Pakistan: Facts or farce?

The political edifice in Pakistan fabricated under the auspices of imperialism, particularly the British, has once again been shaken by the recent outburst of Zulfiqar Mirza, Sindh’s most senior (former) minister.

At a press conference in Karachi, in a dramatic fashion Mirza not only announced his resignation from his ministerial post, parliamentary seat and position as the senior vice-president of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Sindh, but went a few notches higher in his diatribe against the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) boss Altaf Hussain and the PPP’s top honcho and Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik by accusing them of treason and being responsible for the recent spate of gruesome slaughter in Karachi, which has killed thousands of people.

In the ongoing investigation of the murder of Imran Farooq, an MQM leader who was whisked from Karachi to London in the 1990s by the British intelligence service MI6, the noose is tightening around Altaf Hussain and the MQM leadership. Imran Farooq was in a vulnerable position in one of the many internal conflicts that was raging within the mafia-like structure of the MQM. He had a base amongst the immigrants who came out of the bloody partition of the subcontinent in 1947 from Bihar rather than those from the Central and United Provinces of India who dominate the MQM’s hierarchy.

Mirza also accused Altaf Hussain of conspiring with the Americans to balkanise Pakistan for their imperialist interests. The investigation of the Supreme Court in this case of mass murder and treason, will expose the class nature of the judiciary yet again. The rich and the powerful will prevail over the law.

In Pakistan the censorship and distortion of news and information at the present time is not being carried out by military boots but by the dictatorship of the financial oligarchy that includes most bosses of the media empires. Hence conspiracy theories are always present in abundance, most of which are implausible and absurd. Every act or incident is attributed to the ‘agencies’ or the Americans as if they controlled every little stir in society. They have their own crisis and conflicts and they do indulge in scandalous and criminal acts in this ongoing war of attrition but to attribute every single move to their jurisdiction is naive to say the least.

Once again Zulfiqar Mirza’s lambasting of the MQM and Rehman Malik is being portrayed by some conspiracy theorists as Zardari’s contrivance to use his school buddy to kill two birds with one stone. This possibility cannot be ruled out but it is a sheer subjective and mechanical method of analysis. Without a dialectical approach to understand the prevailing objective situation and the severe crisis this society is going through, one cannot reach a profound conclusion.

The old man Hegel used to say, “Necessity sometimes expresses itself through accident.” Mirza’s bombshell was the outcome of the malaise that has beset this tragic land, the appalling ferocity of which can have an impact even on rare individuals at the helm of affairs. Probably it exploded when the Rangers, under Rehman Malik, started the ‘clean up’ operation in Lyari, the PPP’s stronghold in Karachi while the areas under the MQM and ANP mafias were expediently left alone to prop up the ‘coalition’. It is possible that Zardari wanted to subdue the MQM to win the Senate elections in March and get rid of the ‘foreign baggage’ in the shape of Rehman Malik. Malik rose dramatically to political prominence and power at the behest of the imperialist intelligence agencies for his role in capturing and extraditing Ramzi Yousef and sealing the infamous NRO deal for Benazir Bhutto. In the process, he made billions. He rose from a petty police officer to deputy director of the FIA, initially through his services rendered for the wife of Ziaul Haq, the brutal military despot who was responsible for the judicial murder of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and who ravaged Pakistan with his Islamic bigotry and harrowing tyranny. A former IG of police described Rehman Malik as “Mrs Zia’s most glorified orderly”.

But whatever the real story might be, the real stakes for the vast majority of the oppressed working masses of Pakistan are extremely bleak. The deafening din of democracy and reconciliation that we have to suffer round the clock has only worsened the ordeal and plight of the masses. Hardly anybody dares to spell out the real class character of this democracy and its principal actors. What class interests do they represent? Whose interests do they serve? How and by what means do these shadowy and sinister characters become our ‘elected rulers’?

Lenin wrote in 1923 of, “The bourgeois parliament that fools the masses with hypocritical sign boards concealing the financial and stock exchange deals of parliamentary businessmen and ensures the inviolability of the coercive apparatus of the bourgeois state.”

However, the conditions of the Pakistani elite are far worse than those of Czarist Russia. Here, with the rottenness of Pakistani capitalism, these parliamentary businessmen have to make dirty deals in the narcotics trade, land grabbing, human trafficking, kidnappings, ransom and other crimes for higher rates of profit. But these deals, as dangerous as they are, can unravel into mayhem and violent bloodletting. With the failure of capitalist development in Pakistan this conflagration can only be exacerbated.

It is also an important turning point for the PPP. This is the first major crack in the monolith of the currently imposed leadership. Whatever the plot behind the scenes might have been, the working masses that supported the PPP are disgruntled with the capitalist policies of the present regime. Mirza’s outburst has stirred them up. There have been several demonstrations in support of Mirza in Sindh. In other regions there is a similar sentiment amongst the traditional supporters of the PPP.

However, Zulfiqar Mirza is no revolutionary communist. Instead of taking the radical path of class struggle he has backed out yet again, but the whole phenomenon shows the mass orientation and a mood of elevation amongst the masses when they see the possibility of the present sycophancy, right-wing policies and the stalemate that plagues the PPP being challenged. Mirza would have gained political credibility and a social base amongst the oppressed and the process of revival of the party on its socialist origins could have begun had he linked his revolt to the aspirations of the teeming millions for socioeconomic change.

The PPP is more of a movement than a party. But this episode shows the real class contradictions and struggle within the PPP and society as a whole. It will need a Marxist leadership and organised revolutionary force to cleanse the PPP of the lackeys of imperialism, capitalists, landlords and the upstarts; and take it forward on the basis of its founding programme, revolutionary socialism.