THE scene is set for the biggest by-election in recent years this coming Sunday. Or so the protagonists would like us to believe.
It is a distant memory but the Multan by-election following Javed Hashmi’s exit from the PTI was also billed as a defining battle. In the end it was a damp squib; the result ultimately made little difference to the lives of the city’s residents, and indeed the rest of the Pakistani public.
In truth there is nothing really to distinguish the PTI from the ruling PML-N, except for the fact that the former would like to displace the latter from the seat of government. Has either party actually raised genuine issues that affect the voting public during the lead-up to the by-elections? Aside from a whole lot of bluster about ‘corruption’ and ‘rigging’ on the one hand, and ‘lies‘ and ‘politics of allegations’ on the other hand, there is almost no substantive content to both sides’ politics.
If it really was an alternative to status quo, the PTI would have something to say, for example, about the recently published IMF report in which the government has made a clear commitment to privatising PIA in December of this year, to be followed by Pakistan Steel Mill (PSM) in March 2016.
There’s little to distinguish the PTI from the PML-N.
Privatisation, as I have written on these pages before, is a major precept of the neo-liberal policy framework to which virtually all of the world’s ‘electable’ political parties have acceded. Should resistance to the parcelling out of public services, lands and just about everything else to profiteers both home and abroad not be amongst the first priorities of a party promising change?
Imran Khan and the sycophants surrounding him do pay lip service to the appalling state of public-sector enterprises. But should the rest of us be contended with the promise that ‘corruption’ in every realm of social and political life will disappear within 90 days of Mr Khan becoming prime minister?
If voted into power, virtually all of our mainstream parties — the PTI included — would jump (and have in the past jumped) on the privatisation, financial and trade liberalisation and just about every other ‘good governance’ bandwagon of the IMF and its sister international financial institutions. In today’s world, the ‘rational’ argument is for ‘white elephants’ like PIA and PSM to be transferred to private hands.
Certainly the stand-off between pilots and the PIA management that has paralysed the airline —preceded by many other signs of dysfunction — tests the patience of even the most committed anti-neoliberal. But it is the mandate of a real opposition party to come up with viable solutions to apparently intractable problems whilst steadfastly challenging the orthodoxy that the ‘free market’ is the panacea to all of society’s problems.
I wonder if PTI groupies are paying attention to the many diverse forms of real opposition that have come to the fore in many parts of Europe in recent years, united in protest against the austerity measures that amount to a steady dismantling of the welfare state. The rise of the avowedly socialist Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the very mainstream Labour Party in the UK confirms that political workers and the general public alike are thirsting for something different.
Certainly, the fortunes of the now dismantled Syriza movement in Greece offer a cautionary tale for the global left, but then a genuine opposition can always expect the nexus of imperialism, propertied classes and a reactionary media to stand in the way of substantive attempts to transform state and society.
In Pakistan, the biggest resistance to a real opposition almost always comes from our self-proclaimed holy guardians — the omnipotent men in khaki. The PTI does not even harbour the pretence of challenging the military establishment. The PML-N claimed that it would but subsequently backed down, whereas parties like the PPP and ANP that have historically laid claim to the mantle of anti-establishment politics have yet to sort out how to reconcile the imperatives of neo-liberalism with their claims to being bearers of progressive ideologies.
On Oct 11 only one candidate in all of the many constituencies in which by-elections are taking place will play the role of real opposition. It was during the Musharraf era that the struggle of tenant farmers on the so-called Okara military farms came into the public eye. There are now more than a few people in Pakistan who call attention to the corporate empire of the men in khaki, but fifteen years ago the Okara tenants stood alone in their resistance to that empire. In the Okara by-election on Sunday Mehr Abdul Sattar of the Anjuman Mazarain Punjab will be standing against the PML-N and PTI alike. If there is to be a battle for the soul of Pakistani politics on Sunday, it will take place in Okara.
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
Published in Dawn, October 9th, 2015
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