[In the following review, Addy credits Ali for his overview of the geopolitics of India in Can Pakistan Survive?, but faults him for not going beyond the “commonly held perceptions of the Left” in the book.]

The creation of Pakistan was for its founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a triumph of will and tactical acumen. For the Muslims of the subcontinent, whose cherished homeland this was to be, its consequences were fraught with tragedy. Jinnah had fondly hoped to build the new state in his own image: liberal, cosmopolitan, secular. But, as Tariq Ali observes [in Can Pakistan Survive?], it was a house built on sand. With Islam as its raison d'être, the country's ruling class consisted mainly of an unholy crew of Punjabi landlords and bureaucrats, a Punjabi-dominated military and a middle-class refugee element from Uttar Pradesh in India who had first voiced the idea of a promised land, only to lose out to the military-bureaucratic rump for whom any prospect of sharing office was an anathema.

The subject masses, Punjabi, Sindhi, Pathan, Baluchi, and the majority Bengalis separated from the rest by 1,000 miles of Indian territory, resisted all attempts, to chasten them into a common Islamic shape. Conflicting national, social, political and economic currents joined to fuel an explosive Bengali uprising in 1971, leading to the emergence of an independent Bangladesh.

In perhaps the strongest part of this book, Tariq Ali discusses the civilian interlude of Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto which followed this débâcle. The new Prime Minister's quicksilver intelligence was anchored to few moral constraints. He could be in turn coarse and charming, a man of the crowd and an aristocrat; but, like most demagogues, was prone to trim his sails to the prevailing wind. He appeased the Shah abroad and the mullahs at home in a desperate bid to retain power. However, every concession to his Islamic clerics emboldened them to ask for more. In the end they got in General Zia the obscurantist of their dreams and Bhutto paid for his weakness with his life.

As with Bhutto, so also with Jinnah. Recalling Lenin's observation that Shaw was a good man fallen among Fabians, Tariq Ali gives the impression that the Quaid-i-Azam was similarly placed in the Muslim League. Whatever Jinnah's early or inner distastes for mass politics he became a past master at manipulating these for his own ends. The ruthless methods by which he destroyed the Unionist inter-communal party of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs in the Punjab would have done credit to a Tammany Hall mobster. Pirs and mullahs were pressed into service in the 1946 provincial elections. Their price inevitably was to be confessional politics in a confessional state. For Jinnah to have expected otherwise was a delusion.

Tariq Ali stresses correctly the contributions of the other players in the tragedy of India's partition: British deviousness, Congress obduracy, Hindu fanaticism and communist stupidity. In conclusion, a lot is said about the geopolitics of the region and the pressures facing Pakistan from Iran and Afghanistan without adding significantly to the commonly held perceptions of the Left. A deeper exploration of India's position and confidence would surely have been more fruitful.

The ties between India and the Soviet Union constitute one expression of this confidence. They are a fact of life and a stable one at that in a highly unstable world. However severe the buffetings from China and America, Indian foreign policy has proved exceptionally durable. Wisely, Tariq Ali refrains from prophesying a quick end to Zia's regime. Short of a military adventure it could be with us for some years yet. But go it will, eventually.