It seems that the high point of Comrade Chaudhry Fateh Mohammed’s career was the Kissan Conference that was held in Toba Tek Singh on the March 23, 1970.
By normal standards it was a volatile time for Pakistan as it had just come out of the military dictatorship and was gearing itself for holding the first general election in the entire country. Elections had been held earlier but only at the provincial level, so expectations were really very high from the opportunities that political freedom had unleashed after years of dictatorships. As it was, left wing parties had been particularly under the cloud, because of the banning of the Communist Party and severe restrictions imposed on other parties belonging to similar ideological leanings. This openness, after decades, offered the opportunity to campaign and propagate point of views without undue harassment or fear of arrest and detection.
After the Kissan Conference, Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote about it in Lailo Nihar and pointed to the peculiarities of the event. It seems that he was perhaps more perceptive than others who got carried away by the heat of the moment. He criticised that the speeches were not written and thus were not to the point, carrying little substance and stressed that there was a lot of repetition as most of the speakers had nothing much to say. He also pointed out that although the conference was about kissans there was actually very little about improving their lot and changing their circumstances, while there was aplenty that had to do with elections, its strategies and the organisation, all to facilitate these parties in their electioneering and power politics.
Faiz hailed the conference as a successful event and lauded the passion and the charge that there was. But he warned the organisers and participants not to become complacent by the emotionally charged event for he thought that the slow gradual haul was needed for any movement to mature. It could not be substituted by the initial emotional discharge no matter how big. The two were not identical, though the charged atmosphere at the start of a campaign or a movement did help. It is actually the proper organisational structure that sustains the ups and downs of a movement and prove resilient enough to survive the crackdown, backlashes, adversities, clampdowns and other more overt repressive measures.
It appears that Faiz proved to be right: the movement could not sustain the initial emotional outburst and gradually frittered away in groups and sub-groups that did not work together for a cause. These organisations were too busy in establishing and promoting their own cause, even at the expense of the cause itself for which they had been formed.
Further, the split between Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China greatly affected the movements of the left in all corners of the world including Pakistan. It led to a split within the left, each towing a line which favoured the two powers of communism in the world. It only verified that the left in the subcontinent had been following the policy line provided to them rather than creating one for themselves based on the objective conditions here. This was also backed by the author when he quoted the party line provided by The Communist International that called for peaceful coexistence rather than revolutionary struggle at the second Kissan Conference in the early 1950s.
The endemic condition of politics of the left has been factionalism. There has been a lack of effort to group together and work in one party rather than to separate and be content with one’s own sections. According to Comrade Mohammed, the split or breakaway tendency among the leftists was seen in a positive light, a sign of a lack of compromise or deviation from the correct policy line. Rebellion was also seen as a virtue in itself. The ideal of forming common fronts and policies of coexistence probably was considered as compromise not fit for a purist.
It is a good account of the politics, whether national, provincial and local that was conducted in the name of securing the rights of the peasantry. Now with the Awami Workers Party, Mohammed was initially inspired by Dr Mohammed Abdullah of the Communist Party in the late 1940s and involved him in peasant politics convening Kissan Conferences. He also cited Eric Cyprian, C.R Aslam, Rodra Dud Joshi as sources of his inspiration. He himself was a worker sympathetic to the National Awami Party once the Communist Party was banned, rose through the ranks and then led his entire life in that field seeing the ups and downs, the coming together and splits. He was awarded the Faiz Award by the Pakistan American Democratic Forum in 2011.
It would be unfair to say that this book on the politics of the left did not give enough space to the politics of labour and trade unions; it could not have done so because that was not the focus of the book. The peasant struggle was the strength of the author who lamented that there was too much emphasis on splits which were actually not based on difference in points of views but on personality preferences. He has also rightly critiqued the various land reforms in the country and how these impacted the new class politics and power formations. These results were not as intended, and naturally did not lead to the well-being of the peasant.
The book is an honest account with an admission of a limited outcome of these 60 odd years of political struggle.