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AMONG the less discussed factors that split the Indian subcontinent in 1947 was Britain’s fear of communism. Prof Jamal Naqvi, who died last week in Karachi, was proof of the threat, which was apparently so palpable it incurred a violent response by the Pakistani state and its Western minders.
By the time I met him in Karachi in 1997 (for a documentary about Saarc sponsored by the Indian foreign ministry) the frail comrade had become a ghost of his former self, having clearly failed to recover from third-degree torture he was subjected to by Zia’s Islamic state.
Naqvi saw Bhutto’s execution as part of a wider anti-partisan fumigation Pakistan was put through. Zia’s adventure in Afghanistan sprang from a similar political strain, Britain’s old pathology with Russia, which it passed on to trans-Atlantic cousins with added virulence.
Everyone, including Jamal Naqvi, tragically, saw a chance for themselves in the division of India in 1947. The Hindu right deepened its resolve to build an anachronistic state, a Semitised edifice on a jumble of contesting traditions and beliefs. The communist party, of which Naqvi would be a leading member, supported the creation of Pakistan, not without the hope that the partisans would thereby have two chances instead of one to usher in their dream of equality and justice for all. That they failed on both sides of a hastily contrived border showed up in Naqvi’s works. Leaving the Left Behind was one such.
If comrades like Jamal Naqvi were tortured by military regimes in Pakistan, the Indian state took on a subtler route to a similar objective.
The Congress for better or worse believed it could create a democratic India under caste Hindu hegemony and Jinnah dreamt of a secular Pakistan under a Muslim umbrella. Everyone lost their bets except those who had opposed Partition albeit for regressive reasons — the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its kindred spirit, the Jamaat-i-Islami. The two have since grown and mutated into more viciously militant practitioners of their respective worldviews.
Naqvi saw Zia’s Pakistan as part of the Cold War chess game in which Vietnam and Allende’s Chile comprised two major factors. Post-revolution Iran would become a new battlefield in the Cold War rivalry. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the author of Carter’s Afghanistan policy, was watched with worry by partisans in South Asia.
“An arc of crisis stretches along the shores of the Indian Ocean, with fragile social and political structures in a region of vital importance to us threatened with fragmentation,” Brzezinski declared. The resulting political chaos could well be filled by elements hostile to our values and sympathetic to our adversaries.”
In several ways, Jamal Naqvi’s intellectual and political denouement compares closely with the rise and fall of Noureddin Kianouri as head of the communist party in Iran. The mullahs in cahoots with the West stalled the Tudeh Party. There was a time when the Iranian revolution looked primed to be taken over by Tudeh partisans. However, a deft manoeuvre by the better prepared opponents, and who were spurred by a Soviet defector, exposed the Tudeh Party’s extensive network set up against the Shah. The exposé made Tudeh members vulnerable to an all-out assault by the clerics. The clergy quickly consolidated their hold on the Iranian state in 1979 and strengthened the stranglehold further with the Reagan era Iran-Contra arms deal.
My Iranian minders for reasons best known to them once escorted me to Kianouri’s cell at Tehran’s high-profile Evin prison. The memory of the Marxist former chief diligently copying texts in fine calligraphy from the Quran under a cleric’s gaze was not dissimilar to Naqvi’s ideological confusion that followed brutal torture and was exacerbated by the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Disillusionment, self-doubt and distancing from their cherished dream have been par for the course for Naqvi’s comrades across the border. In fact, disillusionment has shown a tendency to set in among the best and most sensitive minds that were once enthralled by Marxism. Beginning with the aftermath of Khrushchev’s secret speech about the fraying Soviet ideals in 1956 to ensuing intra-party convulsions, the chaos didn’t spare Pakistani partisans from its ambit.
If comrades like Jamal Naqvi were jailed and tortured by repressive military regimes in Pakistan, the deceptive Indian state took on a subtler route to a similar objective. Both had inherited and honed the British method of torture to thwart communism. The genial Nehru, admired by Marxist ideologues today as a stalwart against Hindu reaction, was prime minister when his party plotted the downfall of India’s first elected communist government in Kerala. It was Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi who would go on to co-opt a vocal section of partisans with a bear hug that found many of the leaders kowtowing to her emergency rule.
That said, a more structured anti-communist hunt in South Asia was pursued by the powerful bureaucracies the British had left behind on both sides of the border. Only last year, or perhaps the year before, Jamal Naqvi’s journalist daughter applied for an Indian visa to help her father meet old relatives and friends in his ancestral home in Uttar Pradesh. It hurts to remember that one tried to help in vain to convince anyone in the bureaucracy to fulfil an old man’s desire, who harboured no ill will towards India, to visit the country of his birth.
The penny, however, dropped some years ago. Syed Mohammed Naseer, another old-school Marxist from Pakistan wanted help to visit India. I passed on the request to then national security adviser J.N. Dixit. He probed the reason for the obdurate denial of visa to a retired professor of economics from Karachi who thought highly of India’s secular constitution.
Dixit came up with a shocking revelation. Naseer was blacklisted by the British CID for being a member of the leftist students’ union in Kanpur that had brilliantly fought colonial rule. Jamal Naqvi found with pain and torture that there was not much difference between the colonial state he fought and the one he had helped set up.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, August 8th, 2017
