Malala Yousufzai: Heroic Pakistani Socialist

As Malala Yousufzai  recovers in hospital in Birmingham, the following article from the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn, by Jawed Naqvi, will probably interest readers:

‘Tere mathey pe ye aanchal bahot hi khoob hai lekin/
Tu is aanchal se ik parcham bana leti to achcha tha/
(Your headscarf looks lovely, my dear, but yield!
Why not make a flag from it for the battlefield?)’

THE poem by Majaaz Lucknavi belongs to the 1930s but it seems to echo an event in distant Afghanistan half a century before.

Malalai of Maiwand died on the battlefield in July 1880 when she was 17 years old, engaging British and Indian troops in the Second Afghan War. It is said that Malalai — also spelled and pronounced as Malala — actually fashioned a flag from her veil to rally her Afghan compatriots in the do-or-die struggle.

She was a much-loved poet too. Her exhortation, as she mustered support for Ayub Khan, the charismatic Afghan commander and son of the deposed amir, was recorded for posterity thus:

“Young love! If you don’t fall in the battle of Maiwand, By God, someone is saving you as a symbol of shame!”

The historic battle saw a rout of the combined Indian and British troops, their ranks depleted of seasoned warriors after 1857. The Maiwand battle was a mandatory topic in the Senior Cambridge history course for years.

Was Majaaz, separated by decades from the battle of Maiwand, inspired by the legend of Malalai to pen his clarion call to his beloved, and thereby to all women? It is hard to tell.

But he did sway a generation of Indian women to crop their veils into flags to fight foreign occupation. Maiwand’s battle cry has inspired generations of Afghan women.

According to an interview Malala Yousufzai gave a couple of years ago, she is a fan of Malalai of Maiwand and was named after her.

There was another Malala to inspire the 15-year-old heroine of Swat. Stories of Malalai Joya’s fight against male barbarism abound in contemporary Afghan lore.

Winning a parliament seat in 2005, Malalai Joya could have chosen an easy, comfortable life. She decided instead to lend her powerful voice to fight those among her fellow deputies she identified as regressive, anti-women warlords. Her enemies charged her with being a communist and successfully had her evicted from parliament.

Addressing an international peace conference in Australia last month, Malalai Joya, already a celebrated author of a book on Afghan women, pulled no punches to highlight international connivance in the tragedy that befell her country.

“The black clouds of war are overshadowing our earth,” she told the Swan Island Peace Convergence 2012. “The US, depending upon the dirtiest fundamentalists forces such as Al Qaeda and its likes has pushed Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan into disaster and deviated the uprisings against fundamentalism and dictatorship by handing the leadership to its fundamentalist lackeys; and they are now in the process of destroying Syria too.”

Not only is Malalai Joya regarded as a role model by the Yousufzai scion, there is evidence of a Marxist underpinning that runs the risk of being overlooked in the teenaged girl’s ideological shaping.

A picture in which she is seen with a poster of Lenin and Trotsky should indicate her proximity to some of the most ideologically groomed bunch of men and women in Swat. They are members of the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), which condemns religious extremism and imperialism equally.

We have been told of Malala’s blogs and interviews with global news groups, but her involvement with the Marxists of Swat (of all the places) tends to be ignored.

As an IMT release suggests, Malala Yousufzai attended its National Marxist Youth School in Swat in July this year. Scores of participants came from across distant provinces of Pakistan. The scale of their commitment is heart-warming. The irony is stark. The spectacle of mighty politicians in Islamabad, running scared of lurking assassins despite layers of security jostles with the rising star (Imran Khan) on Pakistan’s political firmament whose desire to visit the troubled areas becomes heavy weather.

And here we have a group of girls and boys, men and women, armed with nothing more than unwavering dedication to bring change where the mighty fear to tread. They go about their business without the fanfare a visit to Swat involves.

They remind me of the late communist activist Hriday Nath Wanchoo who stood his ground in Srinagar with nothing but his zeal to fight for the human rights of Hindus and Muslims when the rest of his fellow Kashmiri pandits were fleeing the Valley.

Titled Red Flags in Taliban Territory, Imran Kamyana’s piece on IMT’s website is instructive. Swat, he says, is known for religious extremism and the Taliban. “Many comrades themselves became victims of this religious terrorism including one comrade who was shot and had eight bullets in him from a G-3 rifle. Only his willpower and hatred against the cruelty of the state and the Taliban kept him alive.”

In another incident the Taliban killed 14 people in one village and hanged their bodies from trees, declaring that nobody could touch them. Only two dared to bury the bodies. Both became leading members of the IMT. Clearly, Malala’s battle plan was pinned on a simple ground assault of an alternate worldview. It had no room for inhuman drones or gun-toting fanatics. Malala’s kindred spirits are legion.

One person she has a striking resemblance to, in my view, is Rachel Corrie, the American girl who single-handedly unnerved the Israeli army by not being afraid to be crushed by their bulldozers for a just cause. That was also the battle plan of Maiwand’s heroine.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com

12 comments on “Malala Yousufzai: Heroic Pakistani Socialist

  1. Confused narrative on said:

    Why is some of Respect like Yvonne Ridley quoting Craig Murray saying Malala is a poor manipulated tool in the hands of her communist father and that the Taliban are only the symptom of a ‘feudal landlord system’ which is the real issue?

    Are you to demonise her and go on with extolling the Taliban as a ‘resistance’ or what? Its pretty confusing…

  2. andy newman on said:

    Confused narrative: Are you to demonise her and go on with extolling the Taliban as a ‘resistance’ or what? Its pretty confusing…

    Can you point to a single article that has ever appeared on SU that has described the Taliban as the “resistance”.

  3. #3 Whether the blogpost by Murray is correct or not, and whether Yvonne Ridley is correct in her agreement with it, the word ‘communist’ does not appear in it, and it refers to those who carried it out as ‘bigots’ and appalling’.

    So by all means disagree with people but at least quote them accurately and honestly.

  4. prianikoff on said:

    #5 “…..by all means disagree with people but at least quote them accurately and honestly.”

    My sentiments entirely.
    I’m not sure what Yvonne Ridley’s views are, but on Craig Murray’s blog, he says this about the Taliban:-

    (They) “are an extremely nasty manifestation of ancient hatreds and social structures, but their emergence as a potent force could not have happened without genuine grievances to be exploited; it is hard to think of a more egregious grievance than the feudal landlord system.”

    Regarding “political manipulation” of Malala, Murray further argues that:-

    “Her father’s political ambitions centre around a party representing Swat’s rapacious feudal landlord class”

    If so, he’s clearly no communist.

    Powerful people in the West have been trying to use Malala as a political icon since she was 12.
    The fact she was developing into a Marxist by the age of 14 shows that she has a mind of her own.
    The assassin’s bullet failed and hopefully she’ll develop it further when she recovers.

  5. Shosha Mitter on said:

    This is an excellent piece that highlights the heroic deeds of women who attempted to prove that political engagement and struggles for justice and equality in society are not the prerogatives of men alone. Women in all epochs, in all parts of the world have fought against gender oppression to emerge as heroes…
    But i could not help noticing that the author manages to engage in India bashing even on an article which is not about the country.By 1857, the British colonizers had acquired political control over large parts of present day India and had established, in order to consolidate and protect its colonial interests, a powerful army comprising of natives. they occupied the lowest ranks in the military hierarchy and were called the sepoys. They had participated in the Second Afghan war but merely as soldiers of the British Indian army and not as ‘Indians’ because India, as a sovereign nation did not exist in 19th century.