Crisis in the subcontinent: Partition: Can it be undone? By Lal Khan, Aakar, Rs 450

Lal Khan is the nom de guerre of a Pakistani author who was arrested and tortured under President Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship on charges of leading a students’ agitation in 1979. He was ordered to be shot the next year. He escaped to Amsterdam, from where he organized an anti-dictatorial movement. At present, he is the editor of the Urdu periodical, Class Struggle, and of the Asian Marxist Review.

Khan interprets the Partition as history gone awry and provides clues to rewrite it. Like the early communists of India, he dismisses the Indian nationalist struggle as an elitist-bourgeois movement feeding into the imperialist scheme and notoriously avoiding the class-issue. Khan goes off the beaten track in the section where he comes down heavily on the hypocrisy exhibited by the Communist Party of India in the wake of Stalin’s “humiliating capitulations at the altar of imperialist diplomacy.” Khan has no qualms in stating that the “Churchill-Stalin alliance was preferred, however, to the liberation of India by the CPI.”

Khan records an interesting anecdote about Khushi Mohammad, a CPI leader, who, in a 1942 mass rally in Uttar Pradesh, was just about to deliver an anti-imperialist speech when someone handed him a note reminding him of the newly formed alliance between Britain and ‘fatherland’ — Russia. Mohammad made an immediate volte-face and directed his diatribe against Germany and Japan, the declared Fascists.

Khan’s iconoclasm is unsparing. But his analysis appears too generalized and uni-dimensional at times. To advance his own postulate of a possible mass insurgency in the sub-continent, Khan unduly underplays the role of the socialist section of the Congress, represented by Jawaharlal Nehru himself. This section started having its voice heard from the Thirties onwards and, as a result, in 1945, the Congress Working Committee accepted the policy of the abolition of landlords. Khan has not been attentive to the socialist leanings of the Congress probably because he is scornful of the idea of a happy alliance between democracy and socialism. But does militant socialism guarantee an end to human miseries induced by capitalism? The world history of the last two decades of the previous century suggests otherwise.

Anyway, we are prepared to hail the “Permanent Revolution”, which is Khan’s prescription for undoing the wrong of the Partition, and welcome the socialist federation of the subcontinent. However, a question remains unanswered — how much cost-effective will that project be?