In the last period there has been an increasing tendency of the ruling political elite to use All Parties Conferences (APC) and Joint Investigation Teams (JIT) as instruments to justify state repression, solve their rows on sharing their plunder and dupe ordinary people. However, these masquerades increasingly fail to salvage the delusion of the supposedly genuine contradictions between the governmental and ‘oppositional’ political elite. Any real schism of economic policy or ideological differences between various political parties of the political superstructure of Pakistani capitalism has been obliterated by the cumbersome experiences of the masses.
The latest APC was held on Balochistan. All the parties’ representatives slavishly adopted the military establishment’s narrative pushed in the hands of Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif. He talked of a ‘foreign hand’ in the latest gruesome massacre of Pashtuns travelling on a bus in Mastung. Balochistan has gone through four major armed insurgencies over the last 60 years, with the current insurgency going on since 2002. The people of Balochistan have suffered kidnapping, murder and the dumping of mutilated bodies by ‘elusive forces’. This has fuelled alienation and is pushing many to align themselves with separatist organisations. The revulsion of these people suffering class and national oppression is piling up not just against the forces of the state but also against political tycoons including the Baloch and Pashtun elite politicians in cohorts with the state and the system.
The APC a day earlier had agreed upon the route of the so-called economic corridor to be supposedly built by Chinese corporate investors. However, none of these politicians raised the ramifications of this ambitious project. None dared to ask who benefits most. How much more burden will be heaped upon the already impoverished masses in Pakistan from the interests of Chinese loans? Will these projects really create any jobs? And how much will those oppressed villages and other areas on the route benefit from the corridor? Instead, these contractor politicos confined themselves to how the contracts’ profits are going to be disbursed and shared between different segments of this political elite.
As is the routine, a rhetorical attack on the project by some Indian bureaucrat or politician was a convenient alibi for the content of the ‘joint’ declaration and agreement put out to the media by the APC. This also enabled participants to come to an unspoken agreement with the Sharif government’s assault on the masses with a drastic 50 percent cut in power subsidies at the behest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in order for Pakistan to receive $ 506 million inflows before June 30. The right wing capitalist regime of the PML-N has embarked upon an aggressive neoliberal economic crusade that has pulverised the masses. The budget for 2015-16 decisively tilts in the favour of corporate capitalists; the obscenely rich and corrupt construction magnates can indulge in speculation and fraud. All parties of the friendly opposition could only come up with meek criticisms while there was a feeling of mass indignation amongst the oppressed.
The working classes have had enough of this democratic facade and the deceptive onslaught on their livelihoods that have deteriorated terribly under the so- called civilian democratic rule. They are now seeing through the hypocritical rows and harangues of these corrupt politicians and their experts. They have been duped, abused and exploited to the hilt in the name of democracy, representation, constitution, law, parliament, freedom of speech and good governance. The ‘danger’ of military rule and the so-called conflict between the civilian and military rulers is nothing more than a row on getting the lucrative contracts of juicy projects. Ordinary people have reaped only misery and deprivation. Basic human necessities such as water, electricity, health facilities, education, sewage, employment and the right to live a decent human life are being denied to most. More and more children are being left out of school; health provisions have become a luxury they cannot afford, deaths of women during childbirth are rising, justice is such an expensive commodity that 90 percent of the population cannot afford it, violence has marred their lives and crime and vandalism rule the roost in society.
When Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto signed the Charter of Democracy in London on May 14, 2006 under US and UK imperialist dictates, a new strategy of ‘reconciliation’ was unleashed as a new, effective tool for the mainstream political parties to dupe the masses and provide a tangible blanket for the safeguard of capitalist coercion and imperialist plunder. Benazir later wrote the book on elaborating class collaborationism in the form of this theory of reconciliation. The truth is Benazir and other PPP leaders abandoned socialism in the beginning of the 1980s. Other so-called progressive parties, after the collapse of the USSR, rejected class struggle as an outmoded ideology. Hence, the movements of the workers and the youth were betrayed again and again to subdue the masses into a permanent mode of demoralisation and apathy. The inertia in society during the present period is rooted in this political betrayal and the sell-out of these ‘left’ and traditional populist leaders.
However, these schemes and travails of the experts of the corporate bosses are nothing new for Marxists. Lenin wrote a long time ago: “The other method the bourgeoisie employs against the movement is that of dividing the workers, disrupting their ranks, bribing individual representatives or certain groups of the proletariat with the object of winning them over to its side. These are not feudal but purely bourgeois and modern methods, in keeping with the developed and civilised customs of capitalism with the democratic system. For the democratic system is a feature of bourgeois society, the most pure and perfect bourgeois feature, in which the utmost freedom, scope and clarity of the class struggle are combined with the utmost cunning, with ruses and subterfuges aimed at spreading the ‘ideological’ influence of the bourgeoisie among the wage-slaves with the object of diverting them from their struggle against wage- slavery” (Lenin Collected Works, Volume 20).
Paradoxically, in the last analysis, this treachery will boomerang on the ruling classes and their imperialist bosses. The masses have lost every illusion in these leaders and in this phase of ennui and deafening silence are, in fact, rejecting the whole political and socio-economic system. They now are aware that all these democratic and religious politicians are usurpers and crooks. The governments and oppositions in this capitalist political gimmickry are two sides of the same coin. Their conflicts are for share in plunder and power, representing the reactionary and criminal Pakistani ruling classes. They are not adversaries but partners in the delinquency of ravaging society. The real adversaries are the working people and the political superstructure as a whole. In its own crises with rotting state structures, vulture imperialist bosses and their billionaire mullah aristocracy involved in terror and bloodshed, the system is doomed. Now the workers and youth will have their say, sooner rather than later.
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at [email protected]