Back in the late 1980s, a bunch of guys and I started to publish a ‘revolutionary’ newsletter. We were all in our early twenties and some of us had also been involved in various movements against the Ziaul Haq dictatorship. The newsletter was started a year after Zia’s demise. We all fancied ourselves as ‘Marxists’.

I was considered to be the most experienced ‘revolutionary’ in the group because I had been jailed twice (1985, 1986). But most folk in the group had never been arrested. In fact, one such chap was the main financier of the newsletter. One afternoon, the mother of our financier just happened to enter the room where we used to gather and write the newsletter. We weren’t there at the time. But we had left behind dozens of empty beer bottles and cigarette butts. She also managed to get hold of the newsletter. She was shocked. Concerned that her son’s ‘useless friends’ were destroying his future, she confronted him.

The next day, when we reached his house, he told us that we should stop coming to his place. Weeks later, when a friend of mine, the late journalist Irfan Malik, asked me why had I stopped publishing the newsletter, I told him the reason. The next day he handed me an article, saying that I should publish one last issue of the newsletter and put his article in it.

The article went on and on about the challenges faced by young middle class folk who wanted to bring about change. In the end, Irfan wrote: ‘Agar ammi mana na kartien, tau inquilaab zaroor aata’ [Had mom not stopped us, the revolution would have surely come].

‘Simulated subversion’ or ‘designer resistance’ may seem to be revolutionary but is largely staged and very much part of the mainstream ethos that it claims to be subverting

So why am I recalling this tragic story of a........

© Dawn (Magazines)