In politics, the act of moving from the left sides of the conventional political divide to the right (and vice versa) may generate some surprise in some quarters, but it is not such an unprecedented or odd happening.

The break from ones former ideological disposition and the embracement of another (that is the polar opposite of the former) can be an absolute one; but on most occasions such an act is more of an overlap than a clean break.

For example, whereas shifters in this context such as famous British author, late Christopher Hitchens, and American writer David Horowitz, made a clean break from their leftist outlooks to move to the right (libertarian in case of Hitchens and conservatism in case of Horowitz), most such shifts have been subtler.

Famous author and journalist, Christopher Hitchens, made a clean break from Marxism to right-wing libertarianism in the 1990s. He explained his dramatic move as a reaction to what he thought was the left’s failure to challenge ‘Islamofascism.’

The subtler shifts usually encompass the overlapping of opposing ideologies and even a fusion. These mostly involve ideologues and politicians either practicing amoral pragmatism or indulging in a mixed brew of populist manoeuvres and rhetoric.

For example, ZA Bhutto – Pakistan’s former Prime Minister (1971-77), and founder of one of the country’s largest political parties, the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) – frequently incorporated a pragmatic disposition as a politician; and as a leader of a populist party and government, he often fused leftist imagery and postures with right-wing demagoguery.

Whereas, the demagogic populisms (of the left and of the right) of men like Chinese communist leader, Mao Tse Tung, and German Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler were absolute and obstinate, Bhutto’s populism often bounced between the left and the right.

Demagogic absolutes: (Left): Communist leader, Mao Tse Tung’s poster overlooks Chinese children reading his ‘Red Book’ (1967); (Right): Nazi leader meets adoring German kids in Berlin (1937).

Bhutto repeatedly juxtaposed revolutionary socialist rhetoric with right-wing bombast to (in his mind) appeal to a wide range of people. It was something the famous populist Argentinian leader, Juan Domingo Perón, had already perfected.

Perón ruled Argentina between 1946 and 1955 and then again (briefly) between 1973 and 1974. He often mixed socialist moves and policies with a pro-military mind-set and a dictatorial and even quasi-fascist disposition that was explained as ‘Argentinian nationalism.’

Juan Peron with his equally popular wife, Eva, addressing a large crowd in Buenos Aires in 1950. He was toppled in a military coup in 1955 but returned to rule again in 1973. He passed away in 1974 but by then he had lost much of his populist appeal and leftist constituency.

Bhutto was clearly following the Perón example, often juggling leftist and rightest populisms, but then (just as Perón had done during his second stint as Argentina’s President) Bhutto during the final phase of his rule moved more towards the right.

It was his understanding and analysis that convinced him that politics in Muslim countries (in the late 1970s) had begun to move towards Political Islam (a concept that had once been routed and suppressed by the more left-leaning ideas, such as Arab Socialism, Ba’th Socialism, Muslim Nationalism and Islamic Socialism).

Apart from the fact that from 1974 onwards Bhutto had already purged hardline leftists from the PPP, by the time of the 1977 election, the word Socialism too was all but purged from the party’s new manifesto. The word had dominated in the PPP’s manifesto for the 1970 election but was replaced with the word ‘Islam’ (on most occasions than not) in the party’s 1977 declaration.

The leftist tenor of the party was only revived after the Bhutto regime fell in a reactionary military coup in July 1977 and when the PPP’s second and third tier leadership emerged from slumber to help the party’s new chairpersons (Nusrat and Benazir Bhutto) enact a front against the country’s new military dictator Ziaul Haq.

However, Benazir would eventually guide the party towards a more centralist (left-liberal) position from the mid-1980s onwards.

(Left): Bhutto seen as modern ‘soldier of Islam’ and anti-India hero in a poster; (Right): Bhutto speaking at a rally organised by the leftist National Student’s Federation (NSF) in Karachi (1970).

The Perón style is still popular in Pakistan.

Recently, the sudden rise of Imran Khan (of the centre-right PTI) has seen him fluently merge socialist, libertarian and Islamist rhetoric in his speeches and so has Bhutto’s grandson, Bilawal Bhutto, who, like his grandfather, has begun to juxtapose leftist populist posturing and rhetoric with nationalistic jingoism.

Mixing it up: Bilawal and Khan.

There are a number of prominent cases and examples across the world that one can present in which leftist/liberal ideologues rebounded to become some of the leading defenders and advocates of right-wing causes and outfits (and vice versa).

But we will discuss certain examples related to Pakistan only.

Kausar Niazi

One of the most interesting cases of a Pakistani politician moving from the right sides of the divide to the left involves Maulana Kausar Niazi. Niazi was a prominent member of one of Pakistan’s leading religious parties, the Jamat-i-Islami (JI).

In 1953, he was arrested and jailed by the government for taking part in the violent anti-Ahamdiyya riots in Lahore that were instigated by JI and another religious outfit, the Majlis-e-Ahrar.

However, in 1967, when ZA Bhutto formed the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), the JI began to accuse the PPP of being a party of communists and atheists who were being backed by the Soviet Union to ‘destroy Islam in Pakistan.’

Niazi disagreed with the JI’s line of attack. To him, Bhutto was a ‘true patriot.’ Consequentially, Niazi broke away from the JI. He was soon invited by Bhutto to join the PPP.

Niazi’s entry into the PPP was not welcomed by the party’s leftist ideologues. But Bhutto overruled their concerns, suggesting that Niazi fully backed the party’s socialist program.

Niazi was given the party ticket to contest the 1970 election from a constituency in Sialkot from where he won by receiving over 90,000 votes!

In December 1971 after the departure of East Pakistan (that became Bangladesh), ZA Bhutto was invited to form the new government because the PPP had won the most seats from West Pakistan’s two largest provinces, Punjab and Sindh.

Niazi became an advisor in the Bhutto cabinet and in 1974 was made Minister of Religious Affairs).

This was also the year when the religious parties had revived their campaign to oust the Ahmadiyya community from the fold of mainstream Islam.

Contrary to popular belief (and ironically), Niazi was one of the handful of ministers in the Bhutto government who advised the Prime Minister to bypass the idea of taking the Ahamadiyya issue inside the parliament. Bhutto did not take his advice and allowed the opposition religious and conservative parties to table a bill seeking to reduce the Ahamdiyya community into a non-Muslim minority.

Kausar Niazi with Bhutto in 1974.

Niazi eventually lost his place in the PPP when Bhutto was toppled in a military coup in 1977. Niazi was accused by Bhutto’s widow, Nusrat Bhutto, of ‘being the establishment’s man.’

He was finally welcomed back into the PPP, 15 years later in 1993 by Benazir Bhutto, but he passed away in 1994.

Former head of the Jamat-i-Islami (JI) Munawar Hassan went the other way when he moved from left to right. When, as a young man, he joined college in the late 1950s, he immediately joined the Marxist student organisation the National Students Federation (NSF).

His main duty there was to recruit more fresh students to the cause of the NSF (i.e. a socialist revolution), and he went about his business of doing just that with great determination.

He had also begun to hold debates with the members of NSF’s main competitors (in student union elections), the Islami Jamiat-i-Taleba (IJT) – the student-wing of the conservative Jamat-i-Islami (JI).

To convince the IJT members about the flaws in their political beliefs, Hassan began to vigorously read the writings of the JI’s founder and conservative Islamic scholar, Abul Ala Maududi.

But by the time he entered his last year in college he was reading more Maududi than Marx and then, one fine day, suddenly switched his ideological allegiances by quitting NSF and joining the IJT.

He would go on to join IJT’s mother party, the JI, and four decades later rise to become its chief.

What Marx? Munawar Hassan as the JI chief in 2012.

Despite the seemingly authoritarian dynamics of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), it explains itself as a party that has ‘a progressive and enlightened outlook’ in matters of faith, state and government and a staunch anti-clergy bent.

Yet, the student party that spawned the MQM in 1984 was formed by a man who was once a steadfast supporter of the Jamat-i-Islami (JI) and its youth-wing, the Islami Jamiat Taleba (IJT).

Altaf Hussain was a student at the Karachi University (KU) when he plunged into the 1977 movement against the populist ZA Bhutto regime. The movement was being led by an alliance headed by the country’s three major religious parties.

However, after Bhutto was toppled in a military coup in July 1977, Hussain became disillusioned by the JI and accused the party of exploiting the Mohajir (Urdu-speaking) majority of Karachi to come into power.

In 1978, he formed the All Pakistan Mohajir Students Organisation (APMSO) at KU. By 1979, he moved further away from his pre-APMSO disposition by declaring the APMSO as a progressive outfit.

A young Altaf Hussain (centre) surrounded by the earliest members of the APMSO at the Karachi University in 1978.

In 1981, the APMSO joined the United Students Movement (USM) - the largest alliance of left-wing and progressive student groups at KU.

In 1984, the APMSO spawned the MQM and by the late 1980s it had managed to become Karachi’s largest political party.

In the early 2000s, the MQM, after striking an alliance with the ‘liberal’ dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf, restrained its so-called militant tendencies and regrouped itself as a party that was liberal in its social disposition, ‘progressive’ in matters of faith but fiscally conservative, encouraging capitalist enterprise and economics driven by the middle-classes and ‘technocrats.’

Christian women at an MQM rally in Karachi.

One of the most notorious cases of a Pakistani political activist moving from right to left is that of Salmullah Tipu. He was born in a lower-middle-class Urdu-speaking family in Karachi and grew up with stories of how his grandfather had fought against the British and was hanged.

Tipu joined a college in Karachi in 1971 at the age of 18. Here he was courted and then recruited by the fundamentalist IJT.

While reading essays written by the JI’s founder and Islamic scholar, Abul Ala Maududi, Tipu began to compare these writings with articles on Marxism he found in the progressive Urdu weekly, ‘Nusrat.’

Then, during one student union election at his college (in 1974), he suddenly turned against the IJT by supporting one of their opponents.

Dismissed from the IJT and then by the college administration (for getting into fights), Tipu started to commit petty thefts.

His favourite hobby became stealing cars, driving them (at top speed) to the city’s red light districts, picking up women from there and spending all the money that he made by selling the car’s expensive parts, at nightclubs.

On his concerned father’s insistence, he re-joined college in 1975. In this college, he joined the leftist NSF.

In 1976, when he asked his NSF comrades for a party ticket (to contest student union elections), they told him he was still not well versed in Marxism.

Tipu quit the NSF and plotted to get his political career going by joining another progressive student group, the Peoples Students Federation (PSF) – the student-wing of the ruling PPP.

When after the Ziaul Haq military coup in July 1977 the spectre of the crackdown against progressive student groups started to grow, the PSF promoted Tipu to become the student outfit’s president in Karachi.

In 1980, progressive student groups while protesting against the Zia regime at the Karachi University, set fire to an Army Major’s jeep.

The IJT, that, like its mother party was supporting Zia, intervened and caught hold of some students and handed them over to the police.

One of them was a close friend of Tipu’s. The next day an enraged Tipu entered the university with an armed posse of PSF militants and got into a fire fight with a group of IJT militants, one of whom was killed.

Pursued by the police, Tipu escaped to Kabul in Afghanistan, where Bhutto’s sons, Murtaza and Shahnawaz, had set up a left-wing guerrilla outfit, the Al-Zulfiqar [AZO] with the help of Libyan leader Col. Qaddafi, Yasser Arafat’s PLO and the then Soviet-backed communist regime in Kabul.

In 1981, Tipu re-entered Pakistan and with three other AZO men hijacked a Peshawar-bound PIA plane.

He forced the plane to land in Kabul where Tipu shot dead a Pakistani diplomat on board who Tipu and Murtaza believed was a pro-Zia man. He wasn’t.

Though Tipu was able to get Zia to release over 50 political prisoners rotting in Pakistani jails, the meaningless murder turned the tide against the AZO. Benazir Bhutto (who was in jail at the time) also lambasted the hijacking.

Tipu brandishing a machinegun and a ‘V’ sign on the steps of the hijacked PIA plane in Kabul.

The hijacking triggered a power struggle within the AZO.

Murtaza was getting concerned about Tipu’s growing influence in AZO, and also because Tipu seemed to have convinced the Afghan authorities that he (Tipu) was the real Marxist revolutionary and brain behind the AZO and that Murtaza was just a feudal pretending to be a revolutionary.

Murtaza decided to mend fences with Tipu, and then ordered him to kill an Afghan man in Kabul whom Murtaza accused of trying to get Tipu killed during an aborted anti-Zia operation.

When the Afghan authorities got to know that Tipu had murdered an Afghan national (who was close to the Afghan intelligence agency, KHAD), they arrested him. He was tried by an Afghan court and condemned to die. In 1984, he was hanged.

His father tried to locate his body but failed, and nobody knows exactly where in Kabul he is buried.

A group of political prisoners released by Zia climb down the steps of the hijacked PIA plane in Damascus (Syria). Many of them found political asylum in countries like UK, Holland, Germany, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. Some never returned to Pakistan.

Equally notorious is the left-to-right shifts of two other militants: Abdul Rashid Ghazi and Mullah Fazlullah.

Ghazi today is remembered as a militant cleric at Islamabad’s Red Mosque who had asked his followers to burn down CD shops and kidnap ‘obscene women’ in Islamabad because he wanted to force the government to impose Sharia Law across Pakistan.

After refusing to give in to the orders of the government of General Musharraf (to detest from indulging in such activities), the mosque and its seminary were stormed by the army and Ghazi was shot dead.

The truth is Ghazi was a militant for a very brief period of his life. His greatest ambition was to become a diplomat at the United Nations.

This is what Ghazi was planning to become when he joined college in 1982.

Ghazi was born into in a religious family. His father was a cleric who had founded the Red Mosque in the late 1960s.

He enrolled his two sons into an Islamic seminary. But Ghazi rebelled and dropped out, demanding that he be put in a ‘normal school’. This was in 1976 when he was about to enter his teens.

His father reluctantly got him admitted into an all-boys school from where Ghazi did his matriculation in 1979.

Ghazi’s friends at school fondly remember him as an enthusiastic fan of music, films and political history.

Ghazi once again got into an altercation with his father. His father wanted him to grow a beard and join the seminary that he was running.

Not only did Ghazi refuse to grow a beard and join his father’s seminary, he went on to join a co-ed college. Here he got involved with various student groups opposed to the reactionary dictatorship of General Zia.

All communication between the father and son had broken down. They were not on talking terms when in 1984 Ghazi joined the Quaid-i-Azam University that was then a hotbed of anti-Zia activities. He became an active member of a progressive student organisation.

Ghazi’s brother, who had followed his father into becoming a cleric, would never miss the opportunity to admonish Ghazi for going against family traditions and bringing a bad name to their father due to his ‘westernised’ ideas and lifestyle.

After receiving his Master’s degree in International Relations, Ghazi got a job at the Ministry of Education. Then in 1998 his father died. He was assassinated (allegedly) on the orders of an opposing militant-religious outfit.

Ghazi went into depression and began attending the gatherings of a variety of Islamic evangelical groups.

Finally in 1999, he joined his brother at the Red Mosque where both became leaders.

After Pakistan entered the ‘War on Terror’ as a US ally (in 2002), the brothers are said to have established links with militant Islamist organisations.

Ghazi was now a changed man. He’d grown a beard, renounced his ‘secular’ past and had become a vehement militant insisting that the state of Pakistan impose strict Sharia laws.

During the military operation against the Red Mosque militants in 2007, some TV channels began to report that Ghazi was willing to surrender, but was held hostage (through ‘emotional blackmail’) by some frontline militants in his entourage until the military finally barged in and shot dead all of them.

Ironically, this man who had dreamt and studied to be an international diplomat died for an idea and cause he had rejected for most of his life.

A painful shift: Abdul Rashid Ghazi in 2007.

A few months ago when radical Islamist and militant, Mullah Fazlullah, rose to become the leader of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), some local news TV channels claimed that Fazlullah was once a member of the student-wing of the secular/left-liberal Pakhtun nationalist party, the Awami National Party (ANP).

As a former madressa (Islamic seminary) student and a young man who seems to also have had some connection with non-religious educational institutions, Fazalullah was born into a conservative religious family.

Before he married the daughter of a hardline religious leader, Sufi Mohammad, Fazalullah (according to some TV reports), was a member of the Pakhtun Students Federation (PkSF).

In ‘Beyond Swat’, Charles Lindholm in his paper for the book, based on his field research in Swat from the 1970s onwards, suggests that young men in Swat coming from less well-to-do families were first radicalised by the socialist message of former Prime Minister and chairman of the PPP, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

They voted in droves for the party in the 1977 election (that were declared void by the Ziaul Haq dictatorship after that year’s military coup).

These youngsters worked actively against religious parties whom they accused of being in league with the landed elite of Swat.

Interestingly, Lindholm then goes on to inform that in the 1980s, when politics based on religious populism began to peak and was bonded with militant jihadi groups that had begun to spring up during the Ziaul Haq regime, young men from Swat’s working and lower-middle-class backgrounds who had been radicalised by Bhutto’s populist and leftist rhetoric, started to colour their angry leftist stances with an equally angry ‘Islamist’ point of view.

So Fazalullah might have found his first radical expression in the PkSF in the late ‘80s but soon discovered that by the end of that decade men with similar class backgrounds were bagging a more receptive audience after replacing their radicalism, that was initially rooted in the populist-leftism of the Swat of the 1970s, with the jargon and militancy of the religious right.

Mullah Fazlullah: Leftist Pakhtun nationalist turned militant Islamist?

Some other interesting cases of Pakistani politicians and activists shifting from left-to-right (and vice versa) include the following …

Liberal thinker, prolific author, professor and former Pakistan Ambassador to the United States, Hussain Haqani, began his political career as a member of the conservative IJT at college. He then went on to become the student outfit’s main man at the Karachi University in 1979, winning the post of the President of the Student Union there on an IJT ticket.

The young Political Islamist: Haqani in the late 1970s.

He did not join the IJT’s mother party, the Jamat-i-Islami, after graduating from KU in 1980. Instead he worked as a journalist till 1988. During that year’s general election, he joined Nawaz Sharif’s moderate right-wing party, the Pakistan Muslim League (PML), and helped develop its media strategy against the PPP.

Sharif made him an advisor in his first government (1990-93), and then an ambassador to Sri Lanka. However, in 1993, he developed differences with Sharif and was lured by Benazir Bhutto to join the left-liberal PPP.

Haqani began to distance himself from his former ideological inclinations and by the time he was chosen to become Pakistan’s ambassador to the US by the Zardari-led PPP coalition government in 2008, Haqani had successfully transformed himself from being a fervent Political Islamist into an ardent liberal democrat.

Today, he is one of the leading liberal thinkers and authors in Pakistan (though he now lives and teaches in the US).

Haqani: From a fervent Political Islamist to an ardent liberal thinker.

Author and journalist, Raja Anwar, who joined the centre-right PML-N in 1995, was a radical leftist student activist in the 1960s.

Kashmala Tariq.

He then joined Z A. Bhutto’s PPP government in the 1970s and was also a member of Murtaza Bhutto’s clandestine left-wing urban guerrilla outfit, the Al-Zulfikar Organisation (AZO) in 1980 before he had a falling-out with Murtaza and escaped to Europe.

He re-joined the PPP during the 1988 and 1990 election, but quit to move to the (albeit ‘moderate’) right to join the PML-N.

Another member of the PML-N, Parvez Rashid, who is the Minister of Information in the current PML-N government, was also a radical leftist student leader in the 1960s associated with the Marxist NSF. He was active against the Zia dictatorship in the 1980s as well, before joining Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N in the 1990s.

Politician Kashmala Tariq who became a prominent figure in the centre-right PML-Q during the Musharraf dictatorship was a vigorous member of the PPP’s student-wing, the PSF in the 1990s, and Mushahid Hussain, who first joined the PML-N in the 1990s and then the PML-Q, was part of the Liberal Students Federation (LSF) at the Punjab University in the mid-1970s.

A young Mushahid Hussain (second left) with Bhutto in 1976.

Also interesting is the fact that current Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who was given his first main political role by the reactionary General Ziaul Haq in the 1980s and then went on to head the largest PML faction (PML-N), was an enthusiastic supporter of ZA Bhutto’s leftist populism as a college student in the late 1960s!

Nawaz Sharif as a college student (1969): A ZAB enthusiast?