The April 2025 Indo-Pak conflict exposed deep divisions in Pakistan’s Left, revealing its reliance on outdated frameworks, internal contradictions, and failure to connect with people’s struggles against imperialism and state oppression.
By Muhammad Umar Ali and Syed Azeem
The April 2025 Indo-Pak conflict, sparked by Indian strikes following the Pahalgam attack in Jammu and Kashmir, triggered intense debate within Pakistan’s Left. The responses revealed long-standing ideological rifts, exposing how fragmented strands of the Left continue to grapple with outdated frameworks and strategic confusion.
The traditional Left, comprising pro-Soviet and pro-China factions, struggled to reconcile their historic reliance on Indian communist parties with the reality of India’s aggression. While some distanced themselves from the Indian Left’s pro-government line, many fell back on unprincipled pacifism, failing to offer a robust analysis of the conflict. Their stance reflected a deeper historical legacy: tailing Indian nationalism, downplaying Pakistan’s legitimacy, and reducing revolutionary politics to liberal democracy and NGO activism.
In contrast, newer Left groups such as the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (HKP) and the Awami Workers Party’s (AWP) younger faction attempted sharper interventions. HKP condemned Indian aggression, framing it as part of a Western-backed “new Cold War” with India serving as a proxy against China. This analysis, however, drew criticism for mirroring Pakistani military narratives. Meanwhile, AWP’s Ayyaz Malick advanced a Gramscian critique, branding both India and Pakistan as aspiring sub-imperialist powers while stressing the dangers of chauvinism and war hysteria. Yet this approach risked abstraction, lacking a concrete revolutionary program rooted in indigenous struggles.
Historically, Maoist factions in Pakistan offered a more grounded analysis, linking partition, class oppression, and peasant struggles to the region’s contradictions. But decades of state repression, internal rifts, and ideological drift weakened their influence. As a result, Pakistan’s Left today finds itself caught between liberal pacifism, NGO-driven activism, and fragmented social movement politics.
The conflict has underscored three urgent challenges: the rise of China as an expansionist power, India’s turn toward Hindutva-driven fascism, and Israel’s growing regional role. Yet the Pakistani Left has failed to address these dynamics with clarity, often reducing their responses to recycled narratives or geopolitics divorced from mass struggles.
Ultimately, the essay argues, the Left must re-root itself in people’s resistance—whether in Kashmir, Balochistan, or India’s Adivasi and Dalit movements. Calls for abstract peace or big-tent politics will not suffice. Only a revolutionary program, led by workers, peasants, and marginalized groups, can chart an independent anti-imperialist path in South Asia.
