Teaching and talking politics in Lahore

Saturday 27 November, Lahore
The students starting today come from a range of industries, home-based women workers, small factories employing both men and women and the brick industry. They’re in various organisations: the Labour Resource Centre, the Organisation for Women’s Rights and the Bonded Labour Liberation Front. This last is the brick kiln workers who are traditionally locked into debt slavery, passed on through the generations, possibly the most exploited workers in Pakistan. Bonded labour is now illegal but, as always, the problem is getting the law implemented.

As the participants shake off their nervousness , the course takes off and there’s a lively finish to the day discussing women’s oppression and how to fight it, with the men in one group and three groups of women.

This evening, Rizwan, editor of a smallish magazine with a serious interest in socialist theory, comes and we go for a cup of tea in Anarkali an old street now mercifully pedestrianised, full of cafes in the very centre of the city. A little later we are joined by first two and then more students. Anarkali is the traditional meeting place of the left, artists and the intelligentsia. It was once one of the great cultural centres of the Indian subcontinent but repression by military dictators and the rise of Islamic militancy, usually encouraged by politicians, has reduced it to a shadow of what it was. We drink lots of delicious Kashmiri tea, flavoured with almonds and finish agreeing that we will have a meeting tomorrow on ‘Education, capitalism and the student revolt in Britain’.

Sunday 28 November, Lahore
The facilities for teaching in the basement of the hotel are basic but OK. By far the worst problem is when the imam in the mosque across the road starts the midday prayers making a horrible noise through an ugly set of loudspeakers. Today we do 'The Great Money Trick taken from a chapter in Robert Tressell’s famous 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, in which the hero does a role play with his work mates to explain how capitalism works, using bread and penknives and pennies. No pennies or rupee coins available so we use sweets and spoons instead of penknives.

The evening is with a dozen or so leftist students, in a student flat cum office in a suburb somewhere in this vast city with well over five million inhabitants. . All the papers here, including the Urdu ones, have front page colour photos of students and police confronting each other in Whitehall, they are keen to talk about the new movement in Britain. As often happens here, we finish with a long and useful discussion about basic socialist ideas. I get back to my hotel on the back of a motorbike courtesy of Irfan with two stops en route to meet with leftist friends of his, old and young, sitting at the roadside or in a café.