erudite works on Islam are published in Leiden, in the Netherlands. “This book is based on oral testimonies, ethnographic fieldwork and archival research. In Pakistan, in addition to interviewing Communist Party members, labour activists, government officials and student leaders, I conducted archival research in public and private collections, read newspaper reports and worked with memoirs of activists, literary figures and communist leaders (in English and Urdu). For this purpose, I also did research at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., where I looked at the United States State Department dispatches from Pakistan on its labour and communist movement (including some declassified CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] papers) from the 1950s and 1960s. I spent two extended periods in the Netherlands at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) which has a special collection on Pakistan labour politics and its linkage with international labour organisations such as the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). Other important sources on the Communist Party were the police reports that I miraculously found in a private collection in Pakistan and the political reports sent by British diplomats to the United Kingdom which are housed at the National Archives in London. I also relied on old volumes of Soviet publications, scholarly articles and conference reports (especially pertaining to cultural policies) along with Chinese periodicals that I found through the interlibrary loan system while at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. Finally, again closer to my academic home, I found copies of the Communist Party of India’s English language publication, The Communist , for the years 1940-1948 at the Harry Ranson Centre at the University of Texas, Austin.” This shows the love of scholarship abroad. The book took shape at the International Institute of the Study of Islam in Leiden and was written in Berlin.
“This book brings back the memory of the 1960s protest movement and other radical confrontations with the state by focussing on communist and working-class history from 1947 to 1972. If the late 1940s are considered the founding moment of communism in the country (along with the independence of Pakistan itself), linked as the period was to the international consolidation of communism in Eastern Europe and the victory of Maoism in China, then the 1960s were surely its zenith, as urban-based working-class and student movements destabilised the status quo. Hence, the book begins by critically engaging with the history of the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP) during its brief period of legal existence (1948-1954) and ends in the early 1970s by discussing the social and historical process that led to the substantive decline of labour and class-based politics and the concurrent forceful emergence of a politics increasingly shaped by issues of ethnic, religious and sectarian differences that mark contemporary Pakistan.”
The book is a moving blend of fond memories, personal recollections and documentation, which remains to be studied. It concentrates on the CPP. Its central figure is Sajjad Zaheer, who founded and built the party, only to ruin it by a foolish adventurist venture which was exposed in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case. The CPP never recovered from the blow it had foolishly invited (see the writer’s review of the book The Times and Trial of Rawalpindi Conspiracy 1951 by Hasan Zaheer, Oxford University press, Karachi; The Statesman , January 18, 1998) reprinted in the compilation Islam, South Asia & the Cold War , Tulika Books, 2012). The CPP had a brief legal existence from 1948.
The author traces the CPP’s roots to its parent, the Communist Party of India (CPI), and the Adhikari thesis, which sought to build a bridge with the Muslim League, now committed to Pakistan. Dr Gangadhar Adhikari, a member of the CPI’s Polit Bureau, wrote Pakistan and India National Unity, which was published in London by the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Labour Monthly in 1943. In September 1942, the CPI “held an enlarged plenary meeting of its Central Committee at which a senior member of the party, G.M. Adhikari, insisted on the national character of the various Muslim populations… divided them up according to language groups and territories where they were a demographic majority (for example, the Baluch, Pathan, Sindhis, Punjabis and Bengalis).…
“The CPI leadership, in its engagement with the Muslim question as it emerged in the pre-Independence politics of the 1940s, went back and forth in its desire not to succumb to the formula of religion equals nationality (as the Muslim League argued), yet many times remained within the same conceptualisation and reiterated the terms of the debate that they sought to negate. As such they retained the contradiction between Muslim identity linked to a particular place (language group) and the larger construction of a Muslim moral community connected to a territorially bounded nation state.”
At the Second Congress of the CPI, held in February-March 1948 in Calcutta (now Kolkata), it was decided to split the party. Men of high quality such as Sajjad Zaheer and Sibte Hasan were sent to Pakistan to found the CPP there. A few years earlier, sympathisers such as Mian Iftikharuddin and CPI members such as Danial Latifi were encouraged to join the Muslim League. Danial Latifi drafted the League’s election manifesto for the 1946 elections. After Partition, he came over to India and practised law in the Bombay High Court and, later, in the Supreme Court. There was a fatal flaw, however: “The CPP leadership, generally arrived from India, was not familiar with the cultural and political landscape of the country and most, as will be shown later, belonged to the North Indian ashraf , a highly educated and self-conscious Muslim elite, personally steeped in the comportment, culture and aesthetics of North Indian adab in its many connotations and meanings—as literary genre, concept and personal quality. Yet, these very same people were also dedicated to establishing a future socialist society that was committed to democratic values, distribution of wealth and an end to exploitation of the oppressed.”
The early years The author’s description of the scene in 1948 cannot be bettered. “We find the aristocratic and aesthetically inclined Syed Sajjad Zaheer, a central figure in this book, leading the CPP in its early years surrounded by comrades who were sent from the CPI central office in Bombay to assist him in his work. We also find him trying his utmost to understand the local realities , creating bonds with the remnants of the working-class politics in Pakistan and working hard to start it anew, sometimes not so successfully. Yet, this beginning made possible a different trajectory of politics among the urban working class, peasants, students, middle-class intellectuals, artists and literary personalities that grew to sometimes challenge the status quo and demand changes in governance structure during Pakistan’s short history.
“Further, it is to Zaheer’s credit that he never used his family’s influence and wealth for personal gain. Even during moments of extreme financial burden that his family, which was in India, faced during Zaheer’s time in Pakistan and after his return to India in the mid-1950s, he seldom received (or asked for) assistance from his more well-off relatives. The case is similar for most of those who worked for the Communist Party during its early years or joined the progressive movement later. In a country where the idea of profiting from power and patronage is now an old story, we seldom find those who worked for the progressive movement living a life of luxury or ending up with immense wealth. In most cases true to their ideals, irrespective of errors in their analysis and the political mistakes they made, they lived simple and economically burdened lives. Whether it was the middle-class leadership that came from India in the late 1940s, or the more working-class trade unionists who became powerful in the late 1960s, most did not acquire worldly possessions, in many cases married late, had difficult personal lives, became burdened with raising children in old age and had severe problems paying for medical bills during their later lives. Hence, whatever their personal and political failings, these were people who at some fundamental level selflessly dedicated their lives to creating a world that would be better for all” (page 15). A.B. Bardhan, the CPI’s general secretary, slept on a bench in the party headquarters. You do not find such people elsewhere.
Sajjad Zaheer (1905-1971) was the first general secretary of the CPP. His father, Sir Syed Wazir Hasan, was once the Chief Justice of Awadh, and his brother Ali Zaheer was the first Indian Ambassador to Indonesia. The family was close to Jawaharlal Nehru.
1948 CPI congress At the CPI’s congress in 1948, B.T. Ranadive spoke for four and a half hours , tearing into the brilliant General Secretary P.C. Joshi’s line as being “reformist”, not revolutionary. “In the final analysis, the CPI declared war on the post-independence Indian state”, the author fairly concludes. Sajjad Zaheer went to Pakistan with this baggage, but he was not without resources. It is important to note the support which he and his colleagues enjoyed because it reflects the class composition of the leadership of the CPP. “After the creation of Pakistan a number of educated Muslim men from Zaheer’s social background had opted for Pakistan and found themselves in important government jobs. A more detailed study is necessary to show the ways in which class linkages trumped political allegiances (at least in the initial years of Pakistan’s existence) to provide Zaheer (and other communists) the protection he needed in his years in the underground. For example, based on intelligence reports, if we take Zaheer’s first few months in Pakistan, they were spent with friends and relatives who were very much part of the government machinery from which ostensibly he was hiding. In May 1948 Zaheer arrived in Pakistan from India and remained underground until he was arrested in March or early April 1951.”
Dr Z.A. Ahmed is another illustration of this network. A background of numerous trips to Pakistan preceded his career in the CPI. He was protected by his brothers, who were themselves part of the police and judicial services. As the author records: “It is clear that the newly arrived and highly educated immigrants who were either successful businessmen or now held important posts in the Pakistani state machinery valued their friendships and relationships with Zaheer and were willing to take the political risk of giving him shelter in their homes. It may be that they did not completely understand the severity of the situation and it was still a time of much uncertainty in everyone’s lives. A new country had been formed and every day new batches of people were coming to Karachi or Lahore having left their ancestral lands to settle in Pakistan. Giving shelter to an old friend or a relative—much less someone with the family name and reputation of Sajjad Zaheer—was the least they could do based on the cultural norms of ashraf hospitality and generosity.”
This could not last long. It was an ephemeral advantage which a leadership, parachuted into Pakistan momentarily, was blissfully unaware of, and worse, it was unwilling to learn, the realities of the social, economic and political conditions in Pakistan. At the Calcutta congress, only three delegates from Pakistan attended. Mohammed Ata Hussain from the North-Western Frontier Province (NWFP), Jamaluddin Bukhari from Sind and Eric Cyprian from Punjab who was to emerge as the sternest critic of Zaheer. Thirty-two delegates represented East Pakistan. Hindu and Sikh communists had left Pakistan.
Sajjad Zaheer’s role was central in the CPP’s early career, which Kamran Asdar Ali records in a balanced appraisal. “A person of aristocratic lineage who acquired an Oxford degree and had literary accomplishments to his credit, Zaheer was dedicated to working-class politics and the plight of the poor and the downtrodden. He was close to the upper echelons of the All India Congress, having served with Nehru in Allahabad in the late 1930s, and yet he could not resist Ranadive’s most banal and crude interpretations of Marxist politics. It was the same Zaheer who, with the writers Ahmad Ali, Rashid Jahan and Mahmud uz Zafar, published a collection of modern Urdu short stories in the early 1930s which covered provocative topics linked to gender, sexuality and critique of religion. He continued to retain high aesthetic standards and wrote an excellent book on the Persian poet Hafiz while in jail in Pakistan during the 1950s.…
“When Zaheer arrived in Lahore in the summer of 1948, some of his closest associates were the poet Faiz and the progressive Muslim League leader Mian Iftikharuddin, a member of the Constituent Assembly and the publisher of Imroz and Pakistan Times , two prominent left-leaning newspapers.” His closest friends were the great poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Mian Iftikharuddin and Sibte Hasan.
Conditions in Pakistan, as even in the more politically advanced India, were hardly propitious for the kind of struggle that Ranadive had in mind. The masses had not been aroused either. Neither the “subjective” nor the “objective” tests—to use communist jargon—was satisfied. In Pakistan, only 1 per cent of its population was engaged in wage labour. The Ranadive Line was rejected by some in Pakistan as well as in India, notably by Z.A. Ahmed and Dr K.M. Ashraf. Ajoy Kumar Ghosh of the CPI Central Committee went to Pakistan in October 1947 to reorganise the leaderless provincial committees.
Given the crippling handicaps, Zaheer did a good job in welding the CPP into a respectable force. Funds were a big problem. The CPP had no money even to meet the day-to-day expenses. He sold his press for Rs.16,000 and invested Rs.3,000 in a Karachi bookstore. If, within a matter of months, it was in a position to recover its investment, it was because of the brilliant business acumen of its owner Malik Noorani (page 230). A committed communist sympathiser all his life, he founded the Pakistan Law House (PLH) in Karachi; was imprisoned by the Ayub regime but never wavered in his loyalties. He knew Sajjad Zaheer and other CPI leaders from their Bombay days. His wife, Mumtaz, shared his commitment. His son Kamran took the PLH to new heights; the daughter, Hoori, publishes progressive authors and poets. Kamran’s wife, Uzma, is a formidable activist in human rights, gender equality and democratic governance.
It is a rich legacy which this writer’s uncle Malik Chicha left behind. He was an invaluable friend when I was in my teens. Two gifts I remember. One was Julius Fucik’s Notes from the Gallows ; the other was History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Bolshevik, which bears his inscription dated February 8, 1948: “By conviction I am a communist yet I cannot read this book, reason: my eyes. Though opposed to the communist viewpoint, I am sure you will read this book with profound interest, your views remaining the same.”
To resume, while he toiled hard to build the CPP, Sajjad Zaheer could not shed the Calcutta baggage. He tried to build it on Stalinist lines, intolerant of the slightest deviation from the party line. He had a hands-on involvement with every function. The CPP grew. So did the trade union movement. The Civil Liberties Union, formed in October 1948, became stronger under the leadership of Mahmud Ali Kasuri. The Pakistan Trade Union Federation had Faiz Ahmed Faiz as its vice-president. But Eric Cyprian was ever critical of Zaheer’s approach.
Sibte Hasan, a close friend, assessed him correctly. “The problem was, according to Sibte Hasan, that Zaheer was totally inexperienced in the party’s political work, with his own personality geared towards art and literature, and he had never engaged with workers and hence was not used to people contact and the rigours of party work. In addition, he was not familiar with the social and economic conditions of what was then West Pakistan. Finally, he had to conduct his work while remaining underground as, from the very beginning, there was a warrant for his arrest. If he had worked in the party office, Sibte Hasan suggests, he would at least have got to meet a range of people and been exposed to various ideas and points of view. In the isolation of his underground addresses, which at times had to change very frequently, only a few people had access to him and information that reached him was through the senior party members with whom he met.”
Conspiracy case Such progress as there was was abruptly arrested by the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case in 1951 even as the CPI had begun to retract from the ruinous Ranadive Line. The Army officers and civilians arrested in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case of 1951 included the then Chief of General Staff Maj. Gen. Akbar Khan, Air Commodore Mohammad Khan Janjua, Maj. Gen. Nazir Ahmad, Brig. Sadiq Khan, Brig. Latif Khan, Lt Col Ziaud Din, Lt Col Niaz Mohammad Arbat, Capt. Khizar Hayat, Major Hasan Khan, Maj. Ishaq Mohammad, Capt. Zafarullah Poshni, Naseem Akbar Khan (wife of Maj. Gen. Akbar Khan), Editor of Pakistan Times , Lahore, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, members of the Communist Party Syed Sajjad Zaheer and Mohammad Husain Ata, while two approvers of the case were Lt Col Mohammad Mohyuddin Siddiq Raja and Major Khwaja Mohammad Eusoph Sethi.
They were charged with conspiracy to supplant the existing machinery of law in Pakistan and to substitute in its place a government under military dictatorship. It was planned initially by Akbar Khan and the other accused persons joined in later. The beginning of this conspiracy could be traced as far back as the middle of July 1949, when Akbar Khan, who was then Brigadier, 101 Brigade, persuaded several persons who were responsible officers in the armed forces to help him carry through his plan of overthrowing the government established by law in Pakistan.
The coup planning was spread over 20 months from the middle of July 1949 to February 1951, when Askar Ali Shah, Inspector, Criminal Investigation Department (CID), NWFP, reported to his superior, Assistant Inspector General, CID, G.H. Kiani, on February 23, 1951, about the conspiracy after he was summoned and he had met Maj. Gen. Akbar Khan in Rawalpindi.
The Special Tribunal to try the case was headed by Federal Court Judge Justice Abdur Rehman and included Punjab High Court Judge Justice Mohammad Sharif and Dacca High Court Judge Justice Amiruddin as members.
The proceedings started on June 15, 1951, at the Central Jail, Hyderabad, and the judgment was announced on January 5, 1953. Defence counsel included H.S. Suhrawardy, Z.H. Lari, former Muslim Leaguer of Uttar Pradesh, Malik Faiz Mohammad, Khwaja Abdul Rahim, Nawazish Ali, Qazi Aslam and others, while the main lawyer for the prosecution was A.K. Brohi, who acted with great enthusiasm to please his masters. This pillar of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the International Commission of Jurists served every military dictator with great zeal until his death.
Akbar Khan was sentenced to transportation for a period of 12 years. Air Commodore Mohammad Khan Janjua was sentenced to seven years’ rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs.500 and, in default, to undergo further rigorous imprisonment for one year. He was dismissed from the Pakistan Air Force as well. Maj. Gen. Nazir Ahmad got the minimum sentence, along with Mrs. Naseem Akbar; Nazir Ahmad was sentenced to imprisonment until the rising of the court. Brig. Sadiq Khan was sentenced to seven years’ rigorous imprisonment and to pay a fine of Rs.500 and, in default, to undergo further one year rigorous imprisonment. He was dismissed from the Army. Former Brig. Latif Khan and Lt Col Ziaud Din were sentenced to five years’ rigorous imprisonment and to pay a fine of Rs.500 and, in default, to undergo further rigorous imprisonment of one year. Ziaud Din was dismissed from the Army. Lt Col Arbab Mohammad Niaz was sentenced to five years’ rigorous imprisonment and to pay a fine of Rs.250 and, in default, to undergo further imprisonment of six months. He was dismissed from the Army.
Capt. Khizar Hayat, Maj. Ishaq Mohammad, Capt. Zafarullah Poshni and Maj. Hasan Khan were sentenced to four years’ rigorous imprisonment and to pay a fine of Rs.250, failing which they would undergo further rigorous imprisonment for six months. They were dismissed from the Army.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Sajjad Zaheer and Mohammad Husain Ata were sentenced to four years’ rigorous imprisonment and a fine of Rs.500, failing which they would undergo further rigorous imprisonment for one year. Lt Col Siddiq Raja and Maj. Eusoph Sethi were not tried since they agreed to become approvers. However, it is interesting to note that none of the coup plotters completed his sentence.
The plot The conspiracy was leaked by Askar Ali Shah, CID Inspector, whom Justice Mohammad Sharif described as “an old friend and a comrade in arms” of Akbar Khan. He disclosed in his statement to the police that the coup was planned for March 1, 2 and 3, 1951.
There were four meetings of the participants—on December 4 and 21, 1949; October 16, 1950, and February 23, 1951. The plan was to arrest Governor General Ghulam Mohammed, get him to dissolve the Cabinet, and install a military council headed by Akbar Khan. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was to be sent as High Commissioner to India in this hare-brained project.
But, note the gaps between the meetings. They reflect discord and lack of earnestness. By all accounts, there was no agreement at the last meeting on February 23, 1951—and agreement is the crux of the offence of conspiracy in law (Statute 120A of the Penal Code). The trial was a farce. Hasan Zaheer’s book The Times and Trial of Rawalpindi Conspiracy 1951 is based on daily reports by the Superintendent of Police, Punjab CID, to Ghulam Ahmed, Secretary Interior, later Ambassador to the U.S. They “contained the gist of the evidence” and the legal arguments and their happenings. He did not consult the full record of the trial. On November 22, the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Tribunal (Amendment) Act, 1952, was enacted. It stated: “The Tribunal shall not give a copy of any order, judgment or sentence to any accused person whom it concerns, but shall show him and his lawyer the same and permit him and his lawyer to make such memorandum thereof as he and his lawyer may require in order to draw up a petition seeking the exercise of the powers mentioned in Section 11” (for pardon, not appeal). This is unprecedented and repugnant to all norms of judicial fairness.
The Lahore daily Nation published three articles by Khalid Qayum (November 15-17, 1996) which claimed that “the related documents and judgments have been declassified”. He accepted the prosecution case and shut his eyes to gross illegalities in the trial, probably because he knew no better. The prime witness, Askar Ali Shah, who professed to be in the know of everything, was never produced as a witness. He was a friend of Akbar Khan and had betrayed him to the police on February 23, 1951, obviously with a false gloss on the proceedings.
Even Hasan Zaheer, sympathetic to the prosecution, holds: “It is unbelievable that a formidable secret service outfit, which had combed the Pakistan Army to produce voluminous oral and documentary evidence of conspiracy against two Major Generals, two Brigadiers, two Lieutenant Colonels, one Air Commodore, two Majors, and two Captains, apart from some eminent civilians, felt totally helpless against one of its own subordinates.” Manzur Qadir, one of the defence counsel, contended that Askar Ali Shah had been deliberately kept out of the way so as not to be produced as a witness in this court, and “in all probability, this was done at the instance of the government”.
The government claimed to have known of the conspiracy for at least six months; yet, it acted only on the eve of the elections to the Punjab Assembly. The British High Commissioner’s report to London set out the truth. “As regards proof of any actual criminal conspiracy, we have no evidence except hearsay. Accounts put out by official personages in public and private are somewhat contradictory. On the basis of the above, we are justified in retaining some doubts whether a political movement of potentially subversive character had in fact reached the stage of criminal conspiracy…. It can be assumed that Liaquat and his advisers had strong grounds for suspicion that a plot existed before they carried out the arrests; the timing of the arrests may or may not have been chosen with an eye to the elections.”
Sajjad Zaheer comes out poorly from the proceedings. In his statement before the tribunal, he denied his presence at the February 23 meeting and contended that “to every confirmed communist, the idea of a coup d’etat by the army never finds favour”. This is very true, indeed. But why then did he go through all those meetings? He sinned against the light.
Intriguing question The author remarks: “The intriguing question is not why the state clamped down on the communists, but why the CPP entered into a dialogue with the military. The discussions with the disaffected military leaders that became the basis of the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case, howsoever tentative, did expose the political stance of the CPP’s leadership, a party position that may have thought of relying on the military to bring about social change from above. These discussions could themselves be interpreted as a move by the CPP to short-circuit a future popular revolution. This change from above model may have been based on the CPP’s analysis of Pakistan’s economic development; at its independence, the country had inherited only 9 per cent of the total industrial establishment of British India.
“Despite this isolation from the public and the real world, the question remains as to why Zaheer or the CPP even contemplated such an adventurist position when the Indian Communist Party, on which it relied for guidance, had already made a major reversal in its policies towards a more moderate line. In a personal interview Tufail Abbas, who became the secretary of the Karachi committee, by then underground party in the late 1950s, offered the opinion that the CPP leadership in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case showed haste. He argued that people were in a hurry to bring about the revolution and could not wait for the party to develop its roots among the masses. Whether this is a serious analysis or not, it does seem that the CPP leadership in the early 1950s had decided to keep open all options for capturing state power.” The CPP did not accept Sajjad Zaheer’s false plea. He came over to India, a much diminished man after his release, never to return.
The lament of Hasan Zaheer, a civil servant, is significant. He wrote: “The decision to involve the Communist Party with the Army officers in planning the coup was very controversial within the leadership. It was taken at the behest of Sajjad Zaheer, who was able to steer it through the central executive of the Communist Party by a majority of a single vote. The party leaders opposing it were not convinced of the bona fides of the conspirators; Eric Cyprian bitterly recalled that Sajjad Zaheer took Stalin’s remark that all roads led to socialism to mean to jump at any adventure.”
In his opinion, “ had it not been for its involvement in the Conspiracy the Communist Party might have become a significant element in the mainstream politics in both wings of Pakistan ”. The CPP would have fought the fundamentalists. The aftermath is well recorded by Kamran Asdar Ali.
The CPP was vanquished, but the protest movements came to the fore in the 1960s. In Karachi and Lahore, you will find spirited activists against corruption, violation of human rights, and championing gender equality and accountability. They are bound to grow. It is too early to say the funeral rites of the Left. In the aftermath of the case, Akbar Khan studied law; practised in the High Court at Karachi, joined Z.A. Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party; joined his government in December 1971 and divorced Naseem. Zafarullah Poshni set up a successful advertising firm. Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote his best poetry in prison.
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