Tariq Ali: Can Pakistan Survive? Penguin Books, 1983, £2.95.
'Can Pakistan Survive?' receives the answer that the demise of Tariq Ali's home state is a 'consummation devoutly to be wished'. Ali tells us why Pakistan ought not to exist. Born amidst the slaughter of independence and partition, the scarcely desired child of the imperialist-influenced Muslim League of Jinnah and the errors of Indian nationalists and communists, Pakistan's existence seemed to deny reason in history. East and West were divided by 1,000 miles of Indian territory and, until the establishment of Bangladesh, (after a quasi-genocidal repression of the Bengalis was stopped by a much needed, if self interested, Indian invasion) the West pillaged the East in a manner worthy of their British predecessors. Not the West, of course, but rather the dominant class of the Punjab, the bureaucratic-military-landed power elite that Ali demonstrates to be one of the most philistine and unashamed blocs of parasites ever to preside over a state. Pakistan even after the secession of Bangladesh did not possess linguistic, ethnic or territorial unity; only the legacies of the British Raj and the use and abuse of Islam gave the state coherence.
In a brisk well written narrative Ali takes the reader through the origins of Pakistan, the first decade of independence, the military dictatorships of Ayub and Yahya, the civil war, Bhutto's populist debacle (1971-77), and finally the military fist in an Islamic glove personified in the comic but awful General Zia-ul-Haq. Perhaps the weakest section of the book is here, because, unlike elsewhere, a lot is presumed of the reader. Ali writes with the vision of a South Asian internationalist inspired by the best sort of Trotskyist world view. The vacillations and twists of the Maoists and Stalinists in Pakistan (and India), who have ended up critically supporting their own exits from the political stage in virtuoso performances only matched by the dangerous stupidity of Pakistan's generals, are well documented.
Ali's final chapter on Pakistan's geo-political position is a useful overview of recent developments in Central and South Asia. And yet it is not clear that Ali's picture of Pakistan in perpetual crisis, within sight of being deleted from the map, is tenable. The USA and India both 'need' Pakistan. That 'a backward, nomadic Baluchistan, should have produced a dedicated and internationalist cadre without equal in contemporary Pakistan' (p19) is, perhaps, an index for despair rather than hope. Ali holds to his trenchant optimism, to his vision which is an entirely worthy one: a voluntary federation of South Asian Republics. This is the tone of the undefeated revolutionary, the militant refusal to accept the accomplished fact. Yet, I am left with a more sombre view: 'could it be that History has something still worse in store? ... will the antediluvian generals of South Asia, bedecked with former imperialist medals, try to beat each other to the nuclear draw?' (p 193)
BRENDAN O'LEARY is an active member of the Labour Party. He is currently researching into Marxist theories of Indian history.