The state is hunting Maoist rebels in Chhattisgarh’s dense forests. The left, Faiz’s offspring, is divided in the response. But so far what we have seen is a growing army of dispossessed women and children. Their homes have been burnt and their men slaughtered by state-sponsored vigilantes. —File Photo

IQBAL Bano died some months ago and Faiz Ahmed Faiz passed away a number of years ago. The natural instinct would be to love them and celebrate them.

However, there are good reasons that you may never wish to hear her recordings of his songs again. Or for that matter anyone singing ‘Hum dekhenge’.

This sad thought crossed my mind listening to one of the discussions under way in Delhi these days, on how to avert a looming state-backed massacre of the tribes-people in central India’s Chhattisgarh province.

The state is hunting Maoist rebels in Chhattisgarh’s dense forests. The left, Faiz’s offspring, is divided in the response. But so far what we have seen is a growing army of dispossessed women and children. Their homes have been burnt and their men slaughtered by state-sponsored vigilantes.

The Maoists have retaliated with brutality against the police and suspected informers. Pakistan is in an even bigger shambles. It has a religious variant of tribal resistance that has mutated into a full-blown terror assault on the state. The state is responding with unbridled force.

So why would it not be easy to sing Faiz under the circumstances? I think the reason is simple. Much of Faiz’s evocative poetry – for that matter of Jalib and Josh too, among others – was written for partisans who had a clear objective about life and justice.

The verses targeted their quarries, who shifted from generals Ayub Khan to Musharraf with little change in the intensity. Though Faiz did not live to heal the wounds inflicted on his people by the latter, his poetry still did. You could still galvanise a chorus to evoke the dream of ‘Hum dekhenge’, whether it was the short-lived lawyers’ movement or Benazir Bhutto’s rallies.

Of course her appeal had become a compromised version of her father’s rapport with Faiz’s Khalq-i-Khuda, the people, the awam. Interestingly, India’s Congress party rules in the name of the ‘aam aadmi’, the common man of Faiz. Pretenders on both sides have usurped partisan slogans while studiously discarding their ideals.

Something has twisted the worldview of Faiz into a mangled heap. A key factor could be today’s totally unforeseen battle lines and spanking new doctrines that have replaced the old zeal to overthrow the tyrannical state. Its followers are humane, even liberal, but no longer radical enough to merit Faiz’s poetry.

In a sense history has outwitted Faiz, and thus also his followers. Gen Zia first used religious revivalism to neutralise the partisans. Faiz went into exile, Jalib faced the military’s wrath, but their poetry kept the flame of hope burning.

In recent years Pakistan’s military as also the civilian authority that succeeded was wooing the support of ‘civil society’. To many it is a garbled concept, an untenable ideological mélange that includes partisans and many of their old allergens too.

The objectives of the thus named civil society changed with the circumstances. What can we cull from the works of the progressive writers and poets, including Faiz in Pakistan or Makhdoom Mohiuddin in India that would fit with the agenda of the war on terror?

Where is the reference or a phrase in popular poetry that could be said to have anticipated the threat posed by the Taliban? Who could have thought that a hardy tribespeople who had proved to be invincible with colonialism would be forced to turn upon their fellow revolutionary bards who had sung praises of Pakhtun valour?

Could Faiz or his Marxist protégés have ever believed that they would be praying for the success of Pakistan’s military against their erstwhile hardy compatriots, the Khalq-i-Khuda. Who would have thought that the aam aadmi would turn into a zealot? Has he really turned into one, or are we misinformed about the real agenda of a grim war?

Leftist intellectuals in South Asia often claim that most creative writing and poetry has come from within their flock. There is some truth in the claim. In fact it may even be argued that the left gave the slogans and the songs, which flowed copiously when there was a dream to be lived for. The movement abated or stalled, but the songs didn’t. They were hijacked by others.

The obscurantist mullahs quoted Kaifi Azmi liberally during their struggle in the 1970s to declare the state-run Aligarh Muslim University exclusively for Muslims. It would of course have been suicidal for India’s Muslims had they succeeded. Yet ever so often we could hear the mullahs rally their flock with Kaifi’s populist call, which was originally aimed at colonialism:

‘Ailaan-i-haq mein khatra-i-dar-o-rasan to hai Lekin sawaal ye hai ke dar-o-rasan ke baad.’

(Seeking the truth may lead us to the hangman’s noose/There is yet hope in the quest, and little else to choose.)

Then in 1990 there was the upper caste movement against job quotas for India’s less privileged Hindus. Newstrack video magazine, precursor of the TV Today news channel, fully backed the rightwing campaign. With widely circulated video clips of bloodletting and mayhem they played Iqbal Bano’s rendering of ‘Hum dekhenge’, which, loosely speaking, is an aggressive variant of its western counterpart ‘We shall overcome’.

It is Faiz’s tragedy and that of his other comrades from the progressive poets’ flock that the movement he pined to see flourishing in India and Pakistan stands pulverised today. In Pakistan the choices seem to be restricted to the state and its generals in tandem with the western military alliance on the one hand. Confronting them are Taliban of different shades.

Across the border, in India the choices for Faiz’s fans are equally devastating and possibly even more limited. Unlike Pakistan, where the left was systematically defanged by different military and civilian regimes, the Indian left managed to secure for itself vital space within the parliamentary system. A clutch of radical columns broke off from the main left and adopted what they interpreted as the Maoist path.

As parliamentary democracy began to lose its way under the twin assault of Hindutva and neo-liberal economic policies the mainstream left was confronted with Hobson’s choice. It opted for unpopular economic reforms that led to a serious erosion of its charisma and popularity. Maoists became its most vocal critics, forcing the left to align with the wrong classes to get even with their main quarry.

The Indian left had even earlier, under assault from Hindutva, shifted its cultural focus from Marxist idioms to the readily popular Sufi music. Naturally, it was awkward at times to find a group singing a completely inappropriate and tangentially romantic Amir Khusro composition like ‘Chhaap tilak sab chheeni, mosey naina milaaye ke’.

We dread the day when Hindutva will discover Amir Khusro, just as the almost usurped Faiz in 1990. The mainstay of a tragedy is its inevitability.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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