Alternative politics and dominant narratives: communists and the Pakistani state in the early 1950s

Abstract

This article analyzes the role played by the Communist Party in Pakistani politics before it was banned in 1954, a time when it was the centre of a motley variety of progressive movements that expressed regionally variant, alternative visions of politics. It is an attempt to draw out the relationship between the state, and groups who referred to themselves varyingly as ‘communists’, ‘leftists’ and ‘progressives’ within the city of Lahore. This localized analysis of these different yet overlapping groups illustrates how they were all linked within official state narratives to the Communist Party, which was, in turn, constructed as the centre for godless, anti-national sentiment, thereby justifying the repression of all those who were seen to be associated with it. This allowed for the construction of a historical narrative where the role of the Communist Party as political opposition, presenting an alternative in its own right, became subsumed within the wider narrative of the nation state and its friends and foes.