RAWALPINDI: Awami Workers Party (AWP) started its campaign for the upcoming local government elections with a public meeting in Rawalpindi.

The AWP activists, volunteers, students and katchi abadi residents gathered at the party’s head office in Satellite Town on Saturday.

All speakers on the occasion including AWP Punjab President Aasim Sajjad, AWP Sindh general secretary Bakhshal Thalho and the party’s central labour secretary Zahoor Khan said their party represented the only genuine alternative to status quo amongst the existing political parties.

They announced that the AWP would participate in the elections in both Islamabad and Rawalpindi to popularise its political programme and stir the conscious of the mainstream voter.

Aasim Sajjad asserted that the left in Pakistan had consistently opposed the nexus of state, imperialism, religious right and propertied classes and until the 1980s was a major threat to the established order.

However, he said that over the past two decades the left had declined globally and it was only in recent times that it had experienced something of a revival.

The AWP leaders said the party itself was formed as part of the larger project of left revival, and that it had grown steadily in the two-and-a-half years since it was formed.

The hollow claims of the pro-establishment parties like the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) and Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) about ‘change’ and ‘revolution’ had been clearly exposed, one of the speakers added.

Published in Dawn, June 22nd, 2015

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