{"footnote":"\u003Cp\u003E  Empty the feudal world may have been on several levels, but it always knew how to defend its class interests. My father\u0026rsquo;s membership of the Communist Party of India did not ruffle as many feathers  as he had imagined it would. He was approached by his father and cousins and offered a safe seat \u0026ndash; \u0026lsquo;safe\u0026rsquo; in the sense that, like several others in the region, it was controlled by our family \u0026ndash; in  the 1946 elections to the Punjab Legislative Assembly, which was to help determine the make-up of the Constituent Assembly after the birth of Pakistan in 1947. He took the offer to the Politburo of  the CPI. The comrades were tempted by the thought of gaining easy representation, but finally decided to reject the offer as unprincipled. The person chosen to contest the seat for the CPI was a  veteran working-class militant, Fazal Elahi Qurban, who picked up a few hundred votes as a result of some intensive canvassing by my parents. The actual victor was some obscure relation whose name  I cannot recall.\u003C\/p\u003E\n","audio":[],"video":[]}