The Disintegration of Mazdoor Kissan Party in the late 1970s and the internal party debates that fueled it

A debate on the positions that Pakistan’s left groups have taken on last year’s India-Pakistan war has backed into examining the history of the original Mazdoor Kisan Party’s fracturing over 1977–78. This is an important debate because it has implications for the correct orientation toward questions of class and nationalities in grounding an anti-revisionist politics today.

Both sides in the debate seem to assume that the MKP split revolved mainly around the national question. Aisha Tahir and Khurram Ali argue that Major Ishaq Muhammad’s Pakistani nationalism aligns with the Punjab-dominated Pakistani ruling class’s narrative, and that this led to revisionist politics. Meanwhile, Arfan Chaudhury seeks to redeem Ishaq’s politics, instead blaming Sher Ali Bacha as inflaming class and national questions, borrowing from and leading to revisionist politics.

The problem with both readings is that the MKP’s split was not merely over disagreements about class and nation, but connected to fundamental questions about the nature of the united front necessary for the people’s democratic revolution in Pakistan, and the organizational forms appropriate to the task.

Much of the debate engages in a kind of historian’s or teleological fallacy where we constantly rely on what a person believed at a later time, to explain why that person took a certain position at an earlier time. So, if someone ends up in a revisionist politics, we hold that this explains (and therefore negates) whatever position they took at an earlier time. Such a fallacy erases historical contingency and the fact that people changed their minds over time. Importantly, it overlooks and undermines critical political and organizational questions that are relevant for anti-revisionist politics today.

Before proceeding, we should have clarity on the meaning of revisionism, because despite three articles from those discussing revisionism and anti-revisionism, we have yet to get a clear definition. Some assume that a certain position on nationalities leads to revisionism, or the opposite, that revisionism comes packaged with certain positions on nationalities. These are both mistaken approaches that ignore how anti-revisionist movements have developed outside of Pakistan.

In fact, the debates in the 1970s MKP opened the possibility for further developments along anti-revisionist lines, but these were not pursued adequately by any of the sides in the split. The post-MKP groups did not split neatly between revisionist and anti-revisionist positions, which align clearly with the nationalities question. Rather, post-MKP groups arrived at more or less revisionist positions, which need to be reviewed and assessed carefully for any future discussion.

Defining Revisionism

To define revisionism, we can look to the debate between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and Communist Party of China (CPC) in the 1960s. The Soviets put forward the following propositions:

1. Peaceful coexistence between socialism and capitalism. The Soviets hoped the capitalists would leave the Soviet Union alone rather than seeking to undermine it, if they could also convince the capitalists that communists did not seek a revolutionary rupture in the advanced capitalist states. As such, they also argued for:
2. Peaceful transition to socialism; and
3. Parliamentary transition to socialism; and
4. In the Third World, they effectively encouraged subordinating the proletariat’s independent initiative to the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois forces.

To elaborate, where an anti-imperialist “national bourgeoisie” was in power, the Soviets emphasized the theory of “national democracy” against imperialism. Here, emerging bourgeoisies and petty bourgeoisies would play a leading role in advancing their societies out of feudal and tribal relations toward capitalism, under a strong state that would regulate the market and private property. Communists would represent working-class interests, encourage greater democratic rights, and foster national unity against imperialism and for development of the productive forces. Through peaceful and parliamentary means, the national democratic society would transition to socialism.

Of course, the Soviets argued, where there was no national bourgeoisie in power, communists should ally with and — this was implied — operate under the leadership of the anti-imperialist national bourgeoisie to defeat imperialism, including by armed means if necessary.

The Chinese argued that these propositions were revisionist, because they got rid of Marxism-Leninism’s revolutionary core while retaining a radical language. The Soviets, they argued, were effectively doing away with the dictatorship of the proletariat, which entails the leadership or class domination of the proletariat and, moreover, also a necessary revolutionary rupture in moving from capitalism to socialism. Participation in parliamentary politics, though it may be tactically useful or necessary, could not be elevated to the level of strategy. Communists had to master all forms of struggle.

Importantly, in Third World countries, if the proletarian party followed (tailed) the “landlords and bourgeoisie in the revolution, no real or thorough victory in the national democratic revolution is possible, and even if victory of a kind is gained, it will be impossible to consolidate it.” The proletarian party had to have its own programme, work independently of the landlords and bourgeoisie, and strive to lead the national democratic revolution itself based on a worker-peasant alliance. This was not to indefinitely defer the question of proletarian power but rather to develop an independent, revolutionary strategic outlook for its achievement.

The MKP was formed over 1968–1970 by anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninists who had split from the National Awami Party. The MKP was best known for leading the movement of tenants and landless labourers against the khans (large landlords, or feudals) of the North-West Frontier Province (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), but party workers also participated in labour struggles like taking over factories in major urban centres, and played key roles in peasant struggles elsewhere, including in southern Punjab. Some of the key debates emerged because of the successes of the Hashtnagar or Frontier peasant movement.

Rural class struggle in the Frontier

When the Frontier peasant movement began to count successes, as tenants effectively became landholders, key problems began to arise in the coalition between the tenants and landless labourers. Ishaq Muhammad discussed the issue in Hashtnagar in 1972 and Chistian in 1973.[1] Bangash discussed the issue in considerable detail in a 1972 address in Punjab. He noted that Bacha raised the issue of separate organizations of workers to ensure that they could independently articulate their interests, rather than having their voices and concerns be shut out of party meetings and discussions by rich peasant leaders. Bangash even stated that, “Our decision about not forming a separate organization of agricultural labourers is not irrevocable [written in stone]. As we face ups and downs, gain more experience and knowledge, we will improve and carry forward our work.”

In his essay, Arfan presents Bacha as an opportunist who “raised the question of farm workers” — the contradiction between landholding peasants and landless workers in the Frontier — to “establish his own political base,” and to leverage it against Bangash’s “support base into conceding” on the question of nationalities. But clearly, the structural contradiction and discrimination between landholding tenants and landless workers was observed and acknowledged by all major leaders, during the movement itself.

By 1972–73, there was a slowdown of both worker and peasant militancy, largely in response to repression from the Pakistan People’s Party government. But in the Frontier, this was also a consequence of co-optation. After dismissal of the NAP government in Balochistan, the Frontier NAP-JUI government also resigned. The PPP took over the provincial government, and after putting a  halt on evictions formed conciliation committees between landlords and tenants to bring about compromises. This often meant that tenants purchased lands at discounted rates or continued to pay rent but at very strictly controlled prices.

Now secure in their possession of the lands, the peasants no longer needed an alliance with the landless workers to fight the landlords. Consequently, the peasants violated explicit, MKP-mediated agreements with landless workers to share the land and other rural resources, and continued to lord over landless workers not unlike landlords had done over tenants.[2] This is why by 1974 Sher Ali Bacha argued that “where once there was one Khan, there are now a hundred Khans.”[3]

Critically for the MKP, this led to a situation where many landless workers — who had rapidly become a very significant section of the population — did not want to join the MKP. Many landless workers split from the rich peasant-dominated committees to form their own workers’ organizations, which considered themselves to be part of the MKP. This obviously gave Bacha’s political position greater strength, which he did bring to the appropriate party forums — the party central committee and the party bulletin Circular.

By 1974, Bacha wrote a 12-page position paper in Circular which was introduced by Ishaq.[4] Ishaq summarized the party’s new position: the MKP would not form new separate organizations, but would also not disown those that had been formed. Elsewhere, Ishaq was broadly supportive of Bacha’s position, though he worried that separate organizations might be taken advantage of by landlords against peasants. But given the increasing numbers of landless in Pakistan broadly, he agreed that organizing amongst them could be the primary way that the MKP enter many villages.[5]

Again in 1976 — Bacha having won the debate — the party changed its position: it would now allow the formation separate Mazdoor Tanzeems (Workers’ Organizations) of labourers and poor peasants, but only in Hashtnagar and Malakand. This debate and position is expressed in a 9-page position paper (authored by Bacha, but not attributed to him) published in Circular:

There is a contradiction between the rich peasants and agricultural labourer and poor peasants. This contradiction can be resolved by organizing agricultural labourers separately. Unite them with poor peasants and urban labourers so that, even while fighting against khans shoulder to shoulder with rich and other peasants, through their separate organization they remain united against the rich peasants’ oppression, become capable of controlling rich peasants, and so that the opportunities wrested from khans are received by agricultural labourers and poor peasants rather than rich peasants.[6]

As the fracturing of the MKP was under way following the final September 1977 central committee meeting, the Circular published an article by the anonymous “Mushahid” (Observer), which agrees with Bacha’s point about independent organizations of poor peasants and labourers. In my view, this was written by Ishaq, to signal to Bacha his broad unity on this issue.[7]

In Arfan’s essay, he alleges that Bacha played out his strategy through “organizational means” (presumably, conspiring within the organizations or building new ones) rather than following Ishaq’s advice to bring his “disagreements before the appropriate party forums.” If anything, it should be clear that on this issue Bacha models what a scientific socialist in a party should be doing: conducting social investigation, studying Marxism-Leninism, and engaging in principled discussion and debate to advance his position in the party forums.

It is also important to note that not only was Bacha the key organizer of the Kisan Committee in Mardan (whose areas adjoin Hashtnagar and Malakand) since the 1960s, but he had been elected the central general-secretary of the MKP in its 1973 Congress. He was therefore in a very appropriate position to reconsider party strategy and organizational questions.

Dissolving the party? Or putting the party in command?

In his essay, Arfan writes that Sher Ali Bacha (and Imtiaz Alam)’s position in 1977 was that the “central party should be dissolved and that each national or federating unit should become an independent party and attempt to materialize the revolution within its own national boundaries.” This is very much incorrect.

Bacha and Imtiaz were not arguing for dissolving a central party. Their key argument was for the need of a distinct political organization which would embody the unity of multiple sectoral fronts and mass organizations, including the fronts of various nationalities.[8] The MKP, particularly at Ishaq’s and Bangash’s insistence, had no or little space for mass fronts or organizations. One exception was the Dehati Mazdoor Tanzeem (Rural Workers’ Organization), which pre-existed the MKP and became its rural landless workers wing, but only in Punjab. Otherwise, the MKP had no student wing, no trade union federation, no women’s front, etc.

MKP workers certainly could participate in trade union politics, but Ishaq insisted that there could be no independent trade union organization or faction associated with the MKP.[9] Ishaq’s general argument had been that there should be one big organization (the MKP) in which all oppressed classes were organized, and which would struggle for revolution directly. Any fragmenting of this organization only created room for sectional demands, a limited consciousness that only struggled for reforms — economism — rather than a political outlook. On the contrary, Bacha and Imtiaz saw having one big organization as a roadblock on the capacity of radicals to organize and, most importantly, go beyond economism. This was in large part because the MKP struggled to assert and project an existence independent of its peasant movement work.

The critical issue here was that the MKP was something of a hybrid organizational form between a party and a front and a mass organization. The MKP was formed in 1968 in NWFP when the National Awami Party’s peasant front, the Kisan Committee, whose leadership was dominated by Marxist-Leninists, was expelled. The Kisan Committee and its constituent committees in Hashtnagar and surrounding areas, in effect, became the MKP. Thereafter, as rural sharecropper-tenant movements erupted, these peasants directly became members of the party instead of becoming members of a front or mass organization. But they were not beholden to the actual, written program or constitution of the MKP.

There was thus no way to exercise discipline over the vast sea of peasant members. In fact, Bacha and Imtiaz’s point was precisely that it was incorrect to expect high levels of discipline from such a mass membership, who should be able to join in Kisan Committee (or peasant union) organization with wider and broader bases of unity.

Moreover, because of the heavy influence of peasants in the MKP, landless workers in the NWFP, urban middle class sections, non-tenant/sharecropper peasants, and even urban workers, often hesitated in looking at the party as their party. Indeed, the MKP came to be associated uniquely with land — the term “Kisani” in the Pashto local dialect of the Peshawar valley has come to mean forcible occupation (from the perspective of landowners, it means going violently nuts), not farming as it means elsewhere in Pakistan — and this became an obstacle toward articulating a broader political program.

Bacha was arguing that the MKP, which theoretically argues for the leadership of the proletariat, was due to its domination by the rich peasants an obstacle to the participation of the proletariat and the development of its leadership. This was tied to an understanding of increasing capitalist relations in the countryside, despite the persistence of semi-feudal or underdeveloped relations more broadly. In a rural situation where landowners had ejected peasants in the tens if not hundreds of thousands to consolidate their control over land, and where even the tenant-sharecroppers who received land as a consequence of the struggle were increasing their exploitation of waged labour, alienating the landless proletarians was not going to help defeat feudalism or overcome it based on proletarian leadership. It would be self-defeating for communist practice.

In 1977, Bacha and Imtiaz argued that it would be better to rename all these peasant committees precisely that, Kisan Committees or Kisan Unions, and organize their explicit, politically negotiated unity, with workers organized in rural Workers’ Organizations, and both should be constituent elements of a broader united front organization. That political practice would be of far greater consequence for avoiding economism, or raising the consciousness of the masses toward a people’s democratic revolution. If that meant renaming the MKP or restructuring it, then so be it, but that was not an argument for dissolving a central party. But to rename MKP units to Kisan Unions would, in effect, dissolve much of the identity of the MKP as it existed, to which Bangash and Ishaq objected.

On the united front and nationalities

The charge of “chauvinism” against Ishaq is a fine point and should not be treated so lightly. Tahir and Khurram identify Ishaq as a chauvinist because he emphasized cultural and geographical reasons for the separation of Bangladesh over uneven development and national exploitation, and further asserts the distinct cultures of the Indus and Ganges rivers. Moreover, they contest Ishaq’s assertion that Pakistani nationalism was driven by Muslim masses facing contradictions with landed and monied Hindu upper castes. Arfan has largely shown that Tahir and Khurram misread Ishaq, and argues that the charge of chauvinism is “slanderous”.

It is, therefore, important to have a clear definition of chauvinism. In a recent interview, Imtiaz Alam defined chauvinism as denying the contradiction between the oppressor and oppressed nationality.[10] Douglas Howland offers a broader definition of chauvinism in the Chinese context that is more broadly helpful: “The contradiction between, on the one hand, a leadership that sees itself as progressive and superior in knowledge and development, and on the other hand, the minority peoples who are the object of the leadership’s exercise of authority.”

The case against Ishaq is more complicated than his critics suggest. Ishaq did not deny the existence of distinct and oppressed nationalities in Pakistan, nor did he deny political, economic, social, and cultural inequalities. In The Martyrdom of Hasan Nasir Ishaq asks the Punjab-Muhajir ruling elite and those who identify with them: “Why should we not respect our ancient culture which still influences us today? … When a Pakistani says that I have been Pakistani for 25 years, Muslim for 800 years, and Pashtun, Punjabi, Sindhi, Baloch, etc. for 8000 years, then — notwithstanding romanticized hyperbole — what is there to object to?”[11] He viewed the suppression of such cultural identity as an obstacle to consolidating a national identity.

Ishaq’s “Indus Valley Civilization” thesis should also not be read through romanticized hyperbole.[12] Read carefully, it is not an argument that shared river basins mechanically produce nations, nor that Pakistan’s people are culturally homogenous and distinct from those of the Ganges or elsewhere. His point is that Pakistan’s cultural heterogeneity is intermeshed and intermingled through historical processes and economic interdependence, including ancient and recent migrations.

Rather, Ishaq was proposing a flexible yet material basis for Pakistani nationhood given the collapse of the religious-based “Two Nation Theory” after 1971. Though Muslim nationalism had represented the interests of certain merchant and landed classes, it had also enabled Muslim lower classes/castes to seek freedom from Brahminical elites and British rule. (In this he was conflating something historians have argued about Bengal — where Muslim nationalism was indeed often posed in terms of contradictions between the working classes and Hindu upper classes — with Punjab and Sindh, where it more generally was not.)

But, Ishaq argued, upon Pakistani independence, the Two Nation Theory lost its explanatory and justificatory force, leading to secessionist tendencies among dominated nationalities, culminating most dramatically in the creation of Bangladesh. Muslim identity did not stop Banu Umayya and Banu Hashim from fighting, he warned. Ishaq wanted to arrest this centrifugal dynamic, and so affirmed that the country’s diversity does not need to contradict what Arfan calls an “inclusive” national identity, which could draw on the shared history of the Indus Valley Civilization. Convincing or not, accusing Ishaq of chauvinism, as such, is a stretch.

The real tension in Ishaq’s thoughts lie elsewhere. Ishaq argued that a weak Pakistan in which centrifugal forces won the day was precisely what imperialism sought. He argued that US imperialism, Soviet social imperialism, and Indian expansionism were all interested in and pleased with East Pakistan’s secession in 1971 — India having played a critical role in seeing it through.[13] Moreover, Bangladesh, under the comprador bourgeois rule of Mujib-ur-Rehman did not liberate its working masses. He also identified the military operations and insurgency in Balochistan in the mid-1970s as playing into US-Soviet conflict.

Ishaq was also reluctant to see Punjabis as a whole as an oppressor nationality. On the contrary, he argued that the Punjabi national identity itself was also suppressed by the Punjabi-Muhajir power bloc that also incorporated Sindhi, Baloch, Pashtun dominant classes. This is why he emphasized the development of Punjabi language and culture, as he did Pashto, Sindhi, Balochi, and so on.

Ishaq’s position became more controversial as insurgency in Balochistan brought the question of national self-determination to the forefront. Ishaq condemned the military operations and described the crisis as the “necessary and logical outcome of a semi-colonial, semi-feudal economy.”[14] Indeed, he suggested that “Balochistan was 100–200 years behind the twentieth century”, its crises a result of “stupid,” “backward,” and “tribalistic” sardars trying to fast track their way into feudal and capitalist relations. He argued that the conflict might acquire a popular character if it persisted, and the dominant classes would then unite to fight the Baloch people. But judging that it was still “limited to a chaotic struggle over power amongst the ruling classes,” he did not frame it as a struggle for national liberation.

To be fair, Ishaq did argue that Balochistan, Sindh, Punjab and the Frontier should have complete khud-mukhtari, and that, indeed, this was necessary for Pakistan’s integrity [salamti]. But he also insisted that the provinces of West Pakistan formed a “natural oneness” based on “historical geographical, economic, and political interrelationships” that were fundamentally different from the relationship between East and West Pakistan. One could not compare any of the provinces to East Pakistan. Thus, what Ishaq actually meant by khud-mukhtari, was unclear, as the term itself can mean self-determination, autonomy, sovereignty, or independence.

Ishaq effectively objected to the right of secession, arguing that national liberation could only succeed when combined with the broader struggle against feudalism and for socialism. His appeal to Baloch nationalists was that “You may not need me, but I need you.” Their grievances would be most effectively pursued in a common struggle against the ruling centre and for proletarian revolution, in alliance with working classes across Pakistan. “If we maintain mutual trust and fraternal relations until arriving at success, then it is entirely possible that you will no longer raise the question of separation.”

However, in lamenting that the MKP had not been able to establish itself well in Balochistan to properly advocate an anti-revisionist revolutionary position, he all but argued that the Baloch nationalists did, in fact, need him. Thus, Ishaq viewed a unified Pakistani national identity and mass party, tethering nationalist demands to the Punjabi working classes, as the best bet against comprador dependence on imperialism.

However, significant sections among Baloch nationalists were also critical of tribalism, feudalism, and bourgeois nationalism. Marxist-Leninists like Sher Muhammad Marri of the Baloch People’s Liberation Front did not advocate for outright separatism for much of the 1970s, calling instead for multinationalist unity and militant struggle against the ruling classes. Similarly, Sindhi Marxist-Leninists like Rasul Bux Palijo of the Awami Tehreek, which was connecting with the MKP in 1975–76, did not agree with separatist politics. Yet, they argued for the distinct political identity of oppressed nationalities, rather than incorporation into a common Pakistani national identity. Despite their mutual respect based on shared anti-revisionism, Palijo and Ishaq continued to have strong disagreements on the national question,[15] holding back integration between the anti-revisionists of the MKP and Awami Tehreek.

Seen through Howland’s definition, elements of chauvinism thus enter Ishaq’s position. The issue is not his denial of oppression or rejection of diverse identities in Pakistan. Rather, in hedging his support for national liberation and encouraging a Pakistani national political identity, he implied that an all-Pakistani (Punjabi) leadership was more progressive and superior in knowledge and development versus the leaderships of the dominated minority nationalities. In this sense, the problem was not merely of acknowledging distinct identities but also about asserting who was best placed to lead the revolution.

Imtiaz thus pointed to a genuine contradiction, albeit in an exaggerated way: “By ‘nation-building’ [Ishaq means] not the building and advancement of the oppressed nationalities but the imposition on them of the neo-colonial, plunderer, parasitic capitalist relations of the so-called ‘Pakistani nation.’”[16] There was and is nothing inherent to an “inclusive” Pakistani national identity that makes it resistant to bourgeois and feudal domination. Moreover, far from obstructing Western imperialism, the Pakistani state has often served its counter-revolutionary activity throughout South Asia and the Middle East.

In this context, we can understand the position that Bacha and Imtiaz argued for in 1977: What would it take to build unity with organizations of national liberation on anti-revisionist lines in Sindh and Balochistan? Their intra-party argument for a new political united front organization was also meant to make space for regional mass organizations with distinct national identities, which would pave the way for greater central unity. Note that they did not deny the leadership of the proletariat in the national struggle. As Imtiaz argued, “It has happened time and again that the bourgeoisie and other reactionaries have tried to use national, democratic and other popular questions in their own favour. It is the duty of the proletariat and revolutionaries to take the initiative and, with steadfastness, put these struggles on the right course.”[17] In other words, this is still an anti-revisionist politics.

Thus, as Muhammad Umar Ali and Syed Azeem now call for “recognizing national liberation struggles” as part of a “worker-peasant and subaltern led new democratic revolutionary program,” their position is closer to the Bacha and Imtiaz of 1977 than Ishaq. Only after the MKP split — over late 1977/early 1978 — did the Circular, now exclusively under Ishaq’s leadership, reproduce an interview with Sher Muhammad Marri, besides translating a fresh speech by Paleejo. By now, though, it was too little, too late.

Elections

The MKP split also revolved around the question of elections, with important implications for a revisionist politics. By early 1977, Bacha was advocating tactical participation in elections, echoing Lenin’s arguments against infantile left communism, He argued that MKP representatives in provincial and national assemblies should act as tribunes of the people.

Bangash and Ishaq were strongly opposed to electoral participation and carried the day. Thus, from January to March 1977 the MKP organized large rallies of 2,500 to 6,500 (according to police records) in the Frontier calling on peasants to boycott elections and to instead fight directly for Mazdoor Kisan Raj. The numbers at these rallies easily rivalled those at any mainstream political parties’ rallies.

However, as one “Mushahid” (likely Ishaq) wrote in the Circular,all these peasants “would raise their hands again and again at Mazdoor Kisan Party rallies swearing on the Qur’an to not vote. But in reality they voted for the People’s Party in great numbers.”[18] In fact, according to police records, Bangash went around rebuking peasants for not following party instructions after the elections. The PPP had indeed, “from above,” secured the peasants’ possession of the lands. Peasants thus voted for the PPP to try and block the NAP and Pakistan National Alliance’s return to government, which would just make the peasants’ situation worse.

Thus, by late 1977, Bacha and Imtiaz reasserted their position on participating tactically in elections. They cautioned against conflating “the strategy of people’s democracy and the tactics for achieving it. It is an accepted fact that a people’s democratic revolution and the establishment of a people’s democratic republic are impossible without smashing the old parasitic neo-colonial state structure by force. Beyond that, the theory of a ‘peaceful transition’ to socialism is revisionist.” The elections debate in 1977 thus parallels similar debates in the Communist Party of Philippines staying out of electoral struggle during the anti-Marcos movement.

Though Ishaq continued his vehement opposition to participation, Bangash also came around to the position of supporting elections. However, his position was distinct from Bacha and Imtiaz (who wanted the MKP to have its own, independent candidates) and became the party’s “consensus position”: provincial leaders would decide on how to channel the votes of the workers and peasants under their influence to negotiate with mainstream parties — “We vote for them in exchange of an endorsement of our Party programme and policies.” Ishaq’s position was probably most correct, for this compromised position ultimately laid the ground for a dispersed revisionism, including in his own faction.

Assessing revisionism

Finally, it is worth discussing how the party split and its implications for revisionism. It was Afzal Bangash who played a primary role in wrecking the MKP — not Sher Ali Bacha or Imtiaz Alam. Bangash brought up a chargesheet against Bacha during a provincial committee meeting on August 1 or July 31, 1977, and used that as a pretext to expel him from the MKP. This was opposed by a central committee meeting a few days later, at which the key debates laid out above were argued, in often heated manner.[19]

Just how much the Bacha and Imtiaz position won out can be assessed by a statement that Ishaq as party president issued in Circular 85. That said, Bacha was restricted to work in Mardan while an inquiry committee investigated the matter, which Bangash resisted. Meanwhile, in November 1977, leveraging certain scandalous allegations, Ishaq removed Imtiaz from his leadership positions in the MKP and restricted him to Bahawalnagar.[20] One could thus argue that it was Bangash and Ishaq who tried to use “organizational means” to foreclose debates rather than allowing them to play out in the proper party forums.

By January 1978, Bangash was openly announcing the separation of the MKP — touring on his own, connecting with the Socialist Party to form the Awami Jamhoori Ittehad, and so on. In February 1978, Bacha formed the Pakhtunkhwa Mazdoor Kisan Party, in close coordination with Imtiaz, who — after a series of Punjab MKP meetings were not held —formed the Punjab Mazdoor Kisan Party (Workers’ Group) in June 1978.[21]

Despite the party’s fracturing, Arfan’s view — that Bacha and Imtiaz wanted “each national or federating unit [to] become an independent party and attempt to materialize the revolution within its own national boundaries” — still does not entirely hold true. They certainly established distinct mass parties with national identities, but they continued to uphold the necessity of centralized coordination via consensus and multi-nationalist unity against the ruling class — not regionally bounded revolutions.

Through the 1980s, however, Bangash, Imtiaz, and Bacha all turned toward revisionist positions of strategic unity with the exploiting classes of oppressed nations. Bacha and Imtiaz began to focus on “left unity” and increased interaction with communists in Afghanistan, which ultimately led to their arrest and imprisonment from 1981–1985/86. During this time Imtiaz interacted more closely with the revisionist Communist Party of Pakistan members. Upon release, Imtiaz turned toward reforging the Communist Party of Pakistan (and mass alliances with landed elites), and later the Qaumi Inqilabi Party, before abandoning left politics as such and becoming a journalist and civil society media activist. Meanwhile, Bacha joined hands with Mehmood Khan Achakzai to forge a cadre-based social democratic mass party via the Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Ittehad over 1986–89, ultimately passing away in 1998.

Bangash, who had never identified as anti-Soviet, as such, escaped Pakistan in 1979, first to Afghanistan and then the UK. He became closer to the Soviet Union, attacking the anti-revisionist politics of the 1970s. Upon returning to Pakistan in 1986, Bangash led his faction of the MKP into the Moscow-led Awami National Party (as did Palijo with the Awami Tehreek) — under the leadership of Frontier’s landed elites — just before his death.

But even in Ishaq’s faction, a distinct form of revisionism took root. The 1977 MKP’s “consensus position” on elections was never repealed. As I have observed in my fieldwork and many visits to Hashtnagar since 2012, the Pakistan Mazdoor Kisan Party’s peasant leadership exchanged their vote banks to mainstream parties in return for jobs, recommendations, benefits, and securing their possession of lands, etc. (In the 1990s they worked with the Awami National Party, in the 2000s onward with Aftab Sherpao’s PPP/Qaumi Watan Party.) Meanwhile, at least since the 2000s, they have largely ignored the question of organizing the poor peasants, landless workers, and growing waged and salaried proletariat, who easily constitute 50% if not more of the rural population. In parts of Punjab this takes the form of a soft spot toward the Pakistan Muslim League or Pakistan People’s Party.

Moreover, as Tahir and Khurram correctly point out, the PMKP did merge with the remnants of the Communist Party of Pakistan in 1994 — which about a decade prior is exactly what Imtiaz was doing — without a critical assessment of revisionism and anti-revisionism in any serious way. (However, it is not clear what any of this has to do with not having an outlook sympathetic to regional nationalist struggles, as Tahir and Khurram assert.) Later, the same elements who led this merger liquidated their faction of the “Communist Mazdoor Kisan Party” into the Awami Workers Party, again without any systematic assessment of revisionism, anti-revisionism, or strategy.

Continuities and Ruptures

The problem with the current debate on the history of the MKP is that we too often explain positions taken in the 1970s with reference to what happened afterward. If we stop reading history backward, we can better assess that the central question was not simply class versus nationality, but how a revolutionary movement should organize in a multinational society where class relations were changing rapidly, even as the broad political economy remained semi/neo-colonial and semi-feudal/underdeveloped. None of the resulting factions resolved that problem.

Tahir and Khurram are thus correct to advocate a critical assessment — not only of Bacha, Imtiaz, and Bangash, who for too long have been blamed one-sidedly by the PMKP that sees itself as the inheritors of Ishaq Muhammad in KP and Punjab — but also of Ishaq’s political line.

However, Tahir and Khurram believe, incorrectly, that MKP has been confined to Punjab, despite its legacy in Hashtnagar and Malakand. This has led to an explanatory response from Arfan:

In Punjab, one of the MKP’s greatest assets was a large group of brilliant, fearless, and seasoned rural workers. The MKP’s workers were down-to-earth, and a large proportion of them came from the lower peasantry, landless farm workers, and the urban working-class.

This not only implies that NWFP did not have “brilliant, fearless, and seasoned rural workers” etc. but misses the point. Indeed, Ishaq himself noted in 1974 that the MKP’s leadership was dominated by middle classes: small peasants, well-off tenants, and urban intellectuals.[22] Pakistani leftists constantly conflate the lower middle class to which many belong with the working class. Our collective understanding of class struggle, class structure, and class categories is highly underdeveloped. This perhaps helps explain the frequent turns to revisionism, such as via the PMKP’s earlier merger with the CPP and AWP.

More broadly, Tahir and Khurram ask why Hashtnagar or the MKP did not develop into a Naxalbari type movement. The answer probably has less to do with leaders’ positions on the national question, as such, and more to do with not adequately grasping the relations between party, frontal and mass organizations, and united front, as Bacha and Imtiaz pointed out.

While the Sarhad Mazdoor Rabita Committee that Bacha helped organize continued to be a thorn in the side of the military regime in the late 1970s and 1980s, ironically, most of his activities seem to have revolved around seeking out “left unity” rather than doubling down on patiently expanding the organizing of proletarians in the countryside and elsewhere. Certainly, many in MKP (Ishaq) continued to work with the Dehati Mazdoor Tanzeem to organize bonded labourers, although these efforts became tainted by “NGOtic” deviations in the 1990s before fading out.

Meanwhile, Ishaq’s resistance to unification with other anti-revisionists in Balochistan and Sindh held back the development of a robust and militant anti-revisionist line in Pakistan. Was his reluctance a historic mistake that only made the revisionist support for national liberation more enticing?

Learning from the successes and errors of historical anti-revisionist practice in Pakistan requires serious study, all-sided self-criticism, and political education. Not least of all, it requires concerted and disciplined political work amongst the proletarian elements of our multinational society.

Tags: Communism, mazdoorkissanparty, Pakistan, Peasents Last modified: October 27, 2026