Setting off this morning for a very short early stroll round my hotel, having gone a hundred yards or so, I find myself walking into the Lahore High Court. All brick, it’s vast, a fine example of Victorian gothic.
Full of smartly dressed lawyers, whose 2008/9 battle against first the dictator Musharraf and then the new president, Zardari, to get the Chief Justice Iftikar Choudery reinstated is one of the few real victories for democracy we’ve seen here in years. They had to demonstrate again and again, often, despite their smart suits, being savagely beaten police using latti, five foot batons. Despite the building crawling with police, staffing electronic security doors and new, elegantly designed small watch towers on the perimeter wall - Lahore has seen some awful suicide bombings in the last eighteen months – there is an air of brisk efficiency.
Late morning and early afternoon is spent with the bright young comrade Umer, who is interested in ideas. We agree to walk and talk around the Lahore fort, and then, next to it, to the Badshahi mosque and finally, with the little time left, we have a curry on the roof of an old courtesan’s house, now restaurant, overlooking both fort and mosque. The only hassle is from a nasty young plain clothes ISI (intelligence) officer who tries to get Umer to tell him who I am and why I’m going to the mosque. It is amazing, and quite shocking that it doesn’t seem to occur to him that I’m visiting this fantastic building as a tourist. Rather, as the only ‘gora’ (white person) in sight, I’m viewed with suspicion. The mosque is simply breath taking, one of the great buildings of the world. The architect cleverly laid out a huge courtyard in front of it, so everyone has to see the mosque as a whole on entering.
Our conversation ranges from why in the early modern period; merchant capitalism takes off in Europe and not in the much richer and more powerful regions of India and China to how to be active as a socialist. Umer wants to set up a socialist community. I argue that the efforts of the great utopian socialists Fourier and Robert Owen all failed, no island of socialism in a hostile world is possible and that the community has to be a community of activists, a revolutionary party. Umer has avoided being a student so far, organising his own reading (from Marx to Nietzsche), being an activist – in an old style communist party - and traveling. He’s been to the north, visiting a Maoist village replete with red flags and chanting, surrounded by villages with Islamist flags and chanting, all extremely poor, none of them a model for anybody. Next year he plans to become a student, perhaps in Canada.
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