Eqbal Ahmad: Critical Outsider in a Turbulent Age

EQBAL VEERED FROM MAINSTREAM THINKING MOST OF ALL in his position on partitioning states. He came to believe that partition, though often desired by external powers to separate belligerents and momentarily tame conflicts, did not solve problems. Regarding Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims, he reluctantly advocated separation from the Serbs, mainly because he felt that these well-armed enemies would exterminate the Muslim minorities. Most partitions, he asserted, have reflected the failure of negotiating processes and the victory of supranationalism over rationalism and compromise. He argued that negotiated unity, even if imperfect, was most often better than creating sectarian states.

Despite his parents’ cosmopolitanism and disdain for nationalism, Eqbal was consumed by the turbulence provoked by partition. He initially embraced Pakistan’s creation with gusto. But he lived through the heady pre- and postindependence days, when many promises were made and then quickly postponed and forgotten. In the postcolonial period, optimism gave way to pessimism as liberal civilian governments fell to dictators. Pakistan was no exception. Nationalists had created myriad undeliverable expectations, and strong states were needed to contain mass aspirations and face the challenges ahead.

Pakistan’s nationalist leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah was a British-educated barrister who spoke English in public, his native Gujarati in private, but his country’s official language, Urdu, not at all. He believed that Pakistan had to forge a multicultural nation, an idea not at all liked by the country’s religious elite, the ulema, who wanted to create an Islamic state. Eqbal argued that the population of the new Pakistan backed Jinnah in attempting to forge a modern nation. He pointed out that because later military dictators did not have Jinnah’s charisma and nationalist credentials, they, unlike Jinnah, began to use Islam for their own political ends and to legitimize their rule by backing conservative ulema and their dogmas. In the process of historicization, Eqbal commented, Jinnah was converted into “a man of orthodox religious views who sought the creation of a theocratic state[,] and the Ulema, who with rare exceptions, had opposed Jinnah and the Pakistan movement, emerged as heroes and founding fathers of Pakistan.”¹

Dictators everywhere speeded the burial of expectations. Nationalism waned as manipulation and disillusionment grew. The new danger lay in authoritarianism. Military regimes often spent tax revenues on weapons and established kleptocracies that milked their nations of wealth. Small elites prospered at the expense of the increasingly impoverished masses. In Pakistan, dictatorship accompanied martial law, declared in October 1958, a little more than a year after Eqbal arrived in the United States.

In a lecture he delivered in 1998, Eqbal explained how he came to oppose that partition and to believe that “the break has to be mended.” “[P]olitical boundaries were drawn on the basis of nationalism, and identities were asserted based on proclaimed and imagined differences” both in 1947 and again in 1972, when Bangladesh achieved its independence.² The work of Pakistani writer Saadat Hassan Manto (1912–1955), who wrote at the moment of partition in 1947, demonstrated the problem, according to Eqbal: his characters’ indecision over what they should take of the old and which of the new places they should relate to lead to a confusion so profound that they end up in no man’s land. For Eqbal, “no man’s land” was the perfect metaphor for partition, which had to be rectified.

Eqbal always focused on people’s basic humanity rather than on the ethnic or religious differences that divided them. This made him unpopular with the powers that be, for he opposed the trend of his times to separate warring parties while forgetting to settle the long-festering issues that brought them to war in the first place. Likewise, Eqbal’s message was always antihegemonic. The people to whom he gravitated at the end of his life and his closest friends, such as Radha Kumar and Edward Said, examined partitions critically. After Radha wrote The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1900, she completed another book, Divide and Fall? Bosnia in the Annals of Partition, which criticized the partition of Bosnia.³ At a memorial service for Eqbal in 1999, Radha stressed that “Eqbal was absolutely passionately committed to undoing the partition of India. He was committed to opposing partition wherever he found it. He believed very deeply that the problems of our individual countries would never be resolved as long as this partition lasted. He was much more optimistic than I. He believed this partition would in fact end and that the subcontinent would find another way of creating itself.”⁴

Radha herself grappled with the problem of India’s partition in her book Making Peace with Partition.⁵ She concluded that the Indian partition may have been less painful than partitions in other countries. Although the split was accompanied by horrific violence and the experience was intense, she argued, on the Indian subcontinent the violence was short-lived, unlike in other partitioned regions such as Ireland, Korea, Palestine, Yugoslavia, and Cyprus. The Indian and Pakistani armies did not get involved in the mutual slaughter, she noted, and most of the people who unleashed the violence demobilized quickly in the aftermath of partition. Eqbal had already pointed out that the numbers of people killed in the partition were initially exaggerated: “Originally it was said that four or five million died. No. The number of deaths was minimal in view of the size of the catastrophe. Less than half a million died. But remember, twenty-two million people were displaced, moved from one place to another. To date it remains the largest migration in recorded history.”⁶

Eqbal, Radha, and Edward argued in favor of a world devoid of artificial borders, a world where protagonists would work hard to sort out their problems through negotiations and would not accept having to live in small or large Bantustans because such partitioned areas only served the needs of narrow nationalists or those who governed the world. Their visionary message may seem utopian to many who think that separating warring parties is the best option to allow time to heal wounds and find relief in the fact that immediate killing has stopped. Eqbal, Radha, and Edward did not disagree with the need to put an end to violence, but they pushed for prolonged negotiations to sort out conflicting claims and establish a just peace. Their points of view certainly grated on policy makers, who wanted to end conflicts quickly at the lowest possible costs to themselves.

Just as Eqbal never became an American citizen,⁷ long absences from Pakistan reinforced his outsider position there as well. Until the last years of his life, when he moved back to Pakistan but still spent some time in the United States, he had played little part in framing events in the newly created country, whose history unfolded while he lived abroad. He never established a solid base in Pakistan or involved himself in the rough and tumble politics there or spent years in jail to prove his mettle or confronted military dictatorship on a daily basis.

When young Pakistanis flocked around Eqbal and urged him to help establish a political party, he could not and did not do so; he instead attempted to create a new private university but failed. Outsiders, however, can do important things. First, the contradictions of Pakistan’s politics had created a relatively free press. The print media there flourished, and Eqbal’s columns, often condemning corruption, police brutality, and jingoism in Pakistan, were not censored. He thought they were published uncensored because less than 10 percent of the population were literate.⁸ The state controlled local television stations more carefully because millions watched them. Satellite TV disrupted such control, however, as Pakistanis could watch a wide range of programs overseas. Eqbal’s detachment and novel insights allowed him to contribute new ideas for many groups that he joined, helped form, or encouraged. He always felt that the subcontinent was his real home, and he never wanted to close the door to returning there one day.

As Eqbal matured, he became more and more vocal in his opposition to the jingoistic nationalism emanating from both India and Pakistan, which prevented peaceful relations between the two neighbors. Starting in the 1970s, on his own initiative, he began traveling to India and established contacts with outstanding intellectuals there, such as Rajni Kothari (1928–2015), the founder of the Indian Center for the Study of Developing Societies. His trips were facilitated by the agreement of July 2, 1972, that Pakistan and India signed at Simla on bilateral relations, momentarily putting an end to the conflict and confrontation that marred their relations. The two countries had resolved to “work for the promotion of friendly and harmonious relationships and the establishment of a durable peace in the subcontinent.”⁹ Simla became the benchmark for future people-to-people exchanges.

Eqbal had scores of Indian friends and took on the task of personal diplomacy without conceiving of any institutional frameworks within which he could expand contacts between Indians and Pakistanis. The Indian peace activist and Mainstream editor Nikhil Chakravarty (1913–1998) led the way in organizing delegations of prominent Indians to visit Pakistan, and he spent twenty-five days in that country at the end of 1981. Dr. Mubashir Hassan (b. 1922), former Pakistani finance and planning minister and one of the principal organizers behind Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s rise to power, recounted what happened next in an article on the history of the Indian-Pakistani peace movement published in 2003:

After Eqbal started returning to the subcontinent on a regular basis in the late 1980s and using the Indian friendships he had nurtured in the 1970s, he teamed up with Mubashir Hassan to expand those contacts and regularize cross-border visits by intellectuals and other prominent personalities. Both men saw an opportunity to broaden contacts between the civil societies of India and Pakistan and to end the cold war and arms race between them. Mubashir argued that it was “nothing short of tragic” that both countries missed opportunities to usher in progress and prosperity for the two people.¹¹ Each of the governments had long claimed that they could not enter into negotiations across their frontiers because of massive opposition from their civil societies against establishing such contacts. Eqbal and Mubashir wanted to demonstrate that little fierce opposition to a thaw existed within both societies, so they set out to establish and then broaden people-to-people contacts across the barriers that separated the two countries. They intended to build a social movement that would undercut the arguments for inaction of both governments and in that way help to create a groundswell to move both countries toward reconciliation and peace.

During the last decade of the twentieth century, as the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States ended, it became possible to launch a campaign for peace and against war on the subcontinent. On April 9, 1990, a number of prominent Indians “appealed to all men and women of goodwill in both the countries, to make a united front to avoid a disastrous conflict, which will not solve any of the existing problems but will only aggravate and multiply them. We believe there are no outstanding problems, including Kashmir, which cannot be solved peacefully in a manner that could be acceptable to both the peoples and governments in India and Pakistan in the spirit of the Simla Agreement.”¹² In another statement published in the Hindustan Times (New Delhi) about a week later, another group of prominent Indians, including the historian Romila Thapar (b. 1931) and Eqbal’s friend Rajni Kothari, “appealed to India and Pakistan to refrain from taking any steps that might lead to a destructive war.”¹³ On April 25, 1990, seventy-eight South Asian academics and intellectuals, including Eqbal, “signed an appeal addressing all scholars and professionals, political leaders, academic associations and concerned citizens…for conciliation rather than confrontation and highlighted the futility of armed conflicts. Rather they advocated the resolution of disputes through discussions and negotiations.”¹⁴ On May 13, 1990, Eqbal and forty-nine other eminent Pakistanis, including jurists, parliamentarians, retired military officers, and even a retired cricket captain, issued another statement that received wide publicity in the Indian press. It said: “South Asia is haunted by the spectre of a fourth India-Pakistan war. The dispute is again over the unresolved question of Kashmir. As concerned Pakistanis, we urge the governments of India and Pakistan to refrain from seeking military solutions to an eminently political problem. Wars did not resolve this issue in the past…. We believe that Kashmir, which has so far been the primary cause of hostility between Pakistan and India, can well become the bridge to peace between the two countries.”¹⁵

At the very end of May 1990, Eqbal and Mubashir, working with other Pakistani activists, formed a five-person delegation that included themselves, Asma Jahangir (b. 1952), secretary-general of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan; Nisar Osmani (1931–1994), journalist and Human Rights Commission vice president; and Nasim Zehra (b. 1953), celebrated columnist and television talk-show hostess, to take part in a discussion with their counterparts in New Delhi on the Indo-Pakistan relationship. They met Shri I. K. Gujral (1919–2012), the minister for external affairs of the Indian government. Another informal meeting took place with an eminent member of Parliament and a leader of the Indian People’s Party, Shri Jaswant Singh (b. 1938), at his residence. Rajiv Gandhi (1944–1991) had an informal discussion with them in his parliamentary office months before his assassination. The delegates spent the rest of their time on tour in discussions with Indian intellectuals, especially political analysts, and retired diplomats at the Indo-Pakistan Friendship Society, the Council for South Asian Relations, Kothari’s Center for the Study of Developing Societies, and, in a combined meeting, the Indian Institute of Technology and Jawaharal Nehru University.

While in Pakistan in 2004, I spoke with all but one member of this delegation, Nisar Osmani, who wrote a column about the trip for the Karachi newspaper Dawn.¹⁶ Members of the delegation praised Eqbal’s role in helping to organize the peace initiative. Clearly, Mubashir Hassan, as a former Pakistani government minister, was the key figure among them, but Eqbal, because of his previous frequent trips to India and his own notoriety, knew many intellectuals and drew Indian audiences to the talks and discussions. He wore traditional Pakistani clothes, and in the debates they participated in he came down hard on both Pakistan and India. He already had an international reputation as being pro-Palestinian and had been arrested and tried at the highest level by the U.S. government, so he could not be accused of being a Zionist or a CIA agent, as other peacemakers invariably became labeled and dismissed in the press of both countries. He had to be taken seriously. (Regarding an encounter he had with Pakistan, a couple of his former friends and editorial collaborators had ridiculously called him a U.S. spy, but I thought then that their foolishness had more to do with his unwillingness to share their ideological choices than with anything based on fact.)

Asma Jahangir, human rights advocate and lawyer who sees clients in her private practice while being guarded by two soldiers bearing machine guns, has a no-nonsense approach to life. She had lived through years of repression in Pakistan, which steeled her resolve and courage to carry on. In that way, she is representative of a growing number of Pakistani women and men who have lived through a series of military dictatorships, suffered prison or state-sponsored terror, and finally have emerged stronger and less afraid. It was gratifying on my most recent visit to several cities in Pakistan that I met scores of people like her.

On the delegation’s trip to India, she and her colleague Nisar Osmani were impressed by India’s democracy, its press freedom, and the sophistication of in-depth analysis in the media. Jahangir at first had her doubts about the outsider Pakistani who did not live in Pakistan. Many intellectuals she knew, however, looked up to Eqbal as a demigod. She told me that “people around him made him into something that he was not.” On the trip to India, she got to know him well. In some ways, she found him typical of a class of Indians who were truly great storytellers. In the process of spinning their yarns, they added some spice and elaborated to accommodate their audiences. She also later came to know the depths of his compassion and sensitivity. When they went out shopping together, she understood how down to earth he could be. She was impressed that he did not talk down to anyone. In the discussions among the five, she felt no gender pressures. She especially appreciated his ability to focus the group on elaborating structures for further exchanges.¹⁷

The exchange participants from both the Indian and the Pakistani sides thought that wars of the past had served no purpose and that an armed conflict in the future would be a disaster. They advocated government negotiations. They could not agree, however, on an agenda or priorities in those discussions. By the end of June, however, these Indian and Pakistani peacemakers had organized fifty-two politicians, former army officers, social workers, judges, teachers, and writers from across the divide to call on both governments to jointly reaffirm their commitment to peaceful resolution of all outstanding differences between the two countries.

In one of the South Asian dialogues in 1993, another delegation of Pakistani intellectuals, journalists, and human rights activists that Eqbal joined met with their counterparts in India and reached consensus on three points:

Kashmir was and still is a wedge dividing India and Pakistan. Periodically, as it did in August 2013, it explodes into violence and brings both states back to belligerency, jeopardizing all the gains made through people’s exchanges and increases in trade relations between the two countries.

Eqbal did all this work on border crossings and writing about normalization between India and Pakistan as well as the Kashmiri issue as one of many projects that he participated in while living in Pakistan, but he did not see this work as the principal focus of his life there. In the end, however, these exchanges and visits to India as well as his and Mubashir Hassan’s hosting of Indians when the latter in turn traveled to Pakistan may turn out to be the most significant contribution he made to the subcontinent’s healthy future. As peacemakers, he and Mubashir deserve great credit for spearheading a movement that has mushroomed in recent years to include the exchange of parliamentarians, students, professionals, business leaders, and others as well as the establishment of bus service between the countries and with the contested region of Kashmir. When I was in Lahore in May 2004, I found it difficult to find a room in a hotel because of the influx of thousands of Indians there to attend a Pakistani-Indian cricket match, something inconceivable a decade earlier. Eqbal and Mubashir’s contributions include preparing both India’s and Pakistan’s civil societies for such exchanges and ultimately forcing the governments to stop using their own people as an excuse for their belligerence.¹⁹

By the mid-1990s, Eqbal intensified his cross-border contacts. He traveled to Calcutta as a guest of the Bose Institute, headed by Sugata Bose (b. 1956), the grandson of the famous and controversial Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) and now professor of Indian Ocean history at Harvard University.²⁰ Sugata, while still in India, invited Eqbal to give a series of talks there. In the early 1990s, few Indians came to Pakistan. Eqbal spoke before large audiences in traditional clothes and became the embodiment of civil society contacts between the two countries, organizing petition drives and the reciprocal exchanges of intellectuals that later blossomed. He also simultaneously engaged in a South Asian dialogue starting in 1990. He went to Nepal, Dakka, and Sri Lanka.²¹

When first the Indians and then the Pakistanis exploded their atomic bombs in full euphoria, Eqbal joined Pakistani physicists Abdul Hamid Nayyar (b. 1945)²² and Pervez Hoodbhoy (b. 1950) in speaking out against the folly of a nuclear arms race in a part of the world where poverty degraded so many millions of people. He did so despite his gut feeling that if Pakistan would test an atomic bomb, it would give the Israelis a jolt. His fears of nuclear proliferation and atomic disaster on the subcontinent, however, outweighed his geopolitical concern that counterforces to Israel’s power in the Middle East and the larger Muslim world needed to be established. He refused to follow the nationalists in Pakistan who celebrated Pakistan’s explosion of its atomic bomb. In 1998, he told David Barsamian, “I don’t believe in nuclear weapons. Therefore, I believe that just because India has nuclear weapons, Pakistan does not have to have them. I believe in unilaterally not having to compete with India in the nuclear arms race.”²³ This was a lonely position, but that did not stop Eqbal from writing and lecturing in Pakistan and India against atomic diplomacy and exposing the political manipulations behind the detonations.

The lack of stability in Pakistan added to Eqbal’s concern about the country possessing nuclear weapons. He told David Barsamian in 1998, “Out of the last fifty years since partition twenty-five have been spent under military rule and twenty-five under unstable, corrupt, and inefficient civilian rule. People who have been living in that unstable fashion, facing a very large hostile neighbor, created out of historic India, therefore not certain whether their status is permanent or not, will feel insecure. That’s another reason I feel we should have avoided the possession of nuclear weapons.”²⁴

Pervez Hoodbhoy began decrying nuclear arms on the subcontinent in 1978, four years after India exploded its first plutonium bomb. Eqbal vicariously followed Pervez as Pervez began writing more frequently on the question and had his uncle edit his articles before publishing them. When Pervez wrote something for the monthly magazine the Karachi Herald in 1980 and asked Eqbal to go over the article, he noticed that Eqbal was not as alarmed about the issue as he was.²⁵

Pervez also shared his manuscripts for six pieces he wrote in 1993 for the News (Islamabad), which Eqbal said that he liked. In that year, Pervez had an interview with the chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, General Shamin Alam Khan (b. 1937), and was troubled by the general’s cavalier attitude toward nuclear arms. The general told him that Pakistan would use the bomb if the Indian army attempted to take over Pakistani cities, estimating that in a nuclear war about 12 percent of the population would die. Most of the population would survive, he concluded. Thumping the table, the general raised his voice and shouted that the Pakistani army would never be defeated. Eqbal was appalled when he heard Pervez’s report on the conversation.²⁶

Also in 1994, Zia Mian, the Islamabad-based Qaʿid al-Azam University physicist and later, beginning in 1996, Princeton University research scientist, edited a collected work on nuclear proliferation issues, which Gautam Publications put out. When the book was published, the head of the press, Riaz, and his staff were arrested and tortured for seven months despite the fact that all the chapters in the book except Zia’s had already been published elsewhere. Security forces put pressure on all Pakistani publishers to reject manuscripts by this group of antinuclear activists. Such realities began to change Eqbal’s mind about the issue, and he became more and more involved.

Eqbal was shocked during an interview he had with General Pervez Musharraf (b. 1943) in March 1998, more than a year before the latter overthrew Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a coup. Musharraf told Eqbal that nuclear weapons would protect Pakistan from India and would change the strategic contours of South Asia. Eqbal immediately called Pervez and told him that the army thinks that it has a nuclear shield. “They are playing with fire,” he said, “and when they are through with it, there will be tragedy.”²⁷ On May 28, 1998, a few weeks after India set off its own round of nuclear explosions, Pakistan exploded five nuclear devices in underground steel-girded tunnels.

Four antinuclear activists—Pervez Hoodbhoy, Eqbal Ahmad, Zia Mian, and A. H. Nayyar—represented lonely voices in Pakistan. On June 2, a few days after Pakistan’s nuclear tests, the Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy, which Eqbal helped animate, held a meeting in a hotel and a press conference on nuclear issues, in which Eqbal and Pervez participated. Some 120 journalists came, but so did a large number of belligerent spectators, and they disrupted the press briefing, making catcalls and derogatory comments. Others raised silly questions. Eqbal tried to pacify them and read a sura from the Qurʾan praising differences of opinion. All this happened with much noise in the background. Suddenly fifteen people marched into the hall carrying signs and placards in favor of the nuclear detonations. They belonged to the youth movement of the Jammat al-Islam. They then circled around the stage, started chanting pro-bomb slogans, and shouted out that conference convenors were Indian agents and that there was no place in Pakistan for them. Nayyar, sharing the stage with Eqbal, reacted to the shouting, and the demonstrators pounced on him and started beating him up. Eqbal fruitlessly tried to protect him, and the security guards in the hall were useless. They were more afraid of the crowd than Eqbal and Nayyar were. About ten of the one hundred journalists present tried to protect Nayyar, and they too were beaten up. The crowd roughed up but did not beat some women on the stage.²⁸

Eqbal would, however, not be silenced. Two days later he published one of the most poignant columns he ever wrote on the subject:

I saw on television a picture more awesome than the familiar mushroom cloud of nuclear explosion. The mountain had turned white. I wondered how much pain had been felt by nature, God’s most wondrous creation. The great mountain in Chagai will turn in time to solid ash!…

The leaders of India and Pakistan have now appropriated to themselves, as others had done before, the power that was God’s alone—to kill mountains, make the earth quake, bring the sea to boil, and destroy humanity. I hope that when the muscle-flexing and cheering is over they will go on a retreat, and reflect on how they should bear this awesome responsibility.²⁹

Beena Sarwar of Pakistan television, who produced a program on Eqbal as peacemaker, outlined for me later the story line of Eqbal’s anti nuclear activities:

In May 1998, India exploded nuclear weapons, followed by Pakistan. Eqbal vociferously opposed both…. [H]e argued against Pakistan testing, and expressed his belief that the “celebrations” were not spontaneous but officially sponsored and engineered—“government agents ran around up and down Abpara market in Islamabad saying ‘close your shops, come out to show your support for the bomb.’ Then they said to the camera people, you can now take pictures. I did not see any expression of spontaneous joy either in Islamabad or in Rawalpindi.” [Eqbal] argued that the Indian public and the Pakistani public, “even those who felt joy about it, know that this was too serious a matter to go about celebrating…. In both countries, on Hiroshima Day in 1998, large demonstrations took place. In India the demonstrations were much larger than in Pakistan. In Calcutta 250,000 people came out against nuclear weapons. In Delhi, 30,000.”³⁰

Eqbal joined Pervez about a half-dozen times in giving talks on the nuclear issue in different parts of Pakistan. When he agreed to speak, journalists turned out in large numbers to cover the event. Most audiences were initially not hostile, and each amounted to between two hundred and four hundred people, mainly from the liberal sectors of the society. However, when retired army officers appeared, they tended to be hostile. In 1996, some bearded people—Islamic radicals—showed up and objected to the talks. Nayyar told me that Eqbal was a great source of strength for this and many other movements, and when he died, they were so very much poorer. Before he joined them, they were working on impulse, Nayyar commented.³¹

Eqbal finally decided that he would live in Pakistan full time and get deeply involved in the day-to-day frays of civil society. His friend Raza Kazim thought that Eqbal would have had to do a long apprenticeship and learn how to operate in the treacherous political environment of Pakistan if he ever hoped to become deeply engaged. Raza told me that he himself had lived in Pakistan since 1947, had gone to jail five times, and managed to survive.³² Others expected similar sacrifices from their populist leaders.

I had never seen Eqbal as happy as he was in India and Pakistan when we traveled there together during 1980. He beamed as he took me to the home of Raza Kazim, a lawyer who never gave up on political struggles and whom Eqbal got released from prison in November 1985, after mounting an international campaign over a period of nearly two years. A Pakistani military court acquitted the barrister.

Raza explained to me in 2004 that both he and Eqbal came from old feudal families who had fought their way into the Indian subcontinent, Raza’s a millennium ago and Eqbal’s beginning in the mid-fourteenth century. That history and shared background created a strong bond between them, which was cemented by their status as refugees from India. Political differences could not break their friendship. Raza also recalled that Eqbal had told him that he was his closest friend.³³

Younger friends and associates urged Eqbal to get deeply involved and set up a mass-based party, especially beginning in 1987, when he returned to Pakistan with Julie and Dohra. Many people wanted him to lead a movement then, but Eqbal resisted the temptation to do so. Imran Hamid, a friend of Eqbal’s from Islamabad, thought that Eqbal would have served as a father figure because they needed someone to strategize with them and direct a movement, but Eqbal’s daughter, Dohra, did not believe that he would have been able to make the necessary compromises needed to run for office and legislate or govern. Imran mulled that “you can’t spend most of your life subverting hierarchies and then construct a political organization. It just wouldn’t have worked.”³⁴ Zia Mian, a close friend of Eqbal, thought differently. He told me in 2004 that Eqbal had come to realize that the Pakistani state, sapped of its strength by years of official corruption, had become so weak and fragile that a successful oppositional movement would have only created anarchy and disorder. Eqbal wanted instead to work within state institutions to strengthen them.³⁵ In reiteration of what he told his friends, Eqbal wrote a few short months before his death, “Pakistan has been a parliamentary democracy for a decade,…[but] the democratic system is still in its infancy, feeble and malfunctioning. Its limbs, the institutions of governance and public service, have to be rebuilt and reinforced internally.”³⁶

Eqbal nevertheless encouraged nongovernment organization militants within Pakistan’s civil society. For example, when in 1981–1982 a group of Pakistanis formed the Women’s Action Forum, Eqbal understood what they were trying to do to widen women’s rights and participation and endorsed their activities. When he first returned to his country on a regular basis in the late 1980s, he felt that the Left was out of touch with global realities. He had no faith in Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party, which he viewed as the leader’s feudal fiefdom. He encouraged young socialists who gathered around him to talk to and organize workers within the party and industrial laborers in general. Rani Mumtaz in Lahore told me that when she first met Eqbal, she was overawed by his persona, but as she got to know him, she saw his human side and appreciated him as a friend. What she liked best about him was his nonsexist approach; he became good friends of both men and women.³⁷

In many discussions with groups of between fifty and one hundred people, Eqbal helped deepen these individuals’ analysis of the current political situation and continuously argued that political parties were too corrupt to rely on in Pakistan, as were municipal governments. In a hard-hitting article that Dawn published in November 1998, he responded fearlessly to the growing violence engulfing the country’s major city and economic capital, Karachi:

As Eqbal matured, he criticized with unrelenting honesty the wrongs that he saw all around. His readers and audiences came to expect that of him. As he formulated his criticisms, he discarded any traces of his earlier nationalism and began applying universalist yardsticks to Pakistan’s problems, as he had done earlier in the United States. Because most Pakistanis were nationalists to the core, his criticism shocked and sometimes bewildered his audiences and readers, but his logic was so clear and his persuasive force so great that they had to listen and pay attention to what he said and wrote. Educated people in Pakistan read him avidly, for few others took on the establishment and challenged consensus the way he did, consistently and devastatingly.

As he did with his students, he tried to empower the people he dealt with in Pakistan. Raza Kazim’s half-sister, Nasim Zehra (or Chotti, as her friends call her), whom Eqbal befriended and encouraged, remembered the impact of their first encounter in 1985. She found him “extremely humane and a powerful intellectual. He made it sound as if anything was possible. It was…very inspiring,” she told me in Islamabad. “In a world of hate and intolerance marked by an unethical use of power, Eqbal forced many people who became opinion makers and policy makers to value dialogue and peace without surrendering. He touched people intellectually and emotionally. He spoke of values and morality in the context of power. He was one of the few to do so,” she remembered.³⁹ In the early years that she knew him, he addressed the most important challenges they faced and advocated not being reactive. He argued that one factor that pulled the Muslim world down and led to its intellectual depletion was its reactive and derivative tendencies.

One of the groups Eqbal worked with—led by I. A. Rehman (b. 1930), since 1990 the director of the Human Rights Commission, and Mubashir Hassan—organized encounters between South Asian citizens. Eqbal’s outsider position facilitated interaction with the group’s Indian interlocutors and lessened tensions in their meetings. These interchanges have grown more frequent since Eqbal’s death in 1999 and constitute one of his significant accomplishments.