The Afterlives of Bakhtiar and Ibrahim: Commemoration and its Uses in the Punjab Labour Movement

Contributed by Ahmad Azhar

In March 1969, two processions of workers moved through the streets of Lahore against the faltering regime of Ayub Khan. One was led by the Hydroelectric Central Labour Union, the other by the railway union of the Mughalpura workshops. At the head of the first was Bashir Ahmad Bakhtiar; at the head of the second, Mirza Muhammad Ibrahim. Between them they had been organising workers in Punjab for close to forty years — and by that point almost everyone around them understood the two to represent opposite things.

Bakhtiar was the 'reformist': the constitutional trade unionist, the man of federations and negotiated settlements, who after Partition helped build the government-sponsored All Pakistan Confederation of Labour. Ibrahim was the 'revolutionary': the communist, president of the Pakistan Trade Union Federation, repeatedly detained under the Public Safety Act because it spared the state the inconvenience of a trial.

Those labels have fixed the men in place ever since. They fit neither of them well; both spent their lives trying to escape the choice; and the way each is remembered today says more about the people doing the remembering than about the lives themselves.

Two plebeian lives

What makes this pair unusual is that we have their own accounts. Almost all the memoir literature of the South Asian left was produced at the top of the movement, by men from educated or elite backgrounds. Bakhtiar and Ibrahim were not those men.

Bakhtiar (1909–1993) came from a middling rural landholding family of the kind being pushed, in those decades, into wage work. He was literate but never went beyond primary school. Adrift in Lahore after the First World War, he was swept up in the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation agitations, drifted towards revolutionary terrorism, and abandoned it around 1929 — roughly with the exodus that followed Bhagat Singh's trial — pledging himself instead to building a labour movement. He worked as a carpenter. By the mid-1930s he was in Amritsar, founding the Amritsar Labour Federation, which at its height held together some seventy unions, many so small that today we would file them under the informal sector.

Ibrahim (1905–1999) was born at Kala Gujran in Jhelum district and had no formal schooling at all. He described his origins bluntly as a bemaalik kisan gharana, a landless peasant household. He was first arrested at sixteen, for taking part in the Khilafat movement, and worked at a brick kiln, as a gardener in a British household, and in the railway workshop at Jhelum before reaching Lahore around 1930 — where he entered the Mughalpura workshops, the largest single employer of industrial labour in the province, as a fitter.

That both were formed by Khilafat is worth pausing on, because it predates anything either would later be classified by. Ibrahim, recalling his political awakening, went back to going out as a boy on prabhat pheris — dawn processions with roots in Sikh devotional practice — to wake people for the morning prayer. Neither man arrived at labour politics from a book.

The same teachers

Both came out of the same school of organising, and both traced it to the same two people: J.B. Miller, the dismissed Irish railway guard who led the great Lahore railway strike of 1920, and M.A. Khan, the middle-class ex-railway servant who handled the negotiating while Miller handled the crowds.

Bakhtiar dedicated his memoirs to them, called what they practised 'genuine' trade unionism, and was explicit about what he took from where: from communists like Sohan Singh Josh he got theoretical knowledge; from Miller and Khan he learnt how the work was actually done. Ibrahim was a member of Miller and Khan's union before the communists ever reached him. He was recruited into a clandestine cell by an MA student named Jai Gopal, who approached him in workman's clothes and whom Ibrahim at first took for a police informer, threatening to beat him.

The split between the two currents was real, but late and institutional rather than doctrinal. It came with the Second World War, when the movement broke between the Royist Indian Federation of Labour and the official communists. Bakhtiar's federation went one way; Ibrahim stayed with the party and by 1946 led the North Western Railway Workers' Union. Jai Gopal — Ibrahim's own recruiter, who had also run study circles for Bakhtiar's federation in Amritsar — went with the Royists, and Ibrahim later found himself leading a demonstration against M.N. Roy.

Read the two accounts side by side and the 1930s look nothing like a confrontation between two philosophies. They look like a crowded, argumentative common ground, where the red flag was carried by people who agreed on very little, and where the categories that later hardened had not yet been handed out.

The babu and the fitter

Where the men genuinely differ is in how each handled the barrier between workers and the educated men who claimed to lead them.

Bakhtiar crossed it. He emulated the professional trade unionists he admired — barristers and educated men like Khan, M.A. Ghani, Dewan Chaman Lal — in their bearing and clothes as much as their politics. Organising construction workers early on, he put on clean clothes before facing their employer, and noted with satisfaction that the labourers called him babu. In jail, the other inmates called him master ji. The cover of his memoirs superimposes a photograph of Bakhtiar at a podium, suited and wearing a fez, on a photograph of workers seated on the floor listening. That is the transformation the book is about: from mazdur to babu, and the man knew it.

Bakhtiar crossed it. He emulated the professional trade unionists he admired — barristers and educated men like Khan, M.A. Ghani, Dewan Chaman Lal — in their bearing and clothes as much as their politics. Organising construction workers early on, he put on clean clothes before facing their employer, and noted with satisfaction that the labourers called him babu. In jail, the other inmates called him master ji. The cover of his memoirs superimposes a photograph of Bakhtiar at a podium, suited and wearing a fez, on a photograph of workers seated on the floor listening. That is the transformation the book is about: from mazdur to babu, and the man knew it.

He was never only that. The same figure went round Amritsar on the back of a camel with a bugle, and stayed on a picket line the day he learnt of his child's death. A photograph in the Bakhtiar Labour Hall in Lahore shows him on an elephant, surrounded by a crowd

celebrating a strike victory. I once took that image for a plain display of hierarchy between workers and their representative — until the man seated beside him in the photograph told me flatly that the workers had arranged the elephant themselves, as a mark of respect.

Ibrahim never attempted the crossing, and was no less effective for it: the union he founded in 1948 counted more than ninety thousand members by 1960 and stopped the railways completely for thirteen days in October 1967. Asked late in life about Faiz Ahmed Faiz and other progressive intellectuals, he said he could never really be one of them, and gave as evidence something very small: he chewed paan and spat it out, and they laughed at him. Faiz was his union's first General Secretary. The distance Ibrahim describes was not a distance from strangers; it ran through his own organisation. Of his 'intellectual' comrades he used the phrase laat sahab de puttar — the sons of gentlemen. He respected them for betraying their own class, and was equally clear that they remained a class, and that he was not in it.

Two strategies for the same problem, and neither a solution. What Bakhtiar joined was a labour bureaucracy consolidating itself as a distinct layer; what Ibrahim's refusal preserved, it preserved at a distance he never stopped feeling.

Testimony from the edge

Both men left their account of themselves at the moment they were being displaced, and this is not a coincidence.

Bakhtiar's memoirs appeared in Urdu at the turn of the 1970s, during the upsurge that carried Bhutto to power, when a new leadership was rising from the rank and file. He said outright that he feared the next generation would conclude his own had been incapable and had not known how to do the work. Ibrahim's testimony was recorded on video in his last years, the final interview days before his death in August 1999, when he had outlived nearly everyone he discussed and had no position left to protect. The loosening of a public role is what makes both sources valuable: these are men no longer performing.

And at that late point the verdicts converge. Bakhtiar's complaint had always been that the communists were not sincere to labour's cause — not that their theory was wrong, but that they wanted to leap over the slow work of building organisations in which workers did the planning and directing themselves. Ibrahim arrived somewhere very close, and was not repudiating the theory either. What he questioned was whether a lifetime inside the party had ever demonstrated the equality it taught; his answer, delivered without bitterness and with real respect for individual comrades, was that it had not. Two men classified for fifty years as opposites, ending on the same judgement.

The ghosts of trade unionists past

Both are remembered. Neither is remembered as himself. And the two forms the remembering takes are so cleanly opposed they might have been designed as an illustration.

Bakhtiar survives as infrastructure. The network of Bakhtiar Labour Halls still provides the spaces in which Pakistani working-class politics assembles, and his name confers legitimacy on rooms full of people who could not say much about him. At his twenty-fourth death anniversary, observed outside the hall on Nisbat Road in 2017, the tributes came from a retired judge, a retired brigadier, WAPDA's general manager for human resources, the chief

executive of the Lahore electricity company, and a singer. To call this co-optation would be too easy and not quite right; Bakhtiar spent his life arguing that labour had to be able to sit in such rooms. But it is a particular kind of afterlife, and meanwhile the unbundled stacks of his autobiography gather dust in a corner of the same building. He is a name on a hall and an unread book inside it.

Ibrahim survives as a saint. He is Baba-e-Mehnat-Kashan, father of the toilers; there is an award in his name; and every spring, near May Day, a Mazdoor-Tulba Mela is held in his memory by a students' collective together with the railway workers' union, with poetry and plays and the recollections of ageing activists. Union propaganda on the walls of the Mughalpura workshops still carries his name. Students entering left politics learn to treat his life as an allegory for the rise and fall of labour radicalism in Pakistan. An allegory is a life with the arguments taken out.

The asymmetry runs into the historical record itself. Ibrahim has an encyclopedia entry, obituaries, a Wikipedia page; Bakhtiar has a handful of passing mentions in the institutional histories of federations that split and re-split. That is not a measure of their relative importance in their own lifetimes. It is a measure of who has found each of them useful since.

The pattern is not confined to Pakistan. A movement that loses its institutional footing tends to keep its leaders in whichever form asks least of it — a building, an anniversary, a morality tale, a saint's name — and each form preserves the man by discarding the thing he was arguing about. Bakhtiar and Ibrahim spent their careers refusing to be sorted into 'reform' and 'revolution'. They are remembered today almost entirely through that sorting, each commemorated by precisely the constituency it assigned him.

Both left instructions about how they wanted to be read. Bakhtiar wrote so that later workers would know what the pioneers had gone through and would not assume their predecessors had simply been incompetent. Ibrahim talked, at ninety-four and with nothing left to gain, about what the movement had and had not proved. Neither asked for a hall or an anniversary. Both asked to be argued with — which, of the various things we do to the dead of the labour movement, is the one we most reliably neglect.