#5: Eqbal Ahmad’s war with the empire

This post is part of a series of narrative articles I wrote for Nearpod, an interactive classroom tool for students. My essays were incorporated into high school history and social studies classes.

One hot August evening, a group of guests at a Westport, Connecticut dinner party suggested a “citizen’s arrest of Nixon,” an abduction of National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, and a sit-in at the White House. It was 1970; frustration toward American foreign policy in Vietnam was at its height. “A people’s grand jury would issue a subpoena for the national leader to face a war crimes tribunal,” Eqbal Ahmad, a Pakistani writer and anti-war activist, explained later during the trial that followed this colorful dinner party.

“There was no agreement that a kidnapping could be done nonviolently, not that it would have the desired impact on the war,” he said. “Consequently there was no plan.”

That November, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover told a closed session of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee about the plan, stating that “an anarchist group” was “concocting a scheme to kidnap a highly placed Government official,” and disrupt government functioning by destroying underground electrical conduits and steam pipes. This statement made headlines, and Hoover was put under pressure to deliver evidence.

This “anarchist group” came to be known as the Harrisburg Seven, which comprised of Eqbal Ahmad and six Catholic pacifist priests and nuns. The seven were charged with conspiracy; but since most of the testimony came from a paid FBI informant, the jury couldn’t believe much of what he said, and after 59 hours of deliberations, the jury was hung, and a mistrial was declared.

Though the plan had not been seriously deliberated or mapped out, the sentiments expressed at this dinner party were real — American imperialism needed to be held accountable. The Vietnam War was only one of the myriad issues that Eqbal Ahmad took up over the course of his career, which was spent fighting tirelessly for victims of imperial policies and groups oppressed by the powerful.

Ahmad was born in 1933 in Bihar, British India, to a middle-income farming family. When he was a young child, his father was murdered while asleep in bed next to him for supporting land reform measures, an incident he would later cite as a reason he was so critical of property disputes and wealth disparity. In the late 1940s, during the partition of India, Ahmad’s older brother decided to take the family to the newly created Pakistan. As the rest of Ahmad’s family left on the last seats of a plane, Ahmad joined a caravan of refugees walking across the new fractured border.

Though Ahmad would, for most of his life, not have a particularly loving relationship with Pakistan, being suspicious of nationalist sentiment of any kind, as a 15-year-old, he joined the youth wing of the Muslim League to fight in the First Kashmir War. The Pakistani army wanted to “liberate” Kashmir from India, and Ahmad went with other activists to Muzaffarabad, the Kashmiri capital of Pakistan, hoping, along with other members of the Communist Party of India, that control over Kashmir could be an opportunity to establish socialism in South Asia.

This lack of cohesiveness within the Kashmir-Pakistan alliance made him realize that all the groups involved had their own agendas — while the need to liberate Kashmir from India was a real one (“New Delhi’s moral isolation from the Kashmiri people is total and irreversible,” he wrote), using Pakistan’s political motivations was not the answer for the Kashmiri people.

Forty-three years later, when Kashmir was struggling again for independence from India, the Pakistani Army approached Ahmad for to support the Kashmir’s cause, and he urged them not to try and control the Kashmiri guerrilla fighters again and argued against U.S. involvement. His advice was ignored and as Ahmad predicted, none of these political actions were in the interest of the Kashmiri people themselves.

Over the course of his career, Ahmad described himself as “harshly secular,” but he was often quick to defend religion from the institutions that hijacked it. He believed in the power of the Islamic idea that faith knew no national boundaries.

Ahmad studied history at Punjab University in Lahore, where he became interested in Native American history and settler colonialism, furthering his internationally-directed mindset about solidarity between oppressed groups around the world. In the mid-1950s, he went to California as a Rotary fellow in American history, and in 1960 he traveled to Tunisia and Algeria as part of his doctoral dissertation at Princeton. He joined the National Liberation Front in Algeria, and was profoundly affected by his experiences there. It was the beginning of a professional life drawn to liberation movements and struggles all over the world.

There is an impoverishment, he knew, that infects the oppressor in any struggle; and this led him to be wary of the ways in which liberation movements could lose their sense of priority after they had won in what he called “the pathology of power.”

He paid the price for these strict standards: friends noticed that the Havana cigars that Ahmad’s friend Fidel Castro sent him suddenly were not there anymore, after Ahmad dissented against Castro’s treatment of his domestic critics once he came to power; his relationship with Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, suffered when the leader allowed the Arab-Israeli peace treaty to come into effect, which Ahmad felt disregarded the needs of Palestinians. Constantly, Ahmad’s aim was to keep his focus on the real center of every liberation movement: the ordinary people affected.

In 1968, he gave a talk to Palestinian activists. After his talk, a man approached him and said, “I’m Edward Said. I want to thank you for what you have done.”

Ahmad’s relationship with Edward Said, the Palestinian American writer and intellectual, would become a defining one for both of them: Said dedicated his seminal Culture and Imperialism to Ahmad, and the two consulted each other constantly on various pressing issues of the day. They were both vocal about Palestinian rights during the 1967 war, when it was an unpopular opinion in academia. “Those around us, including the ‘peace people,’ considered Zionism and Israel to be blameless and [the] heroic survivor of wanton Arab aggression. The media was closed to us,” Ahmad wrote, of himself and Said.

What the two men perhaps connected most over was that they were both outsiders in a sense, removed from national identities, with the feeling of being exiles. “We are, to paraphrase Nehru, at home in both civilizations, at ease in neither,” Ahmad wrote in a letter to two BBC producers working on a project about Said’s life. This outsider-ness gave them the capacity to see the “enemy” on all sides, and be equally critical of all of them. The “Empire,” they knew, was not a nation or a set of policies — it was a penetrative mentality, often invisible, that poisoned anything it touched.

Over the course of his life and experience, Ahmad became intimately familiar with guerrilla warfare as it was being used around the world. His writings on the Vietnam War, for example, changed the paradigm that is now used to even understand the figure of the revolutionary guerilla — as someone who is not a threat, but a defender of the people.

Ahmad explained that developing nations post-independence were largely created by the most privileged of their members, who shared interests more with the United States than with their own country. These were the parties being threatened by the figure of the revolutionary guerilla. Ahmad wrote of the guerilla as a noble figure, rather than a terrorist — catering to “demands unlikely to be satisfied by a politics of boundary management.”

“There is an increasingly perceptible gap between our need for social transformation and America’s insistence on stability, our impatience for change and America’s obsession with order, our move toward revolution and America’s belief in the plausibility of achieving reforms under the robber barons of the ‘third world,’ our longing for absolute sovereignty and America’s preference for pliable allies,” he wrote. His sense of removal from the nation-state also allowed him to see how problematic the binary between nationalism and imperialism was: decolonization often assumed that the former could be a cure for the latter, rather than the fact that both were ways of exercising power over the powerless, and that real people were usually victims of both.

Ahmad’s writings and activism center on those really affected by any policy, and those actually experiencing struggle, because he knew that struggles are often co-opted, often for political reasons. In this way his anti-imperial outlook was not political at all, but simply humanitarian. “I felt that racism was a universal question,” he said, about the actions he took as a Pakistani man joining the struggles of Algerian subjects. “And the fight against racism was a universal challenge.”

“He was a genius at sympathy,” Said wrote, “When he used the pronoun ‘we,’ you knew that he spoke and acted as one of us, but never at the expense either of his honesty or of his critical faculties, which reigned supreme. This is why Eqbal came as close to being a really free man as anyone can be.”

Ahmad spent the last few years of his life in Pakistan, trying to establish an alternative educational institution that vigorously retained a humanitarian approach to world political issues. He died in 1999, at the age of 66, after an operation for colon cancer. “Humanity and secularism had no finer champion,” Said wrote after his death.

Pervez Hoodbhoy, a prominent Pakistani physicist and activist, recalled being in the hospital the day Ahmad died. “As they finally wheeled him out of the intensive care unit, the nurse asked if he was my father. No, I said, he was the head of our clan,” Hoodbhoy wrote. “But there was little point in explaining this was no usual clan, has no blood linkages, and knows no country, religion, or race. Its many thousand members are spread across the continents from Vietnam to the West Bank and Morocco, from India and Pakistan to Europe and North America. Their only bond is a shared belief in human dignity, justice, liberty, and all that is rich and precious in the human experience.”