Red shirts: Remembering Pakistan’s Che Guevara 51 years later

Nasir was in and out of jail in 1954 and also exiled for a year.

KARACHI: The man once dubbed the Che Guevara of Pakistan, Hasan Nasir, secretary general of the Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP), was remembered by the National Students Federation (NSF) on his 51st death anniversary on November 13.

While talking at the event on Sunday, journalist Wahid Bashir said that Nasir had voluntarily renounced the luxuries in life. “He was driven by passion,” he said. “He wanted to fight for a just cause, this one time he roamed the streets of Hyderabad [Deccan] aimlessly distributing communist literature.”

He added that Nasir was born in 1928 to an aristocratic family of Hyderabad Deccan and became a communist while studying at the University of Cambridge. He became a member of the CPP soon after it was formed and banned after the 1951 Rawalpindi conspiracy. As a result, the government started a crack down on leftistst. In 1954, he was in and out of jail and was also exiled for a year. “He went to Deccan when he was exiled but managed to return to Pakistan the day his sentence was over,” he said. “Nasir’s commitment to the cause was commendable.”

By 1957, he joined the National Awami Party where he flourished as a communist leader. He was last arrested on August 2, 1960 and killed in a cell at the Lahore Fort in November at the age of 32.

Advocate Akhtar Hussain, a member of the NSF, said that in the 1950s, the NSF was revolutionary but failed to succeed because it broke down into different factions. The University of Karachi NSF secretary Naghma Sheikh said that the young people should stand up with the NSF and fight for their rights.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 15^th,  2011.