New Left Review I/65, January-February 1971

Fred Halliday

Towards a Red Pakistan

The state of Pakistan is the creation of the reactionary forces that moulded the Indian sub-continent: British imperialism and Gandhian nationalism. Through colonial exploitation the one exacerbated the internal pre-capitalist religious differences of the sub-continent. The other, articulating the interests of the Hindu bourgeoisie under the guise of regenerating the Indian nation, provoked the Muslim people as a whole into a defensive separatism. The ideology that preached nonviolence was responsible for the deaths of several millions of people; by its gross and mendacious irrelevance to the problems of the Indian people it is continuing to kill many more. In this situation, the Muslims were led by their own bourgeoisie and landowners into a separatist state, Pakistan. Since then it has been ruled by a coalition of landowners, businessmen, officers and civil servants, and they have been able to hold the predominantly peasant population in subjection, using both armed repression and the manipulation of Islamic and anti-Indian ideology.

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