Will invoking Sajjad Zaheer’s ghost work?

LEFTIST intellectuals from Pakistan and India have been visiting each other in recent days to celebrate the late Sajjad Zaheer’s birth centenary. The countrywide Indian celebrations wound up last week with a seminar in Delhi and the gathering shifted to Pakistan.

Since the divided and splintered communist parties in India and Pakistan have undergone changes in their larger world view and in the perceptions of their domestic tasks and strategies, their joint homage to Sajjad Zaheer could nudge them to probe closer ties between their representatives, and possibly also of Bangladesh since it shares a common history with both.

A simple litmus test is needed to verify the preparedness of each side to come closer together. Even as the pre-independence and undivided Communist Party of India had supported the campaign for Pakistan, over a period of time there was a subsequent review of this line by their leadership. It is evident the fractured communist movement in South Asia is grappling with a narrow nationalist prism through which they regard their comrades across the borders.

Here is a simple way to test this observation. Take the disputed region of Kashmir which is described by the governments of India and Pakistan variously as occupied, held, ‘azad’ or free and so forth, depending on who is speaking. Their official language has been adopted by the media on both sides, reflecting an intensely nationalist point of view despite their so-called independence from political influences.

What Pakistani media calls Azad Kashmir is described by their Indian counterparts as Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Similarly Indian held Kashmir and Indian occupied Kashmir are Pakistani references to a region that the government in New Delhi calls an integral part of India. What do the advocates of scientific socialism have to say on this extremely nationalist description of a crucial dispute between their countries?

When the Indian parliament passed an avoidably jingoistic resolution during the Narasimha Rao administration, we did not hear any of the two main communist parties protesting. If anything they tacitly, if not actively, supported the motion that decreed the retrieval of “Pakistan occupied” Kashmir as the only viable task before the government of India to resolve the Kashmir dispute. How foolish that resolution sounds today in the face of a more complex and refined back channel diplomacy the two countries are conducting to resolve this bloody dispute?

Thus the communist parties including our home grown ones that had once offered the original thesis for globalization with the slogan ‘workers of the world unite’ have tended to recede into their nationalist shells at crucial times. In doing so they appear to have adopted the language and mannerisms of the establishments they once threatened to overthrow.

Another test to verify the readiness of Indian and Pakistani communists to come closer together would be to look dispassionately at their respective responses to the shrill war hysteria that is ever so often unleashed by the ruling establishments for a variety of malicious reasons, just as they did in the summer of 2002. If I correctly remember my conversation with a popular communist leader from India in those tense days of nuclear fears, he had said almost consolingly: “Don’t worry. The Americans won’t let there be an all out war.”

Apart from a sparsely attended anti-war rally in Delhi organized by some leftist groups including the communist parties in the excruciatingly hot summer of 2002, there was much to doubt about the attention span of their leaderships vis-a-vis the national trauma of looming nuclear conflict.

One of Sajjad Zaheer’s contributions was precisely this. He had encouraged poets and writers from each side of the border to sympathise with the lot of the other. It was thus that India’s Majrooh Sultanpuri wrote against Ayub Khan’s draconian regime across the border. “Jala ke mishal a jaa’n hum junu sifaat chaley; jo ghar ko aag lagaye hamarey saath chaley.” Taken from Kabir’s pre-Mughal verse, the poem exhorted Indians to sacrifice their home and hearth for justice — across the border.

Sajjad Zaheer was sent to Pakistan by the Communist Party of India to set up a party unit there. Many old timers are of the opinion that it was a mistake and even unnecessary to try to cross pollinate an ideology in that way. Anyhow, the communist leader got involved in a life threatening legal controversy in Pakistan. He stood accused along with Faiz Ahmed Faiz and several army officers in the Rawalpindi case of 1951 whereby the prosecution wanted their heads for trying to overthrow Liaquat Ali Khan’s government.

According to one of the papers read by an old timer at the Delhi seminar, Sajjad Zaheer’s return to India was so clouded by innuendo and gossip that the leadership of the communist party declined to send anyone senior to receive him at the railway station. In the absence of the ailing party chief Ajoy Ghosh, EMS Namoodiripad was the acting general-secretary of the CPI. According to this version of the incident, he consulted with P. Ramamurthy, a politburo member from Tamil Nadu and then dispatched a junior party functionary to receive Sajjad Zaheer when he returned to Delhi for the first time in 1955.

It seems Ramamurthy was also of the view that after the partition Urdu was no longer a worthwhile language for the party to pursue in India. But Harkishan Singh Surjeet, who recently relinquished office as the chief of Communist Party of India (Marxist), persisted against all odds to bring out an Urdu newspaper from Punjab. There are lots of other similar issues to ponder as we celebrate Sajjad Zaheer’s anniversary. But invoking his ghost may not be the most effective approach.

Tailpiece: After the cash-for-questions and other financial sting operations, it is now extramarital relationships which are troubling some members of India’s parliament. According to Asian Age, a couple of members of parliament appear to be married to two women at the same time, seemingly unconcerned about the laws against bigamy.

Passengers in the first class coach of the Shramjeevi Express on Saturday were witness to a violent crossfire between two warring ‘wives’ of MP Ghanshyam Chandra Kharwar. Mr Kharwar, who is a Rajya Sabha member, boarded the Shramjeevi Express at Delhi railway station on Saturday along with his second wife Meena Khan.

The MP and his second wife were on their way to Sultanpur. Barely had the train left the station when Mr Kharwar’s first wife, Pushpa Rani, stormed into the compartment with her two children — a son and a daughter — and began beating up the MP and his second wife Meena Khan.

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