ISLAMABAD, Dec 22 President of the National Workers Party (NWP), Abid Hassan Minto, on Tuesday said there was no salvation on the horizon for the working people because of the absence of a genuine progressive alternative to the status quo.

He was speaking at a gathering of political workers held in connection with preparation for a peace rally on the New Year's Day.

Zahoor Khan of the Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party (CMKP) and Aasim Sajjad of the People's Rights Movement (PRM) also spoke on the occasion, said a press release issued here.

Mr Minto noted that while leftist forces had always defended democracy and democratic parties from the conspiracies of the establishment and imperialism, the mainstream parties had contributed to their own pathetic condition by not making the parliament a meaningful law-making institution.

He said all progressive forces needed to follow the footsteps of the NWP and CMKP which had decided to merge into a single formation. He said there will be hope of emerging from the current morass only when all leftist forces come together.

He claimed that the confusion and chaos caused by the war on terror and its fallout were understood coherently only by the leftist forces and it was now imperative that all such forces move beyond drawing room politics to actually offer working people respite from unaccountable military operations, indiscriminate suicide bombings and the structural violence of neo-liberal capitalism.

Mr Sajjad said it was urgent that leftist forces reclaim the mantle of anti-imperialism from the religious right which, he added, was opportunistically presenting itself as the saviour of the masses. He said it was the religious right that welcomed American imperialism into Pakistan and Afghanistan in the first place.