Pakistan Left Review: Then and Now
Edited by Nadir Cheema and Stephen M. Lyon
Oxford University Press, Karachi
ISBN: 978-9697341535
298pp.

The Pakistan Left Review (PLR) was a journal launched by young Marxist intellectuals of Pakistani origin stationed in London. It first appeared in 1968, but its existence was short — it closed shop in 1970. Yet, it managed to create an important space for itself in Pakistan’s progressive circles, providing analysis and opinions during a period when students across the world had risen to become prominent agents of protest and change.

Recently, Nadir Cheema — who teaches economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), UK — and Stephen M. Lyon — Professor of Anthropology and Head of Educational Programmes at the Aga Khan University’s Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, UK — have compiled some telling editorials, analyses and interviews from PLR editions published between 1968 and 1970.

Pakistan Left Review: Then and Now carries these as a way to understand what was going in the minds of young Pakistani leftists in the late 1960s, and what can be learned today from their aspirations, ambitions and frustrations.

In their introduction to the book, Cheema and Lyon recognise the fact that the nature of ‘leftist’ ideas and action has changed compared to what it was in the 1960s. They wonder if today’s young leftists in Pakistan could ever be anything like their predecessors. But instead of treating today’s left as a pale reflection of what the left of the 1960s was, Cheema and Lyon suggest that conditions to survive and thrive as a leftist activist in the ’60s were more conducive compared to what they became during and after the 1980s.

A selection of editorials, analyses and interviews published in a long-defunct leftist journal from London presents not only a slice of history of the Pakistani left, but is also an indicator of its naiveté

According to Cheema and Lyon, “in the 1960s, a student who did not get involved in politics was the oddball. In the 1980s, it was the reverse.” This is an accurate observation. Yet, the editors of this compelling compilation do not go in as much detail to explore the demise of youthful leftist movements from the early 1970s onwards. The upsurge in such movements around the world was remarkably universal, but so was their demise.

In the late ’60s, youth/ student movements rose up simultaneously in numerous regions, including Pakistan. But from the early ’70s, they all appear to have collapsed in unison. Of course, various economic and political factors were involved in their rise and fall. But as I carefully waded through the opinions of some of the PLR’s star contributors in the book, I wondered whether the young leftists of the 1960s were unable to handle in a more mature manner the attention that was bestowed upon them.

Like today’s young radicals from both the left and the right, the young folk at the PLR too sound overtly rhetorical. Their opinion pieces and analyses read like manifestos and unbridled laments which, they felt, was the stuff that would turn Pakistan into a total socialist state. They weren’t very happy with those who were using socialist ideas to concoct ideologies, fusions and narratives aimed at attracting a wider audience.

But unlike those who were formulating such concoctions — such as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and Wali Khan’s National Awami Party (NAP) — their critics on the left were embroiled in parlour games riddled with leftist sectarianism. Just as Islamist groups get into head-butting contests on the question of what form of Shariah rule is closest to the Quran, leftists fought against each other on the question of what model of socialism was closest to Marxism: Leninism, Trotskyism or Maoism?

The PLR’s leading authors, too, in this respect, were not really assembled on a single leftist platform. Yet, they often lashed out at parties such as the PPP and NAP, entirely forgetting about another side of Pakistani politics that was populated by Islamist ideas. This side was undermined as being inconsequential by the ‘thesis’ and theories the left so obsessively dabbled in. One wonders whether this oversight is at least one of the reasons behind the rise of Islamist outlets in the mid-1970s and their eventual consolidation.

One of my favourite parts of Cheema and Lyon’s book is a 1968 interview with Bhutto by the then young and fiery Aziz Kurtha, who was also the PLR’s co-editor. Kurtha’s line of questioning is aggressive and his tone unbridled. He seems underwhelmed by the fact that he is talking to someone who, at the time, was one of the most popular political leaders of the country and a torchbearer of ‘socialism’.

But as Kurtha continues trying to push Bhutto into a corner by more-than-alluding that Bhutto was using socialism as a slogan alone, Bhutto clearly begins to see Kurtha as a young man who is full of hot revolutionary steam and empty of any understanding of realpolitik.

Here’s an example: After Kurtha laments that people desiring revolutionary change are seeing Bhutto as a “compromise”, Bhutto replies by asking, “how am I representing a compromise?”

Kurtha: Well, by fighting the system along the lines that it has laid down, that is compromise.
Bhutto: What do you want me to do?
Kurtha: Go in the fields as a revolutionary!
Bhutto: Why not go to London and lecture?

Kurtha — who was stationed in London — suddenly pulls back and says, “No, be in Pakistan and represent a revolutionary body and boycott the election.”

Bhutto: But he [Ayub Khan] would love it.
Kurtha: But you would lose anyway.

Then there’s a letter by the ‘Trotskyite’ Tariq Ali, addressed to Bhutto, in which Ali complains that there was no need for Bhutto to form a new leftist party in the presence of the NAP.

As things were rapidly evolving on the ground in Pakistan, the young Pakistani Marxists publishing the PLR from London seemed somewhat detached from the many nuances of the three-way tussle taking place back home between the military establishment, the left and the Islamists.

The PLR content compiled by Cheema and Lyon exhibits a journal that meant well, but was quite full of hot air and almost entirely ignorant of the significant influence of the Islamists. Indeed, it had much to say about the military dictatorship in Pakistan but, inexplicably, it was also negatively fixated on ‘other’ socialists. It also seemed ignorant of the fact that Pakistan had in no way reached a stage from which a Marxist, Maoist or Leninist revolution could be launched.

But this by no means undermines the importance of Pakistan Left Review: Then and Now. The book is a precious little slice of history of the Pakistani left — one that was full of youthful exuberance, but also naïveté and academic juvenility.

The reviewer is a research scholar, author and columnist for Dawn. He tweets @NadeemfParacha

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 9th, 2023