Taking troll

Right-wing Pakistani trolls on social media (especially Twitter) have developed a remarkable lingo that is all their own. With a quick jerk of the knee and rapid-fire typing speed they are able to spout out words and expressions that may seem like they come from a malfunctioning toy robot but jump at you like a cornered, angry rooster.

Lately such trolls have been so busy lashing out at all those who question their favourite causes, I wonder if these young men and women have actually ended up talking the way they tweet.

Imagine a mom asking a passionate troll to drive carefully. How would he respond? Easy: ‘Stop being such a lifafah mom, mother. Driving fast can actually stop drone attacks. Tabdilee, mom, tabdilee.’

There is now very good reason for the mom to worry. Her son was never so bright to begin with but now he is talking really funny. So she asks him to just do what she is requesting him to do and come home early from his friend’s place.

He gets agitated a bit: ‘Come home early and do what? Watch RAW agents on TV? Stop acting like killer mafia MQM and corrupt PPP, mom. And where is that liberal fascist?’

Mom is perplexed: ‘Who?’ ‘Dad, mom, dad. Where is he?’ ‘He’s watching TV. A re-run of Seinfeld, I think ...’

‘Liberal fascist! No, fake liberal! Actually fake liberal fascist! No, genuine liberal fascist thus fake liberal ...!’

By now poor mom has really begun to freak out: ‘What is wrong with you? Are you feeling okay? Is this how one talks about one’s father?’

‘Seinfeld is a Jew, mom! What if dad was struck by a drone missile? How would he feel then?’

‘'What? What do drones have to do with Seinfeld, son?’

‘Everything, mom, everything. Everything that is anything has something to do with drones. I think dad is a CIA agent.’

‘What? Have you lost you mind?’ ‘Mom ... I have a feeling both dad and you are sleeper agents. How come I have never seen you denouncing drone attacks, huh?’

‘I don’t know much about such things, son ...’

‘Aha! And yet you were crying when you saw that drama queen and witch give a speech at the UN.’

‘Who, Malala ...?’ ‘Oh you agent lifafah woman trillion million people die in drone attack but West don't care about billion million girls mutilated in drone attacks but give publicity to one girl you all slave of US liberal fake fascist fake liberal Pakistan zindabad ...!’

Mom finally calls in dad. Dad is pretty peeved. He was enjoying his TV. But he heard his son. He slaps the son. The son is taken aback: ‘Ha! And you fake liberals say the Taliban are violent. Shame on you. Hitting me like this. I’m off.’

Dad finally speaks: ‘Off to where? That’s my car you are driving, this is my house you’re staying in, this is my ...’

‘Enough, secular liberal fake fascist liberal fascist fake daddy! You are slave of US. I hope a Nato truck runs over you. Hehehe Lol.’

‘Lol? What on earth is lol?’ ‘You wouldn’t know, US bootlicker. I’m off to stop Nato trucks.’

‘In Michigan?’ Asks the father. ‘We live in the US, fool!’ And ‘whack’, he slaps the son again. Meanwhile, the doorbell rings.

‘Anti-Islam drone-loving killer of billions of innocent Pakistanis. I’m off.’

‘Off to where?’ Asks the mom. ‘Off to get the door, mom,’ says the son. ‘Must be the pizza I ordered.’

Taking troll

During a recent visit to Lahore for a conference, a colleague and I strolled outside the conference hall at a 5-star hotel for a smoke. Looking for a quiet place to share a cigarette and some ideas, we ended up on some comfy chairs laid out near the hotel`s swimming pool.

Engrossed in a discussion, we were suddenly interrupted by a middle-aged woman who was an employee of the hotel.

Talking first to my colleague she said: `Excuse me, sir, you are not allowed here`.

Believing that she was protesting about the smoking bit, my colleague innocently inquired whether one was not allowed to smoke in the open areas of the hotel or not.

`I`m not talking about smoking, sir,` she said, politely. But the politeness was soon followed by a tad more firmness in her tone when she explained that it was the `ladies hour` (to swim).

My colleague and I looked around, but the only lady we could see was the one wagging a finger at us. `What ladies?` My colleague asked.

`Sir, they aren`t coming out because of you two`, she explained.

My colleague (like me from Karachi and also like me, in his 40s), got a tad agitated: `I see, so you are suggesting that we timed our arrival here to coincide with the arrival of some very fragile, modest and decent sisters who`d like a dip in a hotel pool?` Before the hotel lady could offer her defence, I intervened and tried to lightly defuse the situation: `We understand, ma`am. No problem. We`ll go smoke somewhere else. Forgive us, for we are both from Karachi and Karachi, as you Lahorites know, is a very indecent city`.

As I began to walk back towards the hall, my colleague continued to mumble: `You Lahore folks are strange. Why even have a swimming pool? This area too should be turned into a praying area.

This left the hotel lady a bit angry: `Sir, I`m sure things are done differently in Karachi, but here in Lahore we have values that we take very seriously`.

Alas, my slow march towards the conference hall was suddenly halted: `That`s nice to hear,` I smiled. `But only if you guys were also willing to keep an equally stern eye on the extremists breeding freely at the Punjab University as you do on folks wanting a peek at modest lady swimmers, I think the value bit would have sounded a tad more convincing`.

Nevertheless, it has been a long-held belief of mine that at least in Pakistan, the act of imposing moralistic dictates and rules of behavior are not enacted from a position of strength,as such. Instead, on most occasions they emerge from a sense of apathy, insecurity and failure to impose more concrete modes of behaviour and rules regarding economics and politics.

For example, in the late 1960s, when parties like the Awami League, the National Awami Party and Z.A. Bhutto`s PPP rose in popularity and influence by offering various leftist economic, political and social alternatives, the right-wing Jamaati-Islami (JI) reacted by suggesting that such alternatives would damage Pakistan`s moral fabric.The moralists were routed in the 1970 election because the country`s working classes, the peasants and the petty-bourgeoise were more interested in economic reforms than in toiling under a so-called Islamic government who just promised them a better hereafter.

The JI had acted from a position of political and ideological weakness and thus, decided to wield the stick of morality that it explained as being ordained by the Almighty and not orchestrated by any `earthly philosophy`.

Interestingly, Bhutto (whose party managed to come intopower in 1972) decided to borrow the same stick when his chips were down six years later.

Facing a concentrated protest movement in 1977 and failing to stem the economic rot that had begun to besiege his regime, the secular and socialist Bhutto agreed to accept the moralistic aspects of the demands put to him by his rightwing opponents.

It is amazing to note that even thoughBhutto`s economic policies were what made the country`s urban middle and lower-middle classes rally around the calls of the right-wing parties against him, all they got in the end were certain moralistic maneuvers.

It seemed that the country`s economic ills were squarely due to the presence of nightclubs, gambling houses, bars and the fact that Sunday (instead of Friday) was the weekly holiday in Muslim Pakistan.

Well, in order to survive, Bhutto agreed to change all this and he did so purely from a position of desperate weakness.

Pakistan`s worst military dictator, General Ziaul Haq (19771988), would continue the tradition in the most dramatic manner.

Every time his dictatorship faced discontent due to failing economics, bad politics and rising corruption, he responded by introducing laws and policies that claimed to uphold the best interests of faith and morality.

He wasn`t doing this from a position of dictatorial strength.

He did it every time this strength was challenged and he found it difficult to address this challenge through sound economics and politics.

And so it has gone on. Weakness to initiate bold economic, social and political reforms has always resulted in the imposition of moralistic eyewashes.

State institutions do this and end up giving vast spaces to extremist outfits. The judiciary does this when after failing to resolve the problem of corruption and chaos faced by millions in the lower courts, it instead begins to offer headline-grabbing populist, moralistic and reactionary platitudes.

But most of all it is the politicians that do so the most.

Cornered by corruption and bad governance? Ban YouTube.

Can`t stop terrorism? Start praising terrorists and their `morally correct stand`. Can`t revive a rotting economy? Ban `vulgar stage plays`. Failing to compete with foreign films and TV plays? Ban them for being against our superior moral values.

Can`t attract foreign tourists? Introduce `ladies hour` at hotel swimming pools. You get the picture.

http://www.cssforum.com.pk/Morality: The might of the weak

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Left is Right

Deadly caution

NADEEM F. PARACHA

Most Muslim countries today are facing violence from an assortment of religious extremist outfits. Some governments, like the ones in countries like Egypt, Mali and Syria, have gone all-out to crush the extremists, whereas others have struggled to reach any consistency at all, blowing hot and cold against the extremists.

This inconsistency is awkwardly present in even those countries that have been facing the major brunt of extremist violence, such as Pakistan, and recently, Yemen.

There is a nervousness in the state and governments of most Muslim countries that an all-out war with the resourceful and ruthless Islamist organisations may lead to the kind of spiraling instability being experienced in Egypt, Syria and Mali.

Consequently, extremist violence in places like Pakistan and Algeria is only drawing a confined and ad hoc response from the state and the government; and just like in Muslim countries where extremist violence is not as pronounced, the idea in Pakistan and Algeria too is to contain this violence, rather than eliminate it.

Only time will tell whether an all-out assault on extremist politics and action was a more worthy route to eradicate extremism or the more cautious and nervy one.

The answer to this may lie in a rather curious and prominent fact of history that somehow continues to go missing in most present-day discourses on the subject of the rise of religious extremism in Muslim countries.

Of course, the immediate roots of this violence can easily and clearly be traced to events like American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan after the tragic 9/11 episode in 2001.

Going back a little further, roots of extremist violence are also as clearly present in the way thousands of Muslims were indoctrinated, trained, armed and funded by America, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan during the so-called ‘anti-Soviet jihad’ in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and in which numerous Muslim governments allowed many of their citizens to fight.

But even though these two episodes remain prominent in most recent discourses about the rise of extremism in the Muslim world, there is another collective episode that some political scholars and historians have pointed out in explaining the modern roots of extremism in Muslim countries.

This episode, these scholars believe, can also be used to warn those Muslim states and governments that are being overtly cautious in their policies regarding extremism, believing that they will be able to co-opt militant outfits into the mainstream scheme of things and soften their blow.

The 1970s is the era that contains the deepest roots of what mutated into outright extremist violence in the decades that followed.

Most modern-day Muslim-majority countries gained their independence from European colonial powers between the late 1940s and early 1960s. Nationalist movements and then governments in many of these countries were dominated by secular nationalists.

In fact, in most Arab countries the governments were overtly secular and allied to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. A number of Muslim countries across the 1960s and early 1970s experienced a surge in populist secular nationalism that attempted to chart a course between American capitalism and Soviet communism.

The attempt not only opposed the US, but also came down hard on the religious right and Islamic political organisations, accusing them of being an expression of capitalist exploitation and social backwardness.

A number of these religious outfits were brutally crushed and left to wither away. But, alas, as this was being done, leftist outfits grew in size and influence and a time came when they began to challenge the secular regimes’ right to power.

Secular governments in Tunisia, Algeria, Pakistan, Morocco, Egypt, Somalia and Sudan reacted sharply to this challenge in the mid-1970s; a challenge that, in hindsight today, seems to have been an entirely exaggerated threat.

Egypt’s Anwar Sadat who replaced the populist and famous exponent of ‘Arab Socialism’ and nationalism, Gamal Abdel Nasser, in 1970, began to pull Egypt out from the Soviet orbit and bring it closer to the US and the oil-rich Saudi Arabia.

He faced opposition from leftists and ‘Nasserists’ from within his own regime. In response, he tried to neutralise them by suddenly lifting the curbs and bans on religious organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood and its student wing.

The same thing happened in Tunisia and Morocco in the same period where the pro-West secular regimes allowed religious parties to flourish on university campuses that had become hotbeds of leftist groups.

In Algeria, the left-leaning and staunchly secular regime began to believe that radical communists were its greatest challenge. It began to slowly lift the bans it had imposed on various Islamic organisations.

In Pakistan, the populist left-leaning government of Z.A. Bhutto saw an ‘Indian and Soviet hand’ in 1973’s labour unrest in Karachi and in the Baloch insurgency against the state.

He gradually began to expunge radical socialists from his party and oversaw the fragmentation of leftist student outfits and the consequential proliferation of right-wing student groups on university campuses.

Responding to an exaggerated ‘communist threat’ and demonstrating a cautious and controlled appeasement of the religious groups at the behest of oil-rich Arab monarchies, these regimes were the first to begin lifting the lid of a Pandora’s Box that would go on to explode in their own faces.

Sadat was assassinated in 1981 by a radical offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that had enjoyed great freedom during his regime. Z.A. Bhutto was toppled in a reactionary coup that followed a right-wing protest movement led by parties that Bhutto had tried to appease. Somalia and Sudan plunged into civil wars. And Algerian leader, Mohammad Boudiaf, was murdered by an Islamist in 1992.

The policy of appeasement had emboldened religious organisations and given them space and an opening to infiltrate various sections of the state and society, that were once off-limits to them.

The emboldening and circumstances like the Afghan civil war saw many of these organisations mutating and producing offshoots that have been some of the leading reasons behind the violence that has gripped numerous Muslim countries from the 1980s onwards.

As mentioned earlier, a handful of Muslim states have decided to go all-out to now crush these outfits, but most Muslim nations facing the same violence have stuck to giving the extremists a chance to reintegrate into mainstream politics and society.

If examples of appeasement in this respect and reintegration given here are anything to go by, I believe the policies will be a failure and would continue to encourage further mutations of extremism and even more violence.

http://www.dawn.com/news/1078546/pas...owledge-at-par

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If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.(Che Guevara)

The enigmatic Pakhtun

Nadeem F. Paracha


Recently a Pakhtun friend of mine who is doing his doctorate in Anthropology from a European university emailed me the following: “Nothing has damaged us Pakhtuns more than certain myths about our character that were not constructed by us”.

We were exchanging views on how some self-proclaimed experts on Pakhtun history and character in Pakistan were actually using the stereotypical aspects of this character to deter the Pakistani state from undertaking an all-out military operation against religious extremists in the Pakhtun-dominated tribal areas of the country.

My friend (who originally hails from the Upper Dir District in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) also made another interesting observation: “You know, these myths have been engrained so deep into the psyche of today’s Pakhtuns that if one starts to deconstruct them, he or she would first and foremost be admonished by today’s young Pakhtuns. They want to believe in these myths not knowing that, more often than not, these myths have reduced them to being conceived as some kind of brainless sub-humans who pick up a gun at the drop of a hat to defend things like honour, faith, tradition, etc.”

But in his emails he was particularly angry at certain leading non-Pakhtun political leaders, clerics and even a few intellectuals who he thought were whipping up stereotypical perceptions and myths about the Pakhtuns to rationalise the violence of extremist outfits like the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) that has a large Pakhtun membership.

He added that in the West as well, many of his European and American contemporaries in the academic world uncritically lap-up these perceptions and myths. He wrote: “They are surprised when they meet Pakhtun students here (in Europe), who are intelligent, rational, and humane and absolutely nothing like Genghis Khan”!

There have been a number of research papers and books written on the subject that convincingly debunk the myths attached to the social and cultural character of the Pakhtuns.

Almost all of them point an accusing finger at British Colonialists for being the pioneers of stereotyping the Pakhtuns.

Adil Khan in Pakhtun Ethnic Nationalism: From Separation to Integration writes that in 1849 when the British captured the southern part of Afghanistan, they faced stiff resistance from the Pakhtun tribes there. The British saw the tribes as the anti-thesis of what the British represented: civilisation and progress.

This is when the British started to explain the Pakhtuns as ‘noble savages’ — even though in the next few decades (especially during and after the 1857 Mutiny), the colonialists would face even more determined resistance from various non-Pakhtun Muslims and non-Muslims of the region.

From then onwards, British writers began to spin yarns of a romanticised and revivalist image of the Pakhtuns that also became popular among various South Asian historians.

Adil Khan complains that such an attempt to pigeonhole the Pakhtuns has obscured the economic and geographical conditions that have shaped the Pakhtun psyche. What’s more, the image of the unbeatable noble savage has been propagated in such a manner that many Pakhtuns now find it obligatory to live up and exhibit this image.

The myths associated with the Pakhtuns’ character have most recently been used to inform the narratives weaved by those who see religious militancy emerging from the Pakhtun-dominated areas in the north-west of Pakistan as a consequence of the state’s careless handling of the traditions of the ‘proud Pakhtun tribes’ (which may have triggered the ‘historical’ penchant of these tribes to inflict acts of revenge). Interestingly, the same myths were once also used by secular Pakhtun nationalists.

One of the most popular architects of Pakhtun nationalism, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, banked on the myth of Pakhtuns being unbeatable warriors to construct the anti-colonial aspect of his Pakhtun nationalist organisation, the Khudai Khidmatgar.

Earnest Gellner in Myths of Nation & Class in Mapping the Nation is of the view that though the Pakhtuns are an independent-minded people and take pride in many of their centuries-old traditions, they are largely an opportunistic and pragmatic people.

When Pakistan became an active participant in the United States’ proxy war against the Soviet forces that had entered Afghanistan, the Ziaul Haq dictatorship — to whip up support for the Afghan mujahideen — used state media and anti-Soviet intelligentsia to proliferate the idea that historically the Pakhtuns were an unbeatable race that had defeated all forces that had attempted to conquer them.

One still hears this, especially from those opposing the Pakistan state’s military action in the country’s tribal areas. But is there any historical accuracy in this proud proclamation?

Not quite. The truth is that the Pakhtuns have been beaten on a number of occasions. Alexander, Timur, Nadir Shah, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, and the British, were all able to defeat the Pakhtuns.

In the 2008 paper, Losing the Psy-war in Afghanistan, the author writes: ‘True, the British suffered the occasional setback but they eventually managed to subdue the Pakhtun tribes. Had the British wanted they would have also continued to rule Afghanistan, only they didn’t find it worth their while and preferred to let it remain a buffer between India and Russia. The Russians (in the 1980s) too would never have been defeated had the Soviet economy not collapsed — and it didn’t collapse because of the war in Afghanistan — and had the Americans not pumped in weapons and money to back the so-called Mujahideen.’

The paper adds: ‘… while Pakhtuns are terrific warriors for whom warfare is a way of life, they have always succumbed to superior force and superior tactics. The Pakhtuns have never been known to stand against a well-disciplined, well-equipped, motivated, and equally ruthless force.’

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He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow (Ecclesiastes 1:18)

A lesser sister

On Feb 1, some TV news channels ran a harrowing video of a man (in the city of Sukkur) kicking, slapping and dragging a helpless woman from inside a van. According to reports, the brute was the woman’s husband.

After about two to three minutes into the video, a shocked me thought why wasn’t anyone jumping in to stop the man from pulverising his wife in full view of the media and the public?

Some 25 years ago when I was in my early 20's, I saw a crowd gathering around a man mercilessly beating a young child on a street in the PECHS area of Karachi.

Instinctively I jumped in and pulled the child away from the man, who then attacked me saying that the child was his son and that I had no right to interfere.

During the scuffle, I reminded him that the child was first and foremost an innocent and fragile human being.

Soon other people got involved and ultimately we handed over the man to the police. Then with a black, swollen eye, (along with two other gentlemen), I deposited the bruised, shocked and traumatised boy to his mother and grandparents who lived nearby.

According to the mother the boy’s fault was going to a park instead of a madressah, and his father had caught him playing football with other kids in the park before deciding to hand him a pitiless public beating. The child could not have been more than seven years old.

On Feb 1, 2014, as I ever-so-reluctantly saw the man beating the woman on TV, I angrily wondered why the cameraman who was filming the scene wasn’t jumping in to stop the man.

One can rationalise his position by suggesting that he was already involved by covering the event and, more so, exposing the man’s misdeed and face in front of millions of TV viewers. Because after all, it was this footage that ran on a number of TV channels that prompted the Sindh government to order an inquiry.

But what about the dozen or so men who gathered there; what were they up to, apart from simply watching?

Not a single person decided to jump in, to at least pull back the rampaging man. As one can see in the video, the men who gathered at the site of the shameful episode just stood there, staring.

What a contrast, I thought it was, compared to the common spectacle of mobs of men who, even at the slightest wink of encouragement, become the ever-willing multitudes of destruction, butchering and lynching those accused of heresy or ‘blasphemy’, or who, at the drop of a hat, set fire to the homes and places of worship of those they believe had insulted their faith.

It is a fact that many-a-time nothing insults faith like the most faithful, but in this particular case one is right to question the whole hoopla of what a grand ‘ghairatmand’ (honourable) nation we are.

The same evening one saw the usual set of ‘liberal fascists’ and ‘moderates’ outrage against the beating of the woman on Twitter. But I was more interested in reading the tweets of three young women who are always quick to lambast me every time I tweet anything whatsoever about a hijab, niqab or whatever they believe is a ‘woman’s symbol of social piety.’

Thrice I tweeted about the said event expecting these three angry young women to respond to my tweets because after all there was a helpless (Muslim) woman involved on the receiving end of a brutal act.

All of them follow me on Twitter and (thus) can see my tweets on their timeline (TL). There was silence. So I checked their Twitter accounts to see whether any of them was active at the time I was tweeting about the beating.

Two of them were. But one of them was having a conversation with another lady about TV host Aamir Liaqat’s choice of clothes, while the other was passionately tweeting about the best brands of ‘halal perfume’.

There is a no way that they could have either missed the footage of the woman’s beating (that was widely shared by many on social media), nor could they have missed my three tweets.

Their Twitter timelines are usually full of those ubiquitous images where hijabless women are explained as lollipops covered with flies; or with laments against ‘western hypocrisies and discrimination against appropriately dressed Muslim women in the West.’ But not a squeak came from them about a fellow Muslim sister beaten mercilessly in full view of the public by a man in their own country.

This reminds me of a rather eventful seminar I once attended back in 1992 on ‘Women and Islam’. The panel, apart from having some intellectuals, also included a so-called Islamic scholar (a former member of a religious party).

All was well until at one point the scholar’s lecture declared that ‘a woman who wore seductive clothes invited men to dishonour them’.

Some women in the audience after exhibiting their disgust, stormed out of the auditorium. But there were two women who snatched a microphone from an organiser and began shouting insults — not at the lecturer, but at the women who had walked out!

‘They can’t bear to listen to the truth!’ One of the women shouted, until she was asked to settle back into her seat. I was shocked. Was a woman actually justifying an act of violence (by a man) on another woman?

Nevertheless, the most stunning moment of the seminar arrived when, after the scholar ended his speech and asked if the audience had any questions, a woman journalist (belonging to an Urdu weekly) asked for the microphone.

She cleared her throat, said her salam and asked a question that was so basic that I have totally forgotten what it was. But what happened next, I can never forget.

The moment the scholar began to answer the question, the woman shouted (in Urdu): ‘Khabardar! Apni nazrien neechi kar kay mujay jawab doh!’ (Beware! Lower your eyes while answering me!).

Shaken, it was now the scholar’s turn to storm out. He felt ‘insulted’.

A lesser sister

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Left is Right

Revenge of the sillies

Top central government officials are hardly ever seen at places where there has been a bomb blast, and only seldom visit the hospitals where the injured are left fighting for their lives.

Yet, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was quick to announce a visit to those areas of Thar that have been ravaged by a tragic famine.

There is always the danger of another terrorist attack at bomb sites, usually targeted at cops, soldiers and other first responders. So to make sure that the nation does not lose members of the government, government officials stay away.

They are assets of democracy and have to be shielded from what the more throwaway members of the opposition, military, police and civilian communities have been facing for so many years now.

But visiting a famine-hit area is safe. The PM, especially one coming from the very healthy province of Punjab, will never catch starvation, poverty and other such dreadful conditions.

On the contrary, this show of remarkable empathy towards issues that do not bite back can be very good for democracy as well; because it might bag votes for the PNL-N in the Sindh province.

I was searching (online) archives of newspapers and local news channels to see how they had covered the unprecedented outbreaks of dengue fever in the Punjab some years ago and that took the lives of hundreds of men, women and children.

I was impressed. I didn’t find even a hint of the kind of hysteria and shrill outrage that has followed the events in Thar. I guess dying from dengue fever is less tragic than dying from a famine? And even less tragic is dying in a suicide bomb blast.

Otherwise how can one explain an English daily’s decision to side-line any or all columns critical of extremist terror groups (because it was attacked by the extremists), but still find nothing wrong in bludgeoning those who do not bite back?

One can understand the daily’s dilemma and actually sympathise with it for coming under the direct attack of the brutes. But it’s a fair question to ask exactly how much of a right it has left to go after those who are not seen as a threat to its staff?

It’s just like those awful vigilante TV shows on most second-tier channels in which men and women are seen huffing and puffing and running after transvestites, drunken cops, prostitutes and petty criminals, but wouldn’t dare do the same against hardened criminals and terrorists.

Since much of the private electronic media in Pakistan is a reflection of the country’s archetypical middle-class morality, it instinctively comprehends (enough to immediately outrage against) petty social ‘deviances’ and issues that can be used to put down the detested political parties, but when it comes to matters like mass terrorism and extremism, there is confusion.

How often do we hear that the government is confused, the people are confused, the youth are confused, this is confused, that is confused, when it comes to describing their response to an issue that has taken the lives of over 50,000 civilians, cops, soldiers and politicians?

I once asked an acquaintance who (back in 2010) did a few of those foolish vigilante shows for a local TV channel, why didn’t he ever ‘raid’ a controversial madressah to see whether it was imparting hatred and encouraging sectarian violence among its students.

His immediate response: ‘Do you want to get me killed?’

So, basically, what he was saying was that his show only went looking for and chasing ‘deviants’ who do not respond violently. How brave, indeed.

But this kind of one-dimensional morality becomes a lot more disconcerting and more than just silly when in their excitement (read: desperation), some TV personalities actually end up instigating violence against members of certain communities.

In 2007, a famous host of a religious show on one of the country’s largest private news channels was accused of instigating violence against the Ahmadi community when (as an apparent result of one of his shows) four members of the community were shot dead in Lahore.

He wasn’t taken off the air. But when some newspapers began to constantly ask questions in this regard, the host was grudgingly eased out from the channel.

However, lo and behold, he got a heftier job at a competing channel, and after the first channel began to miss the ratings his show had enjoyed, it called him back, now offering him a salary that was many times larger than the one he was receiving when he was asked to leave.

Nevertheless, thus far he has behaved and has been conducting himself in a more composed manner. But since the electronic media in this country is a rather anarchic animal or an animated and chaotic bundle of wayward corporate capitalism, middle-class morality and sudden knee-jerk reactionary outbursts, one would not be surprised if the gentleman goes back to pointing out ‘heretics’ once again.

The common element in this contradictory bundle is cynicism. By this I mean how some TV personalities so casually shift positions just to keep up in the game of TV ratings.

Recently a TV talk show host, who began his career as a level-headed and somewhat liberal anchor, suddenly went ballistic against a yoga institute in Islamabad.

After failing to bag ratings at the small channel he had begun his career from he bounced around a few other channels, posing as a sensible and responsible talk show host.

But he was constantly frustrated by the fact that even after more than five years of hosting political shows, he remained on the fringes of popularity.

Then voila! He got it. It was always in front of him: Outrage against things considered to be ‘immoral’ and ‘sinful’ and then convolutedly give it some weight by tying the crime/sin/deviance to the nation’s favourite paranoia — diabolical conspiracies of enemy agents.

Also, after watching how another mediocre TV anchor (son of a former washed-up film actor) spiced up his shows by constantly inviting two entirely myopic and reactionary mouthpieces, our once soft-spoken anchor began to do the same.

It worked. Finally he began to at least be discussed on social media. But when I asked him (on Twitter) whether (like the mediocre host) he too had adopted one of the reactionary mouthpieces as an uncle, he responded by retweeting a tweet by some rabid troll that went something like this (translation): ‘Yes, Paracha, it’s better than adopting that nigger Obama as your daddy …!’

I burst out laughing. I mean, the mentioned anchor was being criticised for inviting men who were applauding the burning down of a harmless yoga centre in Islamabad (because it was a ‘front for NGOs promoting Hinduism’), but instead of defending his position with a counter-argument, his response was retweeting a comment by a racist.

The sillies who (in a more normal Pakistan) were destined to remain side-lined in the obscure annals of the lunatic fringe, have struck back to become lucrative software for second-tier TV channels. Happy viewing.

Revenge of the sillies

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Left is Right

Pakistani secularisms

Like any other ideology, secularism too has produced a number of variants that were moulded and informed by the cultural, economic and social dynamics of the regions that they emerged in.

The central plank of secularism that remains constant across all variants is the separation of church and state and/or the parting of religion and politics.

In Muslim-majority countries like Pakistan however, secularism has largely been denounced (by religious ideologues and sometimes even by the state), as a doctrinal construct that is anti-religion and negates the existence of God.

The advocates of this claim do not differ between secularism that began emerging as an idea in Europe (from the 17th and 18th centuries), and that variant of secularism that was influenced by the writings of Karl Marx, Fredrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Mao Tse Tung.Though it began as an entirely intellectual pursuit and was a gradual mutation of` the Protestant rebellion against Catholicism, modern European secularism first exploded into prominence during the French Revolution (1789) as an aggressive ideology. It saw the Church and Christian priesthood to be historical tools and avenues of oppression used by exploitative monarchs and feudal lords against the people.However, by the 19th century, European secularism evolved and balanced itself as an important component of democracy that merely wanted to keep religion within the confines of the church and around an individual`s personal space.

A scientific understanding of history, economics, society and human behaviour was to drive political and judicial legislation and religion was to only furnish an individual`s personal spiritual make-up (or lack thereof).

This secularism does not repress religious belief. In fact it accepts and protects an individual`s right to practice his/her religion as long as they are doing so in designated places of worship, in their private space, and as long as their religious beliefs and rituals are not offending other people`s beliefs, or encouraging violence, or creating any other social, domestic or political commotion.

Western secularism recognises the psychological need and role religions play in certain swaths of a society, but it does not allow this role to take the shape of polities because such a tendency encourages persecution and repulsion against modern scientific, economic and intellectual ideas because they threaten the existence of politico-religious entities.

Such has been the secularism practiced in the West for almost a century now.

On the other hand, the secularism that emerged in countries that witnessed communist revolutions and regimes inspired by the writings of Karl Marx (and later Lenin and Mao), reverted to the radical (Jacobin) secularism of the French Revolution.

They attempted to completely squash religious belief and practice, viewing religion to be a counter-revolutionary and intransigent force that encouraged economic and social exploitation and stunted and retarded the evolution of societies.

Western secularism experienced a boost when European nations began to rise as vast economic and military powers. After the gradual decline of monarchism and feudalism in Europe and the advent of democracy there, modernism began to mean economic and political progress based on democracy, science and secularism.

Non-European regions where religion was still deeply embedded in the social dynamics and milieu faced a dilemma when they came into contact with the domineering arrival of Western imperialism and its early secular ideals.

A number of intellectuals and political activists of these regions after observing how resisting these ideals were isolating their people from the economic benefits that these ideals now offered, began to concentrate on how to adopt these ideals without completely discarding those aspects of their cultures and beliefs that were tightly tied to their national, ethnic and religious identities.

In South Asia for example (in the 19th and early 20th centuries), certain Muslim and Hindu reformers and scholars began to develop revisionist scholarly narratives that presented their respective religions to have been inherently modern, progressive and in tune with science.

Some Hindu reformists suggested that Hinduism was inherently pluralistic, whereas the Muslim reformists suggested that Islam was inherently secular because there was no concept of priesthood in it.

Thus began the attempt of many Muslim and Hindu scholars and thinkers to mould their own, indigenous concepts of secularism that ironically derived their variants of secularism from their respective religions.

Thus, when a cleric or a conservative Muslim or a hard-line Hindu describes secularism as an `anti-God/anti-religion` idea, he is almost entirely wrong at least on two counts.

First, western secularisms simply about the separation of faith and the state (for reasons discussed above). Secondly, secular in both India and Pakistan has largely involved thinkers and advocates who justify the separation of religion and the state by suggesting that their respective faiths encourage such a separation.In Pakistan secular thought is largely tied to the musings of 19th century Muslim scholar, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, who painstakingly demonstrated how `scientific reasoning` and rationality can be used to interpret Islamic scriptures.

He also tried to demonstrate that such an interpretation was closer to the true (rational) spirit of Islam and that l`aith needed to be a personal matter.

He insisted it was material progress (through the sciences) that furnished spiritual progress.

Sindhi scholars like GM Syed and Ibrahim Joyo went a step further by suggesting that societies where Sufism had played a strong historical role in shaping the people`s religious make-up are inherently secular because the Sufi saints that they follow were highly tolerant and against the orthodox clergy and ulema (who were allied to economic and political forces who were using faith as a cynical and opportunistic tool of exploitation).

In the 1960s thinkers like Hanif Ramay and his group of intellectuals who published a highly influential Urdu monthly, Nusrat, tried to counter the `Political Islam` of Abul Ala Maududi and the Utopian pan-Islamism of Iqbal, by concocting a concept called `Islamic Socialism` The concept suggested a socialist philosophy that fused modern socialist economics and democracy with the pluralistic manoeuvres of the Prophet (PBUH).

Islamic Socialism claimed that the socialism and secularism that it was advocating was inspired by the `Madina Charter` authored by the Prophet in which he granted widespread rights to non-Muslims and the downtrodden.

But no amount of innovation in this regard has changed the conservative ulema`s views about secularism. The reasons for this seem to be quite apparent.

Even the more spiritually tinged variations of secularism are seen as a threat by these ulema and clerics most of whom were pushed into the mainstream by the gradual politicisation of faith in Pakistan from the mid-1970s onwards.

Pakistani secularisms

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Left is Right

Selling manjan between overs

Don't you hate it when a great commercial is interrupted by a cricket match? No? Then read on...

Last month when the Pakistan cricket team beat India in a thriller during an Asia Cup game, social media sites exploded with thousands of Pakistanis rejoicing, spouting all kinds of praises for the team.

Then, on the same sites, within a matter of minutes, the euphoria of the victory was replaced with collective anger over the way the state-owned sports channel (PTV Sports) had been telecasting the matches.

Not only were a million mind-numbing, repetitive TV commercials punctuating the gaps between overs, by the time the channel used to cut back to live action, deliveries were being missed, action-replays had come and gone, and at times, a wicket had already fallen, making the channel revert to blasting the viewers with another maddening bout of ads.

It was an extremely disorienting experience. What`s more, even when the channel did decide to stay on the field, the screen would contract (from below) and actually shrink to make way for what are called `banner ads, while on the top left of the screen logos or product shots of one sponsor or another would emerge, blinking like a cheap, irregular tube-light.

If you thought that you would be able to survive the chaotic, greedy corporate onslaught on display on PTV Sports by switching to the second main TV channel that was airing the matches in Pakistan (Ten Sports), you`d be wrong.

Though based in Dubai and expected to exhibit a little more sense and marketing ethics than a Pakistani channel, the telecast on Ten Sports was even worse! Knowing that nothing whatsoever called `consumer/viewer rights` exists in this country, Ten Sports too went on a psychotic ads spree, showing exactly the same million commercials that were running on PTV Sports between overs (sometimes even between deliveries within the overs).

The Ten Sports screen would often shrink and contract even more drastically to accommodate the dreaded banner ads or whatever the heck they are called.

Many Pakistanis decided to directly complain to PTV`s new Managing Director, Mohammed Malick, on Twitter about the madness and he promised that he would make sure better sense prevailed during the T20 World Cup.

Nothing of` the sort happened. As you might have already noticed, PTV Sports and Ten Sports are at it again, and there is just no escape from the cringing madness that attacks every last bit of sanity and intelligence left in a viewer whose cable operator conveniently blocks all other channels that are also showing the matches.

All major cable operators are required to block these channels and only make available those channels that are running Pakistani ads. But it is believed that some Indian channels too are no better in this respect.

However, as most Pakistani viewers would tell you, two things make watching a cricket game more bearable on an Indian channel. First of all (compared to their Pakistani counterparts), Indian channels run fewer ads between overs and only rarely attack the screen during play with gaudy, silly banner ads. Secondly (and more importantly), a majority of Indian commercials are a lot more watchable than the Pakistani ones.

Then there is also the example of sports channels like South Africa`s SuperSports. SuperSports hardly ever runs any ads between overs.

I`ve never understood how it makes money, but it must be doing well because it has grown and now has six more channels, if not more.

But the greedy, careless and chaotic approach towards sponsorship of PTV Sports (or Ten Sports) is not the sole problem here. What magnifies the misery is the quality of the ads as well.

Often during the games in which Pakistan is not doing so well, a majority of viewers develop an extremely negative perception of the products and services whose ads repeatedly bombard their senses.

The channels don`t care, but shouldn`t the sponsors and their advertising agencies? All kinds of surveys and marketing research takes place in companies and agencies, so why not do some research on this? Why not go out there to determine exactly what a consumer thinks of an ad or ads played over and over and over again during a match the Pakistan team was doing badly in or during a game that was delicately poised? But coming back to comparative content, Indian commercials are at least watchable. They use clever insights on human behaviour to draw in the viewer, use some humour to keep the viewer`s interest intact, and then slip in what they are actually trying to sell. It works.

Pakistani commercials on the other hand are still stuck in some time-warp, although I`m not quite sure which era that warp leads to.

Thus I will go on to state that in actuality they are wedged in some weird parallel universe! Apart from the few that have used humour to good effect (UFone), a majority of the ads revolve around two main formulaic categories (like they always have).

First category includes ads in which shiny, smiley and happy people are jumping and dancing just for the heck of it. You can slip in any damn soft-drink, cooking oil, mobile phone, tea, chips, paan masala (etc., etc.) product amidst all the deranged jumping and dancing, because such pointless nonsense is not associated with any one particular corporate brand. So exactly how does one`s advertised brand stand out in the dandy, jumpy clutter? Add to this meaningless mix, words like `Jazha`, (will), Khushiyaan (happiness), `Enjoy,`Fun,` Masti (naughtiness) ... you get the picture. Now imagine having to watch this surreal claptrap during a tense game of` cricket (or worse, right after being left sad and sickened by a terror attack.) The second category includes epic and entirely pretentious ads with hefty and poetic Urdu words about patriotism and progress, with images of farmers (sweaty but smiley), school kids (usually running in slow-motion with Pakistani flags), moms dancing in kitchens around frying pans and microwave ovens, dads impressing all and sundry at the office, grandmas sitting on prayer mats, soldiers marching, birds chirping, babies giggling, skies pouring, sun shining, people embracing, people laughing, all because of a great mobile-phone connection that they have, or the right milk that they drink, or because they were able to get an apartment in a spacious housing scheme...

In Pakistan, many ads are still being based on sweeping, pleasing, generalised and largely rhetorical meta-narratives and platitudes; or worse, many also revolve around worldviews that most certainly are not of` this Earth.

Ads that work well on both commercial as well as creative levels are usually based on some psychological and emotional insights most people (or the target audience) can immediately relate to. Glorified renditions of a guy selling manjan on a bus just don`t cut it.

Selling manjan between overs

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Left is Right

In an alternate world, betrayal by old friends won’t stop Imran Khan and his favourite rock band in their quest for dollar-khors.

Controversial scientist, author, evolutionist and Satanist, Richard Dawkins, announced in London that he is planning to write a book on his now eroded friendship with Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician-turned-turnip, Imran Khan.

Talking to journalists at London’s Heathrow Airport, Dawkins told reporters that the book is mostly about the art of reverse swing bowling that Imran pioneered during his cricketing days. The book will be called Reverse Evolution.

Dawkins’ book will be based on his talks with Imran during the time when he first met him in London in 1880. Imran had been invited by Lord John Windstorm and Lady Windstorm for dinner at their luxurious and ghost-infested castle in suburban London.


‘Imran was a very charming young lad then,’ Dawkins told media personnel. ‘I particularly fancied his Duran Duran hair-cut and his extensive knowledge of London’s finest milk bars’.

Dawkins and Imran recently experienced an acrimonious fall-out when Imran refused to attend a Duran Duran reunion concert in Mumbai in which Dawkins was also invited to perform a live human sacrificial ritual on stage to summon the devil.

Talking on the phone from Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, Imran told this correspondent that he couldn’t even imagine sharing the same stage with a devil worshipper like Richard Dawkins. He said this while sharing a stage with some very evil looking hairy men.

‘Ever since I retired from cricket, I have been relentlessly working towards eradicating devil worship in Pakistan,’ Imran explained. ‘I was planning to invite Duran Duran to perform at my rally in Mandi Bahauddin, but I am disappointed that they have allowed a Satanist like Dawkins to attend their concert. I have now invited a local pop band, Hunky Guerrilla & His Misunderstood Brothers, to the rally.’

When asked by this reporter about the controversial songs of the said band in which it propagates hatred towards the armed forces, certain Muslim sects and religious minorities, Imran said that the songs actually only propagate hatred towards bad people: ‘You know, dollar khors, US agents, liberal scum and killers of endangered elephants’.

He added: ‘They (the band) are actually a great bunch of people’, Imran said. ‘Very patriotic but misunderstood. Their latest single, Let’s roll some heads and play football, y’all is pretty awesome.’

Imran says that he had never met Dawkins and that Dawkins was lying about the talks they had about reverse swing bowling.

‘The time Dawkins claims I was with him at Lord Windstorm’s castle, I was actually competing in the annual Riyadh Marathon that is held to counter the effects on the Ummah of the Zionist Boston Marathon,’ Imran claimed.

Dawkins, however, rubbished Imran’s assertion. While taking a swig of goat’s blood from a human skull and letting out a burst of evil laugher, ‘Buhahahaha’, Dawkins said: ‘Immy was there at the castle enjoying a jug of skimmed milk and talking about the art of reverse swing with the Windstorms’.

‘Nonsense!’ Said Imran when told about Dawkins claim. ‘It was whole-milk and not at all skimmed.’

Imran added that though Dawkins was quick to insult his enthusiasm for white magic, could he ever afford to ridicule the fairytale stories about the Holocaust of the Amazonian people?

In an interview he gave to famous Red Indian TV anchor, Barkha Two Horse Power Dutt, Imran said: ‘This does not mean that I am a Holocaust denier. I like the Amazonians because they like white magic too. All I am suggesting is that just because the Amazonians have influence in Hollywood and like to finance one-dimensional and biased flicks about those who do not run the Boston Marathon, Dawkins will never even think of ridiculing them in his books’.

Furthermore, Imran also contradicted Dawkins’ claims by confessing that it was not he who was the pioneer of reverse swing, but former Pakistani cricketer and Boston Marathon enthusiast, Sarfraz Nawaz.

‘Dawkins should know this because Sarfraz too became a devil worshipper,’ Imran said.

But Dawkins has continued to insist that he did meet Imran and that they had long conversations about reverse swing bowling, the need for neutral umpires, Duran Duran’s music and puffy hairstyles, and Lady Windstorm’s inexplicable admiration for Ian Botham’s flabby waistline.

Dawkins, while sticking pins in a voodoo doll that uncannily looked like an 1880’s version of Imran, said: ‘Imran also met former Libyan dictator, Colonel Qadhafi, at the Windstorms’ castle. In fact, Qadhafi offered him $10 million to work as his double’.

Imran admits that Qadhafi made the offer, but says that the offer was not made at the Windstorms’ castle, but during the Riyadh Marathon, in which Qadhafi was also running.

‘You can ask the camel that accompanied Qadhafi when he came to meet me at my tent there,’ Imran said.

When some media personnel travelled to Saudi Arabia to meet the camel, they were told that the camel had been executed in 1987 by Saudi authorities for showing affection to a female camel in public.

In fact, only recently in Saudi Arabia, almost 200 female camels were executed after they were accused of pulling their own carts.

In Pakistan, Hunky Guerrilla & His Misunderstood Brothers have planned to hold peaceful anti-Dawkins concerts and will release a song to raise funds for Imran’s crusade against black magic and the theory of evolution. The song is called Burn them monkeys, y’all.

In Britain, notorious Pakistani sorcerer, Altaf Jadoogar, who was implicated by the Scotland Yard for his role in the assassination of Prince Charles’s favorite horse, Nigel, has vowed to back Dawkins claims by helping him turn his book into a Bollywood blockbuster.

Whereas members of Duran Duran have repented and announced that they want nothing to do with Dawkins anymore. In fact, they are said to have decided to give up music and help Imran raise enough dollars in the US to hunt down dollar khors in Pakistan.

http://www.dawn.com/news/1098039/dawkins-on-imran

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If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.(Che Guevara)

The rise and fall of the communist party of Pakistan

Pakistan`s first communist party was actually formed in India (!). The Communist Party of India (CPI) was of the view that the newly created country (Pakistan) was ripe for a communist revolution due to the fragile nature of the country`s politics and economics at the onset of the partition of India in 1947.

The CPI sent a number of its Muslim members (led by Marxist intellectual, Sajjad Zaheer), to Pakistan for the purpose of fostering ties with labour leaders, students and leftist politicians and to prepare the ground for a communist revolution in Pakistan.

Entryism originally a Marxist concept (honed by Soviet communist leader, Leon Trotsky) in which dedicated members of a small communist party were encouraged to infiltrate strong progressive and/or socialist `bourgeoisie outfits` to gain direct access to a larger polity was also explored.

Zaheer formed the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP) in 1948 in Kolkata and then shifted the party to Pakistan. The party began organising itself in both wings of the country (East Pakistan and West Pakistan).

As planned, it also forged links with labour leaders and trade unionists and gave shape to an active student organisation, the Democratic Students Federation (DSF). The latter not only became the party`s student-wing, but also the country`s leading student outfit at the time.

As a strategy the student group and the labour unions were not officially proclaimed to be wings of the CPP but had secret CPP workers at the helm of these organisations.

CPP was Leninist in orientation. Due to lack of developed bourgeoisie capitalism and the consequential absence of a strong urban proletarian base in the newly formed country, CPP tried to implement the Leninist idea of triggering and guiding a communist revolution through a small, well-trained and dedicated group of intellectuals and workers (like the Russian revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin, had done in Russia in 1917).

Interestingly (and ironically) Leninist and Trotskyite concepts such as of forming a select group of revolutionary elite and of Entryism would both be eventually embraced and incorporated by such anti-left religious parties as the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI).

Equally interestingly, though the CPP was active in organising industrial workers and peasants for the I purpose of creating a communist uprising, it tried to hasten the revolutionary process in Pakistan by un-wittingly getting involved in the ambitious plan of` a military coup by Major General Akbar Khan.

Major-General Akbar was a popular personality in the Pakistan Army and had laught in Pakistan`s first war with India in 1948 (over the Kashmir issue).

He was offended by Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan`s decision to end the protracted war (in 1949) and began planning to overthrow the government.Akbar had also been an avid admirer of Turkey`s Kamal Ataturk and was given to outbursts against the government in gatherings. He had befriended Sajjad Zaheer and some Marxist intellectuals and progressive poets (such as Faiz Ahmed Faiz), with whom he began to discuss his idea of pulling off a progressive-nationalist coup.

After recruiting some officers from the military and the police, Akbar approached his friends in the CPP and asked them to help him streamline his post-coup government through the CPP and the influence that the party had at the time over progressive/leftist student groups, labour unions and the intelligentsia. However, in 1951 some officers that Akbar had recruited spilled the beans and Akbar`s planned coup was nipped in the bud by the govemment and the military.

Akbar, his wife, poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz and dozens of officers and CPP members (including Sajjad Zaheer) were arrested, tried and thrown in jail. The CPP was banned.

Though initially given long jail terms, by the mid-1950s however, the failed coup-makers were pardoned. Sajjad Zaheer and those who had come with him from India were deported back to India.

The remaining CPP leadership went underground and used its student-wing, the DSF, as a front organisation. In 1954 the DSF too was banned.

But the party continued to operate in a more clandestine manner as many CPP members (through Entryism) continued to function secretly within progressive parties like the Azad Pakistan Party and the National Awami Party (NAP).

The NAP had risen to become the largest leftist party in the country in the 1960s. Though it was largely made-up of progressive Pakhtun, Baloch, Sindhi and Bengali nationalists, most of its Punjabi and Mohajir members belonged to the CPP who were operating from within NAP.

CPP`s Entryism also saw it infiltrating the time`s largest leftist student group, the National Students Federation (NSF).

1960s was also a period when `socialist sectarian-ism` in the communist world came out into the open as the world`s two major communist powers, the Soviet Union and China, suffered a major political and ideological rift.

As a consequence, communist parties all over the world split into pro-Soviet and pro-China (Maoist) factions.

NAP suffered the same fate when in 1967 the pro-Soviet faction became NAP-Wali and the pro-China faction be-came NAP-Bhashani.

The CPP operating within NAP and NSF also experienced a split. Its pro-Soviet members moved into NAP-Wali (that was the larger faction), whereas its pro-China members either joined NAP-Bhashani or Z A. Bhutto`s Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP).

However, some pro-China CPP members also formed their own organisations, like the militant Mazdoor Kissan Party (MKP).

Inspired by the beginning of the Maoist `Naxalite` guerrilla movement in India and Mao`s `Cultural Revolution` in China, MKP activists, led by Pakhtun Maoist, Afzal Bangash, travelled to Hashtnagar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa`s Charsadda District and began to arm and organise the peasants against the local landlords.

MKP`s movement was crushed in 1974.

The CPP continued to stick to its policy of Entryism and functioning within mainstream progressive parties and student groups. It was active against the Zia dictatorship in the 1980s, working inside parties like the PPP, Awami Jamboori Party, NSF, etc.

However, as enthusiasm for leftist ideologies began to wane in the late 1980s and the Soviet Union began to suffer from grave economic problems, the CPP`s decision to give up its policy of Entryism and exist as it had in the early 1950s came a tad too late.

It could not retain its original shape and sheen and became increasingly marginalised.

What`s more, not only did it continue to experience splits and further marginalisation, it completely failed to update its narrative and historical and dialectic understanding of international and local economic and political affairs and their socio-political consequences in a very different post-Cold War and then post-9/11 world.

However, though the CPP`s existence in the country`s mainstream political scene was short lived, it threw up an impressive number of Marxist activists who went on to drive a series of left-wing political and student parties, trade and labour unions and progressive publications.

The rise and fall of the communist party of Pakistan

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Left is Right