Pak President's religion is money, says Tariq Ali - The Times of India

This is a news story from The Times of India.




NEW DELHI: The Soviet Union is gone. The Berlin Wall has crumbled. And, in his own words, the most dynamic force for capitalism today is the Chinese Communist Party. But Tariq Ali still keeps the faith.

At 68, the Duracell public intellectual may not be in his fiery, street-fighting years any longer; but he remains a believer in Marxism - not as a state religion but as a grand idea to change the world - even though talking about it gives him the feeling of discussing "a lost, submerged continent like the Atlantis." Ali was delivering the Faiz Memorial lecture here on Monday. The moustache is more salt than pepper now and the hair has thinned over the decades. Like a deft DJ of political history, the Lahore-born, Oxford-educated Leftist shuffled one theme after another - the lost tradition of mushaira in Pakistan, the economic crisis in Europe ("Greece and Italy today are run by bankers appointed by the German government"), the Occupation movement in the USA and the difficulties of coming to Delhi if you are a Pakistani. He also found time for Pakistan president Asif Ali Zardari, who donated Rs 5 crore to the Ajmer shrine on Sunday.

"The president of Pakistan is not religious at all. That's the only thing which can be said in his favour. His religion is money - usually, other people's money," Ali quipped drawing guffaws. Tariq Ali underlined the tradition of reciting and listening to poetry in large public assemblies in Pakistan in the 1950s and 1960s and why it was important for the country's social lifeblood. "Poetry for us was not just politics. It was culture on a very high level. Ordinary people had a sense of criticism and they could see through bad poets very quickly," he said. Ali recalled a musharia after the first martial law imposed by Ayub Khan in 1958: "Faiz was in jail. And the atmosphere was fearful. Any form of dissent was punishable those days. A great Punjabi political poet Ustad Daman stood up. He recited a love poem and went on discuss birdsongs.

"We got fed up and heckled him. Finally he lost his temper and recited a poem spontaneously. 'Ho gayeen mauja hi mauja, jidhar takko faujan hi faujan' which I translated many years later as 'now each day is sweet and balmy, wherever you look it is the army'." Ustad Daman was picked up the very next day, kept in prison for 10 days and brutalised. In the age of social networking websites, the world listens to poetry in different ways. But Ali believes that technology can be harnessed in favour of the craft. He spoke about the Baathist era in Iraq when three great communist poets went into exile.

"One went to Damascus, the other to Europe and I don't remember where the third went. But the population of Baghdad missed their poetry. When Iraq was invaded in 2003, they wrote and sent poems to each other. One of them wrote a poem in the morning, the other sent back a poetic response in half and hour. And within five hours it was being sent through email and recited in the cafes of Baghdad and Basra. That is how the world has changed. The tradition of poetry is not doing to die; it will take different forms. The poet will remain with us," Ali added. What really fascinates Ali, though, is the future of Left and its fate across the world. He firmly believes that Marxism, in its essence, is best way to create a decent and just society. The rise of China has left him with mixed feelings. He finds it ironical that the Chinese Communist Party has launched the most dynamic growth of capitalism in the world today. "China occupies the position today that was occupied by Britain during the Industrial Revolution. It is the workshop of the world," he said.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Pak-Presidents-religion-is-money-says-Tariq-Ali/articleshow/12616378.cms




This is from Zee News on the same event reported above.



New Delhi: Twenty-one years after the fall of the East Bloc, Karl Marx is becoming relevant to students of politics, economics and modern history across the world who want to understand capitalism, says noted Pakistan born novelist, historian and political activist Tariq Ali.

"Marxism is one of the things people are reading now. I know of universities in the US where the students have formed Marxist Study Circles to understand capitalism," Ali, who is based in London, told reporters here.

Marx is "bestseller in Europe again because young people are talking about him", said Ali, 68, who was in India to release a short biography of progressive Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz.

According to him, Marxism in the genre in which it existed in Russia and China has gone. 

"...And that is a not a bad thing… It did not actually educate the party members and allow them to think critically so that it could create a social layer that could think, which Marx was all about. That was a foolish way of developing a political organisation.

"The character in Greek mythology that Marx really loved was Prometheus who was expelled from heaven... Yet Prometheus gave the earthlings the gift of fire. If they misused it (the ideology), it was not Marx`s fault," Ali said.

Explaining the conflicting relationship between religion and politics, he said "it has been a time-honoured historical tradition all over the world for political parties to use religion to push their agendas... and all of it is authoritarian agenda.

"When they do it in Islam, it angers me because the history of Islam in many parts of the world is the history of dissent from within. The rise of religion is a modern phenomenon," he said.

Considered one of the best orators in the world of contemporary socialist intellectuals, Ali laces his observations with caustic wit.

"The new president of Pakistan (Asif Ali Zardari) is not a religious man... it is one of the positive things about him. His religion is money and other people`s money. 

"Why he went to Ajmer, I was surprised... but it will come out. Everything in Pakistan is exposed, the country has changed," he laughed. 

He added that the residents of Lahore were praying to Allah "to grant US their avatar of Zardari". 

The son of journalist Mazhar Ali Khan and activist Tahira Mazhar Ali Khan, Tariq is is an authority on Islamic military history and the Left movements all over the world.

He has authored 17 books including "Protocols of the Elders of Sodom and Other Essays", "The Obama Syndrome", "The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power" and "Islam Quintet" (a five-part fictional history of ancient Islamic civilisations) and hundreds of articles espousing his views of a "free, thinking and just social structure".

Ali is often dubbed the "alleged inspiration" for the Rolling Stones 1968 track "Street Fighting Man"; an interview John Lennon gave to Ali inspired the iconic singer to later write "Power to the People".

The Left intellectual does not like coming to India. 

"The last time I came was in 2006. I was mostly in Kolkata (and a bit in Delhi). Getting a visa is a struggle. I had to wait for three months for a visa to India. 

"It is what we suffer from the bureaucracy. It is not as easy any more as it was in the 1970s and 1980s. 

"I hope this tension which began after 9/11 does not punish common people travelling in the subcontinent. You cannot learn unless you travel..." he rued.

Ali said he was writing a new book. "It is about the American empire and how long it will last," he said. He expects to complete it in a year.
http://zeenews.india.com/entertainment/bookworm/marx-becoming-relevant-again-tariq-ali_2268.htm