The rightward march
By Nadeem F. Paracha
It was called the ‘New Left.’ Emerging
in Britain in the 1950s, the New Left was the left’s disparaging
response to the authoritarian tendencies of Marxism mainly symbolised
by so-called ‘Stalinism’. The New Left revisited Marxist doctrines and
attempted to bring them more in line with concepts like liberal
democracy.
The New Left criticised both western
capitalism and Soviet communism and attempted to put forward a more
non-dogmatic and democracy-friendly version of Marxism. By the 1960s,
it was ideologically informing the evolution of the various leftist
movements that began taking shape around the world.
The New
Left thinking also contributed to the various contemporary socialist
experiments taking place in the Muslim world at the time, where certain
leaders and political organs attempted to cut through Marxist dogma and
capitalist whiplash by fusing nationalism and the more egalitarian
notions of Islam with socialist economics. By the early 1970s, the New
Left had begun to influence conventional social-democracy in Europe as
well, where leftist parties emerged without any ideological strings
attached to the Soviet Union.
However, the oil crisis, brought
on by Egypt and Syria’s war against Israel in 1973, triggered a serious
economic downturn in the West. It also began generating a gradual
reaction against the New Left politics and economics. Consequently a
number of economists emerged who severely critiqued social-democracy,
socialism and the concept of the welfare state.
By the early
1980s, this tendency was referred to as the ‘New Right’ and its early
political and economic manifestations were defined by the Ronald Reagan
presidency in the US and Margrate Thatcher’s rule in the UK. The New
Right forwarded an aggressive mixing of free market economy, religion,
patriotism and a militarist foreign policy, a tendency which, after the
collapse of the Soviet Union, peaked in the shape of neo-conservatism
during George W. Bush’s administration (2001-2008).
In
Pakistan, the New Left’s frontline expressions were the students’
movement against Ayub Khan in the 1960s and the populist emergence of
social-democratic parties such as the PPP. However, interestingly, just
as the New Left was being wiped out in the West by the New Right in the
1980s, in Pakistan it was the old right (i.e. conventional religious
parties in cahoots with a politicised military) that did the trick.
But,
alas, the New Right in Pakistan seems to finally be coming of age.
Because if the collapse of the country’s last military dictatorship and
the constant drubbing the conventional religious parties have faced in
various elections can be seen as the withering away of the old right in
Pakistan, then the active emergence of a revamped PML-N supplemented by
an alarmist new electronic media can be detected as a more vocal
arrival of the New Right in Pakistan.
Couple these happenings
with a vigilante-like nature of a new-born ‘judicial activism’
exhibited by a current strand of top judges and lawyers, and the
impulsive support it is getting from PML-N, the electronic media and
small right-wing organs like the Jamaat-i-Islami and Pakistan
Tehreek-i-Insaaf, one can then suggest that a somewhat instinctive move
is afoot to challenge the large remnants of both the old and new Left
in Pakistan. These include social democratic parties like the PPP, the
ANP and secular bourgeois parties such as the MQM.
Boiling
within the mix of the New Right politics and sociology in Pakistan are
also characters operating as televangelists, ‘security analysts’ and TV
journalists. In appearance and content they are consciously avoiding
the persona of the greying guard of the old right, and attempting
instead to sound and look a lot more contemporary.
They have
gone on to use an intriguing combination of the economic and aesthetic
dynamics of consumerism, free-market enterprise and media-centric
imagery to forward a fusion of social piety, a neo-Maududi’ist take on
political Islam, a plethora of conspiracy theories and demagogic
(left-meets-right) oratory. Barring the PML-N, much of the New Right in
the country is rather ambiguous about its views on democracy.
It
is equally ambiguous about its stand on matters such as terrorism and
extremism. It claims to condemn it, but is more likely to put the blame
on American foreign policy and then return to its ambiguous disposition
when questioned about the long involvement of Pakistan’s own
intelligence agencies and past policies in the matter.
Whereas
the top tier of the Pakistani New Right (PML-N and certain senior TV
anchors) are merging lofty political notions such as constitutionalism
and accountability with vigilante-type ‘judicial activism,’ the second
tier, mainly made up of small rightist political parties and a new
breed of TV preachers and personalities, are (for want of a better
word) glamorising retro-Maududi’ist and Tableeghi notions of ‘Islamic
society’ by encouraging a neo-conservative reading and practice of
religious texts, history and ritualism.
More dangerously though,
undaunted by the obvious failure of political Islam in the Muslim
world, the country’s New Right is trying to rekindle it and that too at
a time when various Islamic reformist movements the world over are
consciously trying to detach Islam from the political moorings it was
convolutedly given in the 20th century by men like Maududi and Syed
Qutb. Moorings that may have played a major role in plunging many
Muslim countries in the state of cultural stagnation and political
turmoil they are in today.
In : Nadeem F. Paracha
Notes