by NADEEM F. PARACHA
A few days ago I received a couple of emails from some readers asking me why (in this column) am I only concentrating on proving wrong Pakistan’s history as written by rightist forces and the ‘establishment’. They asked whether the leftists or the progressives have been the only ones conscious about the country’s correct line of historical discourse.
Not at all. There is almost as much myth-making involved in certain sections of the so-called Left as there is on the right. The only difference is that it was the rightists’ narrative about Pakistan’s ideological composition that made it into the textbooks and populist media. Nevertheless, if one was to tackle historical revisionism and myth-building among those on the Left then there is no better place to start than amongst some former luminaries of the country’s largest political force, Pakistan People’s Party.
On the day when Z A Bhutto’s ailing widow, Nusrat Bhutto passed away (23 October), former PPP ideologue, Dr Mubashir Hasan, was one of the first people to get a call from the electronic media outlets. What followed was a glaring example of the kind of revisionism and myth-making taking place in the populist media about the PPP’s ‘leftist past.’ Hasan, who distanced himself from the PPP after Bhutto’s ‘judicial murder’ by the Ziaul Haq dictatorship, has been a staunch critic of the party under Asif Ali Zardari.
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(Thanks to Robin Khundkar)