History has repeatedly seen how obsolete socioeconomic systems have unravelled in the face of ruling classes and oppressive states despite their trickery and deceit. The crisis of the system is so severe that Pakistan’s ruling elite finds itself totally incapacitated and impotent in harnessing the disparaging, malignant tentacles of this cancerous system. Such is the incapacitated condition of the bourgeois state that it cannot even carry out a simple count of the population nor have an accurate picture of the national economy, national assets, or financial and monetary wealth in society. The central chain of command has not only miserably failed to provide law and order in society but has also lost control and compliance of significant organs of the state’s apparatus. In fact, they neither have the money nor the apparatus to conduct the census of this society.
According to a newspaper report, “A mammoth census exercise scheduled to be completed by March next year looks likely to be delayed, or even scrapped altogether. The government announced its decision to hold the census in March this year. But five months later, Asif Bajwa, director general of the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS) confirms that ‘no funds have been released thus far’ for the yearlong exercise. The census exercise had a budget allocation of Rs 14.5 billion, out of which Rs 6.9 billion was budgeted for the PBS and Rs 7.4 billion was for the army’s security expenses. The second quarter was to begin in October, without any provision of funds thus far, meaning the exercise has not even begun in earnest.”
Instead, the government is deliberating on the possibility of using population data from the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) database for planning and developing future strategies. But the NADRA database is a poor substitute for census data. Although NADRA registration has become mandatory for adult citizens, it fails to capture a lot of poorer and marginalised people, particularly women. Use of NADRA data will mean the vulnerable and poorest will be left out of the process. A census is a massive exercise and must be held every 10 years, according to the Constitution.
The same goes for the din of the political elite for collecting taxes. The state machinery has failed to increase its tax base by a single percentage point in nine years. The political, military and financial elites evade taxes with impunity. The burden inevitably falls on the shoulders of salaried employees and the middle and toiling classes who are bombarded with drastic new taxation every other week. There are arbitrary taxes on energy, the internet, school fees, cars, houses, consumption, mobile phones, bank transactions, edibles and the list go on. The recent almost 67 percent hike of gas prices and on petroleum products is a relentless continuation of the policy of indirect taxation that hurts the unprivileged and dispossessed ordinary people of this unfortunate country. Yet the exemptions for many holy cows of imperialist and national corporate bosses are rampant. Subsidies to industries, landed estates and black and white businesses continue to prosper from these arbitrary taxes. Similarly, untaxed perks and real estate plots to those in positions of power and privilege swell at taxpayer expense. Pakistan’s renowned bourgeois economist Shahid Kardar reveals the vicious cycle of corruption: “Regularly governments form tax reform committees comprising mostly of the same tax practitioners (thriving from this complicated and dysfunctional structure) and the same industrialists benefiting from subsidies and SROs. The committee meets like a parlour game. There is no serious study, only princes playing policy.” Every regime since the late 1970s has pursued this policy clearly designed to jack up the rates of profits for imperialist investors and the national corrupt bourgeois.
Money plundered through corruption, tax evasion, the drug trade, smuggling, extortion, kidnapping, ransom and fraud ends up in Swiss banks and other laundering facilities abroad. However, large sums of this black money is baptised into ‘white money’ through massive housing societies devastating fertile, cultivated lands and making the future stark for generations to come. Most conflicts between political and military elites are the consequence of these cutthroat competitive projects of housing societies owned by extortionists, property tycoons playing philanthropists and brutal land grabbers who have acquired hegemony over state institutions, political elites and media houses by ludicrously bribing them into subservience. The question of retrieving this mammoth wealth from abroad is raised but such an act cannot be executed within the confines of this corrupt system under the watch of its robber bourgeois. The authorities in Switzerland have already disallowed half-hearted requests by subsequent Pakistani regimes to share information regarding this ill-gotten wealth. The persuasions were mere gimmickry as the main culprits of stashing away this wealth have been the main power brokers in these military or civilian regimes of the last four decades.
Western monetary safe havens have religiously protected black capital with strict banking secrecy to attract global funds, particularly from the rich rulers of poor countries. Pakistan’s ruling civilian and military aristocracy’s loot and plunder is also stashed in Malaysia, UAE, Thailand and Australia. Some conservative estimates put this amount to be around $ 900 billion, accumulated through criminal practises. With this class in control of state and political power there is no possibility of any retrieval of this wealth back to the country. Perhaps it was in this background that the Federal Bureau of Revenue (FBR) officially dashed the hopes of any success in recovering the money stashed by Pakistanis in Swiss and other safe haven accounts when it recently told a Senate standing committee on finance last week that it was not easy to get information on investments or deposits kept by Pakistanis in Switzerland and elsewhere.
The Muslim merchant class that had invested so much in the creation of this country did so in the hopes of a competition free market and a subservient, supportive state. They at least had the dream of creating a modern, industrialised society even with the utopia of an Islamic welfare state. Sixty-eight years on that dream has turned into a nightmare for the oppressed masses. The evil nexus of the present ruling elite has no such dreams or plans. They are not only callously indifferent to the plight of ordinary people but have no trust in their own economy and the state they rule. They cannot even tell the number of people living under their oppressive rule, how on earth can they plan any welfare for them? They are robber barons on a run for plunder. They invest abroad and beg for investment from foreign firms. Hypocrisy, deceit, lies and crookedness are the hallmarks of this elite’s politics, ethics and morality. They want to extract the last drop of blood from the working classes and escape with the booty. However, they might be too late. A revolutionary mass uprising can suddenly surge and cut across this orgy of plunder and expropriate this wealth from the rich and the mighty with a vengeance.
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]