In 1952, the Criminal Investigation Department of Punjab published two volumes titled, The Communist Party of West Pakistan in Action. Pakistani communists, it claimed, had built “a powerful party machine” out of the devastation of Partition. Migrant communists from India had succeeded in reviving a party decimated by the chaos, forced migration, and massacres that accompanied independence in 1947. Pakistan was left with a depleted communist base in poor financial shape. Nevertheless, the report's authors claimed, Pakistani communists were now fomenting a conspiracy to overthrow the government.

But more than the party or its ill-fated 1951 conspiracy, it was international communism itself that posed the biggest threat to Pakistan. Communism, the report declared, was “the most inexorable and momentous political force in the contemporary world.” Its “strength and potentialities (were) often under-estimated,” especially in Pakistan where this complacency was partly drawn from the belief that communism and Islam were “incompatible.” And yet, as the increasing influence of communism in one Muslim society after another attested to – in Malaya, Afghanistan, Iran, and Egypt – the Communist Party and its affiliates could not be underestimated. Their “insidious” techniques, “fanatical zeal,” and “single mindedness of purpose” meant that communism would continue to be a dangerous adversary.

The Communist Party of Pakistan was formally banned in 1954, but the danger its ideas posed remained a source of concern, anxiety, and paranoia for decades to come.