This is a movement still alive after 40 years, one that recently brought the peasants back together to fight back evictions. This is the tale of another failed revolution… Or that of a movement largely forgotten that could surprise everyone by brandishing its red flags again where the world least expects it
The first scene takes place in a small village of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province where a few hundred men have gathered to celebrate Kaleeza. People come on stage to give speeches, recite poetry or sing. The content is a surprising mix of Pakhtun nationalism, molvi-ism, and… revolutionary socialism. Everyone seems to enjoy the different genres because they are clapping just as much for the molvi preaching Islam as for the communist wearing a red topi (cap) singing Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry and dancing.
The next scene happens in one of the nearby villages, some days later. The name of the village is Sare Kothe, the Red Village in Pakhtun. A dozen men have gathered, they are sitting on charpoys sipping tea. They introduce themselves: Comrade Farman Ali, Comrade Mohammad, Comrade Mian Munir, all of them are comrades. They are all part of the movement that is named after their region: Hashtnagar. Born before Partition out of the misery of peasants working from morning to night without ever reaping the fruits of their labour, the Hashtnagar movement is the story of a struggle for land in an area largely dominated by big landlords. Supported by the Communist Party, their struggle transforms into a revolutionary movement. The communist ideology of the abolition of the exploitation of the wealth-producing proletariat by the bourgeoisie wins the hearts of the peasants of Hashtnagar, despite the fact that they are deeply embedded in a very conservative Muslim society. The ban on the Communist Party in 1954 does not stop the work of the activists who continue to work underground to mobilise the peasants of Hashtnagar, amongst others. At the beginning, those joining the movement are immediately evicted by the landlords. In spite of this, the movement grows more and more powerful and organises numerous revolts reaching its zenith in the 1970s. The Mazdoor Kissan Party, a communist peasants and workers’ party, is created and practically all the population of Hashtnagar joins it. The Hashtnagar movement is then able to challenge the power of the big landlords in the area. As symbolised by one of their leaders, Abdul Satar, who addressed an assembly of people holding a book in one hand and a gun in the other, the movement is working on two fronts: the armed struggle and the ideological one. Their plan is to form communes and to collectively work and own the retrieved land. The idea is to include not only the tenants but also the daily wage workers, many of whom have joined the struggle.
Comrade Mian Munir relates how, with his comrades, they fought against the eviction of some families from their land during the Battle of Umeri, in 1970: “We started walking at 3AM and reached the site of the evictions late in the afternoon. I had a shotgun, with two cartridges. Most of us were armed with wooden sticks only but we were well prepared and had a good battle plan. We were several thousand strong, forming a 7 kilometer long procession. We took up positions in different houses and in the fields around the road. When the landlords arrived with their police escort, they fell into the ambush we had prepared and ran to hide in the sugarcane fields. We surrounded the fields and held our positions until two hours later, when a magistrate came and announced that he would not proceed with the evictions. We had won the battle.”
The movement succeeded in returning the land to those who work it, but more than that, it gave the peasants their dignity back. “Now even the poor peasants can hold the landlords by the collar”, says one of the comrades. The peasants are now free to vote and families have enough resources to send their children to school. But these victories were won at the highest price since about 300 people laid their lives in the struggle.
Unfortunately, the apogee of the movement seems to have marked the beginning of its decline. Nothing surprising for the comrades who explain how, when the movement was so popular that it started inspiring other movements in the province, the establishment understood it was threatening them. They say the Mazdoor Kissan Party was infiltrated and using its contradictions and its weaknesses, the spies got the better of it. The daily wage workers were turned against the tenants and manipulation broke the trust towards some of the key leaders. The defeat of the party led to a watering down of most of the ideology of the movement. Each tenant family occupied the piece of land they had previously cultivated for a landlord, creating inequality in the redistribution of the land, a far cry from the initial idea of communes. And those who occupied more land than they could cultivate perpetuated the cycle of exploitation by employing daily wage workers. As one of the old comrades confesses: “We have now become the zalim, those who exploit.”
The comrades are well aware of the problems faced by their movement, they talk openly about them and are trying to overcome the movement’s contradictions. Comrade Farman Ali along with others is now trying to reconcile the daily wage workers with the tenants while underlining the relations of exploitation between the two. They recently organized a big peasant conference gathering all factions that have emerged from the Hashtnagar movement in order to try to bring them back together and present a common candidate for the elections.
Like all segments of Pakistani society, the Hashtnagar movement still bears the scars of Zia-ul-Haq’s dictatorship and its no-holds-barred assault on progressive politics. While in the 1970’s, the comrades from Hashtnagar could afford to be known as communists, in today’s context this is no longer possible. The question of religion is also dividing the comrades between those who are communists at heart and do not believe in Islam and those for whom it seems possible to be both Muslim and communist. Comrade Mian Munir, who belongs to the first group, thinks that Islam is only one of the tools used by the elites to keep control over the people. With this anecdote from Lenin’s life, he also explains why despite this, they never speak against religion: “One day, Lenin’s disciples had gone and spoken against religion in a village and came back badly beaten up. Lenin told them: ‘I had told you that God did not exist, I never told you to tell the villagers about it!’.”
In much the same way, for them, talking against Islam would not only be dangerous, it would be political suicide. Other comrades believe that if Islam and the communist ideology cannot be reconciled, it is only because of our misinterpretation of the first. They explain how Muslims’ obligation to give charity leads to redistribution of wealth, but while doing so they expose their own contradictions since zakat would not make any sense in a classless society. Other comrades further argue that a true implementation of Islam would lead to an equal distribution of rights and wealth for everyone. Unfortunately, one of the major issues with this claim is that everyone in this context essentially means all men.
Which leads us to what is certainly the greatest weakness of the Hashtnagar movement: its highly patriarchal structure. And if the reconciliation of communism with religion is not easy, its reconciliation with patriarchy is all the more problematic. When asked about the role of the women in their movement the comrades have different answers: “Women cannot be comrades, actually they reprimand us if we don't pray, they are very religious”, says Comrade Mohammad. But he continues: “We fight for freedom but at the same time we keep our women like prisoners in their own homes.” Comrade Farman Ali has another opinion on the question, he thinks that women had and still have an important role to play, even if it differs from the one men have. He gives the example of his own mother: “We had a lot of communist literature at home and at that time, this was more dangerous than hiding arms. One day, the police came to search the house so my mother lay down on the bed with all the communist books under the mattress and pretended to be ill. That prevented the policemen from checking the bed and arresting my father.” He also reminds us how a woman, Zarchi, became famous while fighting alongside the men.
Today he is trying to organize the women in the community and hopes that one of them will be bold enough to stand for the local bodies elections given that she would be elected de facto since there is a quota of women’s seats that are not being taken by anyone. But before that, the political consciousness of the women has to be developed so that women parliamentarians are not used merely as puppets.
In the villages of Hashtnagar, as in other villages of the province, a woman’s universe starts and ends inside the walls of her house. Communicating with them is not easy because very few have been to school and therefore most cannot speak Urdu. The few women I have been able to talk to seem to think that politics is a man’s affair. Not that they do not wish to take part in it, they just cannot imagine the possibility of it. When asked whether they would like to be comrades, they laugh and explain that it is impossible, since only men can be comrades. While some women would like to work for their community, they will need the support of their male family members in order to be able to face those who will see their involvement as a threat to the male domination of the society. The problem is that even the men who are favourable to women taking part in politics often prevent their own female family members from going out because they fear for their security.
This, then, is the tale of a movement full of contradictions and whose ideology, if not revived, might not reach the next generation. The peasants are occupying land that is still not theirs and disputes have arisen amongst them. Yet this is a movement that is still alive after 40 years, one that recently brought the peasants back together to fight against a landlord and prevented several families from being evicted from the land they cultivate.
This is the tale of another failed revolution that could have changed the face of a country today ravaged by misery and exploitation… Or that of a movement largely forgotten that could surprise everyone by brandishing its red flags again where the world least expects it.
(A modified version of this essay in French has appeared before in Le Courrier)
| Cindy Zahnd is a Swiss cheese lover who has a thing for Pakistani decorated trucks. She was enjoying her student life in Switzerland until she met a Palestinian woman who opened her eyes on the world. She then headed to Palestine and later to Pakistan where she is trying to do her bit of activism. She is presently working in Lahore in an improbable tissue-engineering lab attempting to creat novel dressing for burn patients. Email: |
