In a meticulously researched study, Professor Kamran Asdar Ali has presented a history of the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP) from its birth in 1948 to its being banned in 1954, barely six years later. In his book titled Surkh Salam/Communism in Pakistan he also covers the party’s influence on the Progressive Writers Association (PWA) and the labour movement inspired by the ideas of class struggle in Karachi and its disintegration in the wake of the 1972 violent crackdown by the first Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government.
The CPP was a fractured party from the very beginning as it never became a single nationwide party; its area of operation was limited to West Pakistan, while East Bengal had its own Communist Party. Further, throughout this period the party remained the target of state repression of a most vicious variety. Warrants for the arrest of the party chief, Sajjad Zaheer, had been issued before he arrived in Pakistan and he and his senior colleagues remained underground or in prison throughout the period of the party’s legal existence.
The party’s travails had begun before it was carved out of the Communist Party of India (CPI). The story began with confusion caused by an interplay of several factors — senior CPI ideologue Adhikari’s endorsement of the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan on the basis of Indian Muslims’ right to self-determination, rejection of this thesis by, among others, Rajani Palme Dutt, the India expert in the British Communist Party, and the party’s faith in India’s unity. The situation was further complicated by the replacement of CPI general secretary P.C. Joshi by B.T. Ranadive at the Kolkata congress in 1948, adoption of the latter’s thesis for an all-out assault on the new Indian government, the division of CPI on the pattern of the Partition of India, and appointment of Zaheer as secretary-general of the newly created CPP.
