He was chief editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign (PTUDC) and one of the founders of ‘The Struggle’, a fortnightly Marxist magazine in Urdu language. He also launched a monthly Mazdoor Jeddo Juhad He used to write a column in the Daily Times of Lahore. In his last published piece in May last year, In his last column, India: Class struggle; Hindutva’s nemesis (in two parts), he slammed the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s tendentious Pakistan-bashing :

"Modi’s use of anti-Pakistan rhetoric, the Indian Hindu chauvinism whipped up into a warlike situation through the Pulwama episode and the surgical strikes, etc. In the 2014 elections, Modi’s Hindutva bigoted rhetoric was no less forcefully applied. The slogan of Vikaas (development) was used more fervently, since then Modi didn’t bear the burden of the incumbency factor. But this time he relied more on vile religious anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan demagogy. The difference this time was his strategy to instill more fear and insecurity amongst the masses. The reaction against Pakistan orchestrated by the military strikes was staged to build up Modi’s macho image and boost Hindu supremacy”

He reminded Leon Trotsky’s essay of 1909:”When the curve of historical development rises, public thinking becomes more penetrating, braver and more ingenious. It grasps facts on the wing, and on the wing links them with the thread of generalization … But when the political curve indicates a drop, public thinking succumbs to stupidity.”

That was Lal Khan, a Trotskyist with a difference. In the early years of this century together with the British Trotskyist theorist and the late Jam Saqi, formerly general secretary of the Communist Party of Pakistan, he thought of a campaign for a democratic renewal of Leftist space. His political life began in the late 1970s as a student leader at the Nishtar Medical College in Multan during the dictatorship of General Zia-ul Haq. He was arrested and imprisoned. After release, he briefly studied at Rawalpindi Medical College before leaving for Amsterdam.

He had two reasons for doing so: suffocating milieu under Zia hukmat and completion of medical education. After his return to Pakistan during the first term of Benazir Bhutto regime, he opted for Leftist political life and formed the Pakistan Struggle Group instead of practicing medicine He kept fighting for the cause until he breathed his last, ruthlessly defending through his writings, the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky ‘against the imperialist propaganda onslaught of so called failure of Socialism as a social system’, particularly after the collapse of Soviet Union.

But the trouble with the Leftists is their failure to adapt to the changing times in Pakistan. Cling only to slogans ‘condemning everything; down with America, down with imperialism, down with establishment and down with everything; appropriately put in by the former Pak Senator Farhatullah Babar, a top leader of Pakistan People’s Party. .They keep deflecting attention ‘from religious extremism producing human bombs blowing up everything from mosques to churches and from markets to schools in the country’.

Nonetheless, the Left and its possibilities cannot be written off, at least by the powers-that-be in Islamabad. Otherwise, during the General Elections in 2018, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority would not have blocked the official website of Awami Workers Party, Pakistan’s only registered Leftist party that declared itself when it was founded with the merger of Awami Party, Labour Party and Workers Party in 2012 as party of workers, peasants, women, students and marginalised groups fighting for a democratic and socialist society.

The PTA mentioned inter alia Section 37 of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2016 on national security grounds. The Islamabad High Court Chief Justice Ather Minallah in the writ petition by the AWP challenging the order rebuked the PTA, stating that PTA skipped “due process” as no rules were formulated to carry out the purposes of Section 37(2) of the Act and termed the decision as violation of the principles of natural justice and the fundamental rights guaranteed under Article 10-A of the Pakistani constitution.

The executive, dictated by the ’miltablishment’ showed its imaginary fear of even of soft Leftism. The vote strength of AWP in the national elections fell from 0.4 per cent to 0.3 per cent between 2013 and 2018 - from 18,650 out of 45,388,404 votes counted to 17,935 out of valid votes of 53,123,733. The overall percentage of voter turnout remains stationary at 55 per cent. The panic among the vested interests that thrive on the hangover of military-feudal nexus from the birth of Pakistan is the possibility of rise in this percentage. (IPA Service)