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Debate in the National Media Before the merger of Pakistani Left and Foundation Conference of Workers Party Pakistan =========================================================================== Although we agreed with Asha Amiralis viewpoint, we publish two of four editorials of the daily Dawn Pakistan ===========================================================================
The New Left revisited Today, the Left — particularly in Punjab — must make clear its commitment to a new social contract in which all nations within the state of Pakistan are considered equal and given rights and resources accordingly. The much-maligned and weakened Pakistani Left often comes in for more than its fair share of prescriptive remedies. One such critical dose appeared on these pages on March 3 in which Mr Muhammad Ali Siddiqi expressed a cautious optimism about the recent merger of a handful of leftist groups, which has resulted in the formation of the Workers Party Pakistan (WPP). He also, however, advised the ‘New Left’ to ‘not jump on the anti-American bandwagon’, recognise that the real enemy facing Pakistan today is religious militancy, welcome foreign investment, and follow the lead of New Labour in the UK and repackage itself given the realities of the post-Cold War world. To start with the anti-Americanism aspect, I completely agree with Mr Siddiqi that a new leftist political formation in Pakistan must not limit itself to hollow slogans. There is an urgent need to objectively analyse the contradictions that exist within Pakistani society and put together a political programme that responds to them. Not all of Pakistan’s problems can be blamed away, and Mr Siddiqi is right that there is an immediate need to debunk the anti-American hate-mongering of the right, with all its emphasis on waging war against kufr. But what most liberals and others who decry the Left’s anti-Americanism fail to see is that the Left is not anti-American, it is anti-imperialist. Those are two completely different political positions — the Left’s fight is not with a particular culture but with any state that seeks to destroy, coerce and manipulate others to its own advantage. Most Pakistani people, and indeed people the world over, resent American interventionism in their affairs. The Left can only be a force for genuine emancipation if it heeds this sentiment and builds and articulates an alternative vision which privileges the democratisation of the global order. And while it is obvious, there is no harm in repeating a truth: without genuine democratisation of the global order, democratisation within national boundaries is impossible. A second but related point is the policy regime that the international financial institutions have championed in Pakistan over the past three decades. The claim that the Pakistani people will benefit from uninhibited flows of foreign capital and technology has amassed little evidence in its favour. Throughout the tenure of Musharraf and Shaukat Aziz, Pakistan experienced an extraordinary influx of capital and new information technologies. The result was a temporary bubble of growth which burst, leaving in its wake sharpened inequality and an economy teetering on termite-ridden stilts. The global financial crisis followed soon after and made clear just how viable and pro-people the radical free market capitalist model is. There is no doubt that Pakistan needs to employ its unemployed millions and increase productivity across all sectors, but the trickle-down effects from foreign capital have yet to show themselves in most of the Third World. So instead, why should the Left in Pakistan not look at the experiments being attempted in Latin America which reject the neo-liberal paradigm and emphasise growth and integration strategies that put people and the environment first? It seems the logical thing to do. Finally, and very crucially, the greatest problem facing Pakistan at the present time is not religious militancy, but fragmentation along ethnic lines. Balochistan is (still) burning and a wide cross-section of the Baloch people are increasingly drawn towards separatism. Sindhi nationalist sentiment, while currently muted because the PPP is in office, is nevertheless simmering below the surface. A large number of Pakhtuns view the unfolding civil war-like situation in Pakhtunkhwa as a war in which a conspiring and duplicitous state treats Pakhtuns as nothing more than pawns on its chessboard. Historically the Left and ethnic-nationalists struggled together against the unitary state. Today, the Left — particularly in Punjab — must make clear its commitment to a new social contract in which all nations within the state of Pakistan are considered equal and given rights and resources accordingly. Religious militancy is growing, yes. It is instilling hatred and violence and negating all that progressive forces want to see realised in Pakistan. However, I believe it is essential for the Left to move beyond the liberal refrain about the Islamists constituting an existential threat to the Pakistani state. Islamism has established roots in parts of Pakistani society largely because of its historic patronage by the military establishment. Today it sustains these roots because of continued support by the state, the presence of western troops in the region, and the end of imagination that afflicts society. Military operations against people who have been alienated from the social and political mainstream will not reduce the appeal of radical Islamist ideology. We must focus on causes rather than react to symptoms: the ‘real enemy’, as Mr Siddiqi put it, is not religious militancy, rather, it is the militaristic state and its Islam-centric ideology, the nastiest but perfectly logical manifestation of which is the Taliban. The ‘New Left’ in Pakistan will do well to create consensus amongst progressive forces on these most basic of issues. However, the clear differences between Mr Siddiqi’s point of view and the one propounded here indicate that such a consensus might be difficult. Those who, in Mr Siddiqi’s words, are not sure how they “feel about the word ‘Left’”, are unlikely to support a strongly anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal programme. Unfortunately though, meaningful change is only possible if we travel this difficult path. There are no shortcuts.
Workers Party Pakistan : Pakistan’s New Left – by Muhammad Ali Siddiqi Daily Dawn Pakistan March 3rd, 2010
The Workers Party Pakistan should refrain from playing the role of a traditional opposition party which considers it obligatory on its part to oppose every government move.
Pakistan’s New Left The formation last week of a new alliance of progressive parties in Islamabad must arouse interest in us all, irrespective of how we feel about the word ‘Left’. The very fact that such a merger should take place serves to underline the long overdue need for progressive forces to assert themselves and come out of the depression that has been their lot since the collapse of the Soviet system of states in early 1991. To repeat a cliché, there is a role wandering in search of an actor, and the new alliance under the leadership of Abid Hasan Minto seems eager to grab it. The most important point highlighted by Minto was that it was the Islamist forces which had filled the vacuum left unattended by Pakistan’s demoralised Left. The issue now is: how does the new party — the Workers Party Pakistan (WPP) — create space for itself in the situation now obtaining in Pakistan? Is it going to revive the time-worn and hackneyed phrases which have outlived their utility or is it going to come out with something new and original that has a meaning for the people of Pakistan? Just as his ‘New Left’ in the post-Thatcher era secured Tony Blair three unprecedented terms as Labour prime minister, so too does the WPP have a chance now to craft a new ‘ideology’ suited to the changed national and international situation. Some pitfalls must be avoided, the first of them being the temptation to jump on the anti-American bandwagon. Anti-Americanism is not going to get Pakistan’s New Left anywhere. Denouncing America in a most impressive manner is being done quite adequately by the Islamist forces, which have the support of such men as Oxford graduate Imran Khan and a strategist like Islami Jamhoori Ittihad founder Hameed Gul. Their denunciation of America and the ubiquitous Blackwater, which is to be found in every Pakistani’s backyard, may be considered ‘news’ by sections of an obliging media, but this doesn’t serve to highlight much less solve the Pakistani people’s problems, especially their economic misery. The fate of the now forgotten Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA) — the clerics’ six-party alliance — is before us. It rode the anti-American wave in the aftermath of the US-led attack on Afghanistan in October 2001 and did so well in the 2002 general election that it was able to form government in the NWFP. Once in power, the MMA forgot that it owed something to its voters. It had the Hasba bill enacted (frozen by the higher judiciary), and it forbade male doctors from attending to women patients, but it never occurred to the MMA leadership that it should build some schools, hospitals, roads, bridges and power stations and draw up economic policies to make a difference to the Frontier people’s dark existence. In fact the Islamist forces in Pakistan have no concept of a modern state and its obligation towards the citizens, and if they have then their priorities do not include it. The force behind the MMA was the Jamaat-i-Islami. It chose to boycott the 2008 election because it knew the party had no chance at the hustings. For Pakistan’s New Left there is a lesson in this. Slogan-mongering, wheel-jam strikes and tyre-burnings may demonstrate street power, but that will neither help the WPP in the long term nor solve the problems of the people of Pakistan. Ultimately, as they have demonstrated several times, the people of Pakistan are quite capable of making a difference between substance and rhetoric. Two, in the past, the leftist parties had shown themselves to be utterly indifferent to Pakistan’s foreign policy concerns. (We can see this in the behaviour of today’s Islamist parties and their supporters in the media.) The WPP should avoid repeating the mistakes of the leftist parties in the past. During the Cold War it made sense for left-leaning parties to oppose Pakistan’s membership of US-led military alliances. Pakistan, as Henry Kissinger said, was then America’s most ‘allied ally’. This meant not only getting economic and military aid from the US, it also opened the floodgates of American investment, with the result that Pakistan saw the birth of a native comprador class which had no stakes in the state of Pakistan or in the welfare of its people. Today you don’t have to be an economic wizard to realise that Pakistan’s economic problems cannot be solved without the flow of foreign capital and technology. At present investment is taking place only in food franchise outlets and the mobile phone industry. Feudal landholdings must, no doubt, be broken up, as declared by Minto. But one cannot solve the acute unemployment problem without welcoming foreign capital and technology in a big way. Opposing foreign investment now will mean adopting policies and attitudes which have outlived their utility. If the WPP chooses to adopt the Cold War idiom it will have to be re-crafted in a way that makes sense to the people of Pakistan and they see in the New Left a genuine hope for the betterment of their lives. Three, the WPP should refrain from playing the role of a traditional opposition party which considers it obligatory on its part to oppose every government move. On the contrary there may be moments when the WPP will discover common ground with the two mainstream parties in an atmosphere of uncertainty in which the Taliban are trying to demoralise and weaken state institutions with a view to doing another July 5, 1977. Four, the New Left should know who the enemy is. Well-funded, armed to the teeth, and with collaborators embedded in the media and civil and military bureaucracy, religious militancy poses the greatest threat to the Pakistani people’s political and cultural freedoms. It is here that the New Left should play its long overdue role and resist any attempt to turn Jinnah’s Pakistan into a barbaric theocracy that the very name Ziaul Haq symbolises. Source: Daily Dawn, Wednesday, 03 Mar, 2010
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