Tariq Ali: “Street Fighting Man”
by Radha Spratt
In 1968, Mick Jagger wrote ‘Street Fighting Man’ as an homage to Tariq Ali, and the BBC refused to play the song. An irate Jagger asked Ali if he could print the lyrics in his newspaper and he did, true to his reputation as the voice of the unheard. “In sleepy London town, there’s just no place for a street fighting man,” sings Jagger in his sexy rasping drawl; happily, that’s not the case today.
London is Tariq Ali’s home, and here he carries on the crusade he began as a student in the early 1960s. Through his books, films, articles and trademark forthright talks and interviews, he tells the whole truth in a wry and incisive way.
SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) recently hosted one such searing talk – ‘Pakistan in the Context of Global Politics’ – at which he spoke about the country’s complex relationship with the United States, and the many internal problems that plague it.
The US needs the assistance of the Pakistani military to carry on its activities in Afghanistan, but it “violates its sovereignty without a second thought, launches drone attacks against its population, and then carries out a Hollywood-style operation in Abbottabad.” Ali stresses that although he has “no time for Osama or that organisation” he disagrees with the precedent US actions set. “Whenever anyone else does it, they’re charged with war crimes,” he states emphatically. Above all, he outlined, the US “essentially want to de-fang Pakistan and take the nuclear weapons away.” The pressure to do that “comes from one power and one power alone – Israel – which doesn’t want its monopoly in that large Middle East-Near Eastern region to be challenged.”
US ambitions cause chronic instability within Pakistan, made worse by the fact that leaders of some groups within the Balochistan and Sindh provinces imagine that co-operating with the US will gain them independence: “these are foolish dreams; nightmares actually. We don’t want any more divisions in that part of the world.” Ali points out that “for the United States, its interests are much larger than those of small nationalities who they sometimes use for their own purposes,” and points to the similarly disappointed Kurds in Iraq.
He terms “Pakistan’s tragedy” as being “an irrational short-sighted elite which has never put the interests of its people first,” and calls the current President, Asif Ali Zardari, “one of the largest crooks Pakistan has produced.” Zardari has been jailed for corruption, and earned the moniker ‘Mr. 10 Percent’ for the kickbacks he’s taken when in power amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars.
When asked by a member of the audience why such politicians continue to enjoy support from their parties, Ali chuckles and quotes from The Godfather: “’It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.’ You have a huge outfit now, led by a quite hard-core set of gang-leaders at the top who have been accumulating property and money, not shared equally; it’s difficult to crack that structure. It’s not a political problem as much as a problem of how to deal with incredibly well-organised crime. The fact that they are both criminals and politicians is the story of Pakistan.” Although many see the military as countering this menace, Ali claims that “when the military becomes the arbiter, politics becomes meaningless. In Pakistan, they are over-determined and over-dominant.”
Ali also condemns the feudal elite for being “shamelessly” self-interested and criticises the Bhutto administration of the 1970s for failing to make sweeping land reforms; instead Bhutto used the threat of reform “as a sword over landlord’s heads to force them to join his party. One reason India took off was because they did it, and huge landlords were no longer in power,” Ali laments. He calls the moneyed world of the elite class a “bubble-world”, distinct from the “real world” in which the majority of people live. Pakistan’s real problems – for those who don’t have the money – are to do with a lack of the basics, like education and healthcare.
“Despite these,” he remarks, “it is not the case that the majority of Pakistanis are rushing into the arms of religious fundamentalists.” During elections, “religious groups never win more than 10% of the vote nationally, and that one should never forget.” He speaks of an increase in spiritualism and religiosity in many parts of the world, including Pakistan, being a result of people feeling increasingly alienated.
The issue of what the common man can do to regain control arises, and Ali offers in response: “Change will have to come from within Pakistan to be viable. It’s not going to come from the present structures; it has to come from the new generations”. He speaks of a recent peasant movement, comprising Christians and Muslims of various denominations, which had successfully challenged the military’s attempts to threaten and cajole them off their ancestral lands. As for the substantial diaspora, “at the height of the floods, the President was here signing a deal for a multi-million pound apartment on the corner of Hyde Park; British Pakistanis should have bloody stormed that!”
When asked in a recent interview with Riz Khan how he would like to be remembered, Tariq Ali said, “I guess I would like to be remembered as a dissenter. As someone who always said what needed to be said in bad times to those in power or those who had become the acolytes and sycophants of power.” Amen to that.
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