Mazdoor Kissan Party Circular
The Circular was the official organ of the party. Published on cyclostyled sheets, and distributed by hand, it was meant to be circulated only among party members. In total, at least a hundred issues were produced during the party’s heyday in the 1970s. Despite a decline in the party’s organising and eventual splits, the Circular continued to run well into the 1980s and ‘90s, undergoing changes in its name, from the Mazdoor Kissan Party Circular, to Proletari, and finally, Bulletin.
▴ A sketch from the Circular that reads, “Freedom: Those Who Till, Shall Eat Their Fill”.
A sketch from the Circular that reads, “Freedom: Those Who Till, Shall Eat Their Fill”. This slogan is traced back to seventeenth century revolutionary, Shah Inayat Shaheed, who led a peasant movement to liberate land in Sindh and found a rural commune. The movement was eventually crushed by an alliance of regional lords and the Mughal state. The slogan has since found echo in rural movements in North India, invoked during Left-wing agrarian struggles in the 1960s and ‘70s in Pakistan as well.
▴ A cover bearing the heading: “Jab Tuk Mulk Mein Mazdoor Kissan Hain, Mazdoor Kissan Party Zinda Hai” (Till There Are Workers and Peasants In The Country, The Mazdoor Kissan Party Is Alive)
▴ A page from an issue. Article titles include “The Iran-Iraq War” and “The Second Convention of the Dehaat Mazdoor Unit”
▴ An urdu poem by Manzoor Niazi in the April 1988 issue of the Circular
▴ A page from an issue. Article titles include “The Elections in India”, and an obituary for the Indian anti-colonial progressive writer, Krishan Chandar
▴ A page from an issue. Article titles include, “A New Tradition of Sacrificing Life”, “The Death of a Workers’ Leader”, and “Five Years in Jail with the Naxalites”
▴ A page from an issue. The heading reads, “The Vietnamese Revolution and Culture”
▴ A page from an issue. The heading reads, “Mozambique has been liberated: The scarlet sun of freedom shines in the dark jungles of Africa by Comrade Samora Machel” The article is an Urdu translation of an essay by Samora Moisés Machel (1933 –1986). Machel was a Mozambiqan military commander and political leader. A socialist and Maxist-Leninist, he served as the first President of Mozambique after the country's independence in 1975.