Daily Times

This July 5 marked the 37th anniversary of the most vicious and darkest episode in Pakistan’s history. On that doomed night Pakistan was brutalised by a bloody military coup, the vicious legacy of which continues to torment society in the garb of a deceptive democracy. The coup led by general Ziaul Haq ushered in a period of misery, pain, brutality and repression for millions and was reactionary and counterrevolutionary, resulting in throwing back the movement of the masses. The country’s prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who came to power on a socialist programme, was deposed and incarcerated. In April 1979, he was gruesomely hanged in a judicial murder with the complicity of imperialism, reactionary politicos and the judiciary subservient to the army.

The tyrant Ziaul Haq’s 11-year despotic rule was a nightmare. Thousands were flogged publicly and hundreds were sent to the gallows and tortured in the notorious centres of state incarceration. The main targets were the left-wing and PPP activists alongside trade unionists, poor peasants, oppressed nationalities, minorities and women. There was a flurry of massacres, from the mass killing of the workers of the Colony Textile Mills in Multan in 1978 to the genocide of the peasants and youth during the 1983 MRD movement in Sindh.

These atrocities were the ruling elite’s vile vengeance against the workers, peasants and the youth who had dared to revolt against the existing exploitative order and challenge the relations of property and ownership of wealth, land, and the means of production in Pakistan, a decade earlier. Bhutto failed to abolish this exploitative system but did bruise sections of the ruling elite through his nationalisations and radical reforms that were the by-product of the pressure of the 1968-69 movement.

Art, literature, music, culture, cinema and social life as a whole were strangulated by obscurantist repression. However, most industrialists and landlords were ecstatic. Not only did they get back the industries nationalised by Bhutto with hefty compensation, the military dictatorship also promoted draconian, pro-capitalist, repressive policies in the economy and society.

All this was done in the name of Islam. US and European imperialism not only endorsed this vicious dictatorship but also sponsored and supported this Islamic fundamentalist cruelty. Yet today they have the cheek to shout about democracy, human rights and freedom. What the imperialists mean by ‘democracy’ is freedom for the capitalists and the defence of privilege within the market economy, not freedom for human beings. The Jamaat-e-Islami and other religious parties played the role of an auxiliary team in this bigoted regime. They spied on the workers and ordinary people in the resistance and facilitated their arrest, torture and murder.

The coup came as a result of the movement launched by the right wing in the name of Islam. This was clearly sponsored by the CIA against Bhutto’s PPP government, attempting to take advantage of the discontent within society due to the failure of reforms to deliver within the confines of the prevailing system. Zia then used Islam to justify his martial law to gain the support of the petty bourgeoisie and the primitive sections of society, turning the state into a theocracy. In December 1981 he said, “Pakistan is like Israel, an ideological state. Take out Judaism from Israel and it will collapse like a house of cards. Take Islam out of Pakistan and make it a secular state: it will collapse.”

Official religiosity was imposed in the army, bureaucracy and institutions of the state and society. The Jamaat and other religious parties infiltrated their agents into state institutions, from the judiciary to the armed forces. Ziaul Haq wrapped his contempt for the deprived in the garb of the piety he flaunted. On the question of the responsibility of the state to fulfil the basic needs of the poor he had this to say: “Any increase or decrease in your sustenance comes from Him. Trust in God and He will bestow upon you an abundance of good things in life.”

However, power and religiosity drove Zia into a state of insanity. He had the delusion of hoisting the crescent and star in the Central Asian capitals. He developed a delusion of his invulnerability. His megalomania was becoming a liability for his imperialist backers. Hence his dramatic elimination — his plane was brought down, killing all on board — like many of the imperialist stooges in the past, became inevitable.

Twenty-six years since his demise his poisonous legacy prevails in the state and politics of Pakistan. His party and his protégés are now again in power. Anatol Lieven in his recent book, Pakistan: A Hard Country, writes, “Zia did, however, leave certain legacies. He created a new enduring party, to which was given the glorious name of the old Muslim League. Just another patronage-based alliance of landowners and urban bosses created by the military for its own purposes…the man charged by Zia with leading the new Muslim league, was Nawaz Sharif.”

Zia also created political groupings and parties based on linguistic, communal and ethnic prejudices to drive a wedge into the politics of class struggle. The MQM and other ethnicity-based groups were promoted by agencies under his command to fracture the class unity of the workers, especially in Karachi, the bastion of Pakistan’s proletariat. Even in the PPP several of Zia’s political heirs, including Yusaf Raza Gillani and Rehman Malik, are installed in its leadership. It is not just a question of individuals but the policies that continue to crush society. The blasphemy law, the Hadood Ordinance and other draconian laws against women and the oppressed are flourishing. None of the subsequent pseudo-democratic regimes have been able to repeal them. Nor can they in this socio-economic setup.

Such is the ferocious and organic crisis of capitalism in Pakistan and other non-developed, neo-colonial countries that ordinary people whose lives are mired in misery and poverty get no respite even from ‘democratic’ regimes. Democratic or dictatorial methods of class rule of the bourgeoisie are both designed to perpetuate capitalist exploitation and coercion. Their sufferings continue to worsen. Dictatorship or democracy, the oligarchy of finance capital continues its crushing domination. Ted Grant, one of the greatest Marxist teachers, wrote in the 1960s: “In the history of society there have been many methods of class rule. This is especially true for capitalist society, with many peculiar and variegated forms: republic, monarchy, fascism, democracy, Bonapartist, centralised and federal.”

Unless and until this social and economic system — for the preservation of which Zia’s brutality was inflicted upon the people of Pakistan — is transformed through a revolutionary insurrection, the wounds under the scars of July 5 will continue to fester. The idea of having a secular, progressive, democratic and prosperous Pakistan within the confines of this rotten, capitalist, feudal system will remain a utopia and a deception for the masses.

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com