'British equated communism with anti-culture movement'.

Byline: Peerzada Salman

KARACHI -- Colonial forces in India equated the communist struggle with anti-culture, anti-religion and anti-civilisation movements which harmed communist and progressive movements in the subcontinent. This was argued by Dr Ali Raza in his talk at a webinar titled 'The Unsung Heroes: Genealogies of Progressive and Leftist Struggle against British Colonialism' organised by the Irtiqa Institute of Social Sciences as part of its Hamza Wahid Memorial Lecture series on Monday evening.

Dr Raza, who is a historian and associate professor at LUMS, based his arguments on his book Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India.

He said the starting point of his book was a memory. In that connection he narrated the story of a leading communist figure, Dada Amir Haider Khan, who in 1949 was arrested in Pakistan. 'It's a time when a new state has been formed and the first thing that the Muslim League government did was that it began keeping an eye on the communists and detained them. The same happened in India. In fact, there was a communist insurgency that took place in Telangana (formerly Hyderabad). The Communist Party was banned as well; it was banned in Pakistan in 1954.

The scholar said there were many anti-colonial movements which were after independence called or dubbed anti-state. This juncture was important. So an anti-imperialist movement became an anti-state one. The one argument that he [Dr Raza] spent time on in his book, he told the guests, was that he traced how communism and progressive ideology was not only considered anti-state, but also a foreign idea. Progressive movements were often accused of being some kind of Russian proxy, and that communist ideology did not belong to this part of the world. It was also labelled anti-religion, anti-local culture and anti-values.

Dr Raza claimed it wasn't a new argument. It could be traced all the way back to the 1920s and 1930s when the British tried to ban the idea of communism (soch). It also banned and proscribed the Communist Party. The effort could be seen in a number of conspiracy cases which were formed against members of such movements. One such important case was the Meerut...

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