Pakistan – a powder keg ready to explode


Peter Taaffe, Socialist Party general secretarySOCIALIST
PARTY general secretary Peter Taaffe (left) was recently on a speaking
tour of south Asia. Here he describes his visit to Pakistan.

NOTHING CAN prepare you for leaving the quite modern Karachi Airport
to confront for the first time the living hell of the sprawling
conurbation of Karachi. Transport spews out noxious gases, going the
wrong way along the ‘motorway’. There are more flies than I have seen in
my life, buzzing around waste littering the streets.

I was no normal tourist, whistled from the airport to an ‘upmarket’
city-centre hotel. I was here at the invitation of Pakistan’s
fastest-growing left organisation, the Socialist Movement Pakistan (SMP).
I later attended the SMP Congress.

I was taken to a ‘two-star’ hotel, which at first glance I took to be
another of the slum dwellings I saw on the journey from the airport.
This residence, whose poorly-paid staff were extremely polite and
helpful, would certainly not make it onto the guest house list of a
British seaside resort!

While there, I had a glimpse of the nightmare for the masses in
‘modern’ Pakistan. In baking heat, day and night, the electricity and
with it the fans, could suddenly cut without warning. Just after I left,
the city suffered a three-day power cut, which left no water for
washing, sewage disposal, etc.

Horror without end

Lenin once described capitalism as "horror without end" for
the working class and poor. Pakistan is a living example of this and
Karachi, once its industrial centre and still the fearless centre of
working class resistance, gives a face to this horror.

I spoke at meetings in Hyderabad and Tandojan, moving from the
‘fifth’ world to the ‘sixth’, in terms of the masses’ conditions and the
degradation that capitalism means for them.

It is eight years since I was last in Pakistan and the deterioration
in conditions was palpable. A minister in Musharraf’s regime admitted
while I was there that "63% of the population are on or below the
poverty line". Behind these bare statistics is terrible suffering
and despair.

The newspapers reported on the burgeoning numbers of people
committing suicide; one woman in Tandojan killed herself and her five
children by throwing herself into the river because she had not eaten
for a number of days.

Another unfortunate Pakistani man tried to escape this hell for a job
in Malaysia, which is now short of labour because of the government’s
policies of persecuting and deporting ‘illegal’ immigrants. He was
refused entry, returned home and decided to end it all.

Pakistan is a byword for poverty, disease and suffering. Recently,
outside Lahore Press Club, 20 kiln workers lifted their shirts to
display savage scars on their bodies. This was the result of their
‘donation’ of a kidney for money to pay off crippling loans to their
kiln bosses. In one Punjabi village, 3,000 people donated their kidneys.
Most of these ‘donations’ don’t go to rich Westerners but to rich
Pakistanis.

Their kidneys are damaged beyond repair because of the poisoning of
the water supply – itself a product of the capitalist system – which
tends to disintegrate their kidneys’ effectiveness. 83% of Lahore’s
water supply, for instance, is polluted. Poor people whose kidneys fail
face a lingering and terrible death.

Despite these horrors, what is lacking in the situation is a clear
consciousness of the potential power of the working class. The lack of
this broad ‘subjective’ factor, particularly of a mass, radical
socialist party that can act as a pole of attraction, can delay a
revolutionary explosion. However, such is the potential in this society
that an ‘accident’ could ignite an explosion from the masses.

Ruling class split

PAKISTAN IS a powder keg ready to explode at any time. Some of the
objective prerequisites of a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary
situation exist. Its ruling class is riven with hesitation and split
from top to bottom. Musharraf is besieged by a rising tide of mass
discontent and is hesitant on how to deal with this.

He tried reforms from the top, establishing a fig leaf of a
‘parliament’. Real power is wielded by the bloated military caste which
has ruled Pakistan for most of the 57 years since its formation.

According to Assad, a telecommunications trade union leader and SMP
member, the military amassed immense wealth as well as power. It is now
probably the country’s biggest industrial conglomerate, with investments
in sugar, coal and land, where it has a virtual monopoly and where
prices have been rocketing.

An Islamabad worker commented: "The Pakistani people since 1947
were told to respect the army, but that has all gone, there is now a
hatred for them and the police for perpetuating our misery."

Musharraf is desperately seeking points of support because of the
failure of the military’s political face, the governing Pakistan Muslim
League. Islamic ‘fundamentalists’ in the coalition, whose largest
component is Jaamat Islami, which up to now supported the government,
have now deserted it.

This right-wing party – with 34 of its Central Committee members
millionaires or billionaires – has to seek its distance from Musharraf
because of the growing mood that we must "get rid of the
army". The mullahs dominating Jaamat Islami want to convince the
capitalists that they can do a better job than Musharraf with the same
policies. They launched a ‘million march’ aiming to remove the military
this year.

The other major parties joined in, in words at least, with this aim.
Prominent amongst them is the Peoples’ Party Pakistan (PPP) led by
Benazir Bhutto. However, the ‘Peoples’ Party will do anything except
mobilise the people on a radical, socialist and revolutionary programme.

Its two demands on the military are: 1) Bring back Benazir; 2) Bring
back her husband. Shamefully Benazir has been involved in discussions
with Musharraf’s government, with a view to the PPP participating in
some ‘transitional’ arrangement with Musharraf’s regime.

Change of society

LANDLORDS AND capitalists see that Pakistan’s military is on its last
legs and are urging it to stand down. The PPP is no longer the radical,
‘socialist’ or populist party of the past, but just another bourgeois
party, full of careerists, capitalists, feudals and place-seekers.

The most politically developed sections of the working class see no
hope in a PPP government. This does not mean that the masses, more in
hope than expectation, will not vote PPP to get rid of the military. But
the belief that anything can be achieved from this party is misplaced.

Musharraf has been warned by the bourgeois press that unless the mood
of opposition is channelled into a ‘democratic’ parliament convened by
elections, it will take an extra-parliamentary form, with
"dangerous" implications for the system. Musharraf, however,
is desperately seeking to produce his own counterweight to this by
touring the country to speak at "mass" meetings, where people
are dragooned to attend.

In all this, however, the masses’ poverty and frustration and the
political level of the more developed sections of the working class
shines through. Pakistan may be poor but its guiding layers of the
working class are rich in ideas, confidence and preparedness to struggle
to change society.

This is where the SMP comes in. The Congress produced a series of
documents and demands which can rally the best of the Pakistani working
class, the exploited peasantry, the youth, the national minorities and
the viciously oppressed women in a movement to change society.

It has set itself the task of building a viable revolutionary
organisation. The framework is already in place. This is the only hope
for showing the oppressed Pakistani workers and youth a way out of the
terrible morass which is Pakistan today.