Autobiography of a Pakistani Communist: Jamal Naqvi "Leaving the Left behind"

Autobiography of a Pakistani Communist

Jamal Naqvi "Leaving the Left behind"

Now available@ READINGS, LHORE
book ur copy at

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Although title speaks louder than the inside pages yet it must be a good reading for all. I am just sharing its table of contents and prologue so that u can smell the flavor at least. As i am too reading it so i cannot say that it will be as good and juicy as the autobiograpghy of an Indian communist Mohit Sain " A Traveller and the road" published by Rupa yet he is witness to many developments after 1957 at least.

Its Publisher is Pakistan Study Centre Karachi, Sindh. its adress is

Pakistan Study Centre, P.O. Box No.8450, University of Karachi

Karachi-75270 Sindh. Tel: 99261631; Fax: 99261632; Email: pscuok@yahoo.com

PROLOGUE

IT was dogma of another kind.

All my life till then I had been fighting against being dogmatic in approach towards life … every aspect of life, to be precise. And the tool in my hands to wage that war against dogmatism was my belief in the ideology of Communism. And the source of strength in times when things were not quite going right — and they had been not quite going right more often than not — was the practice of Communism in the erstwhile Soviet Union and the many countries under its influence that together marked the bipolar existence of political geography in the post World War II era. Simply put, I was on the other side of the 'Iron Curtain'. Whether the 'curtain' was hallowed or condemned, famous or infamous depended on how and from where one hap

pened to be looking at it. For me it was a case of the former rather than the latter on both counts … till then.

I was a Red, The reddest of the Red. So Red that even to my own surprise I had been part of the decision-making body of the Communist Party of Pakistan. Some would say that I was the decision-maker, but that was not quite right. Yes, when circumstances so demanded, I had to take a few decisions on my own,

but, generally speaking, I was part of the party structure having moved through the ranks to be part of the Politburo. I had never had the time to move away from Pakistan to have a peek into the world behind the Iron Curtain. Like millions elsewhere and thousands in Pakistan, I just assumed that anything and every

thing negative being said by anybody anywhere about Communism or its practice was nothing but mere propaganda — and most of it actually was indeed just that: propaganda. What I — like the millions elsewhere and thousands in Pakistan — failed to realize at the time was that we had ourselves fallen victim to

the propaganda being unleashed from behind the Iron Curtain. I can't vouch for the millions elsewhere and thousands in Pakistan, but I for one had surely fallen victim to that propaganda. That, I guess, is the price one has to pay for being too close to the events and for being too preoccupied with party politics. It generates a kind of myopia that one needs to guard against. I had failed to do that … till then.

Till 1990.Sitting in the plane that was taking me to Moscow, I had little idea of what to expect. The Afghan war was practically over. Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of Glasnost and Perestroika were sending out signals that were not easily decipherable for the world at large and, as such, there was no dearth of interpretations on that count. Personally speaking, I was not in a position to even have an intelligent guess. Of the preceding few years, I had spent six in prison on trumped-up charges of sedition brought against me and others by the military junta under General Ziaul Haq. Physically I had been in a bad shape having twice suffered strokes during that period which had led to episodes of transient paraly sis. It was all in the past now and I was about to land in Moscow, which had been the Mecca of Communism for as long as I could remember.

As I said, I had little idea of what to expect. But what I was not expecting in the least was the possibility of the trip being an eye-opener. It not only opened my eyes; it opened them wide. The workers of the world may have united, but for every chain they had lost in the process, they had been forced to carry two more. After over 70 years of full-scale practice of Communism, the disparity in Soviet society was worse than I had ever seen in Pakistan. It was disillusionment of the highest and the most unexpected order. I had been invited to spend a few months there — probably as a compensation for the imprisonment I had suffered for leading the Communist Party of Pakistan — but so frus trated and annoyed I had felt by what I had seen there in practice that I returned after just a fortnight.

Had I wasted my life fighting for Communism? I urgently needed to find an answer to that question which was stroking my mind with ascending force. In theory, the system was against any kind of corruption, against any kind of dogma, promoted intel lectual stimulation, and targeted equality at every level. In practice, I had seen it doing just the opposite. For the first time I felt the weight of the Iron Curtain on my soul. It was crushing. And, indeed, it was very, very disillusioning. I needed to think it through and see if I was over-reacting. During my time in prison, the Communist Party of Pakistan had also moved on — nudged along by some state and non-state actors — and I was no more part of its core leadership. I was more of an elder statesman than a politician. This allowed me the liberty to take a detached view of what my life had been, and to have a rational view of what I had seen in what used to be the Soviet Union. At the end of the process, two things were crystal clear to me: one, that in fighting against dogma, I had been gripped by dogma of another kind; and, two, mine was a life wasted. There was no point in discussing the thoughts with many as they preferred to live in the old world charm of being part of the haunted, persecuted Red. But if one thing I had learned with clarity from my days — years and years, actually — as a student and follower of Communism, it was the fundamentality of being Progressive. I publicly conceded that I was wrong in rather unwittingly practicing a dogma in the name of keeping dogma at bay.

As could be expected, the reaction, to put it mildly, was not positive. But that mattered little. I was honest to myself and, come to think of it, I was honest to the core value of Communism which wanted people to be Progressive. I had moved on, and I have never looked back since. The story that follows is the story of a life mostly spent chasing shadows … an utter waste.