LAHORE, Sept 19: Three Left-winger political parties — the Awami Party, the Labour Party and the Workers Party Pakistan — have decided to merge to create a new progressive force with a “workable anti-imperialist, secular, anti-feudal and democratic Socialist programme”.

The urge and effort for the unification of the Left has been there for a long time but the initiative came from the younger lot of the three parties, making their respective leaderships bow to the demand.

“In the past, efforts to bring the Left together have both succeeded and failed, and it is in the spirit of learning from such experiences that the present attempt has been made,” Farooq Tariq of now defunct Labour Party told Dawn on Wednesday.

For six months, representatives of the three parties had been meeting as three merger committees in Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore, away from the media eye, discussing and sorting out all issues likely to become controversial and formulating programme of the new unified party whose name is yet to be finalised.

And the final nod from all the three sides came in the National Merger Committee meeting held on Sept 8 and 9 in Islamabad.

About the name of the unified party, Mr Farooq said they had been looking for the simplest one and hoped the issue would be settled by the next sitting of the committee scheduled for Oct 5 in Lahore.

Representatives of the parties have already formed various committees, including the one for manifesto, headed by veteran politician and constitutional expert Abid Hasan Manto, to prepare policy documents of the new party on certain sectors.

The documentation process is likely to be completed by November 4 when a ‘federal conference’ consisting of delegates from all three component parties will take place in Lahore.

An interim body will be elected for the next six months. A congress of the new party will take place by the middle of the next year to elect all the bodies and to set the political and organisational priorities.

Farooq is optimistic about the success of the new unification effort, believing it is capable of taking the Left representatives into the assemblies in the forthcoming general election.

A press release issued jointly by the three parties invites those who are not part of any of the components to attend the first federal conference as observers and decide for themselves if they want to be part of the new entity.

It says they do not expect to “suddenly emerge as a ‘third’ force in Pakistani politics, because we do not enjoy the kind of patronage of state and non-state powers that right-wing parties do.

“Yet we do believe that the people of Pakistan want to see new alternatives emerging and we expect that a merger of existing Left groups will be a giant leap forward towards building such an alternative.”

It says the new party will undertake a workable anti-imperialist, secular, anti-feudal and democratic Socialist programme.