Weekly Worker 695 Thursday November 1 2007 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

Break from Stalinism. Unite the subcontinent

The October 30 suicide bombing aimed at general Pervez Musharraf in Rawalpindi, which killed at least six people, and following so soon after the previous week’s attack on Benazir Bhutto, which killed 139, shows in no uncertain terms that Pakistan is teetering on the brink of complete chaos. Jim Moody reports

The October 30 suicide bombing aimed at general Pervez Musharraf in Rawalpindi, which killed at least six people, and following so soon after the previous week’s attack on Benazir Bhutto, which killed 139, shows in no uncertain terms that Pakistan is teetering on the brink of complete chaos.

Although Musharraf and Bhutto were physically unharmed, the political damage is harder to determine. Musharraf, who has headed the military dictatorship running the Islamic Republic of Pakistan for the last eight years, condemned the attack on Bhutto. After all, Bhutto’s agreement to return from self-imposed exile was brokered by the US and the UK governments with president Musharraf so she would not face charges for embezzling $1 billion. She has already been prime minister twice (Pakistan’s first woman prime minister in 1988) and hopes to be again soon; their deal also represents Musharraf’s last chance of survival.

Those targeting Musharraf and Bhutto are not lone terrorists. Three million Afghan refugees from the time of the 1979 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan still live in the north-west frontier provinces, where tribal leaders, the zamindar landlord class, effectively operate their own state machines and regard the Taliban as honoured guests and valuable allies.

To begin with it was the Pakistani state, especially the secret intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, that paid for, protected and promoted the Taliban and a myriad array of mujahedin factions. They were considered low-cost and low-risk assets to be used in Pakistan’s proxy wars in Afghanistan and Kashmir. But as a result the country has become awash with armed jihadis and millions of modern weapons that are now being turned against internal foes and enemies.

The islamic groups also hold out hope for the hopeless: Pakistan’s dispossessed peasants, the teeming slum dwellers, the young unemployed. Against the steadily widening gulf between rich and poor and the conspicuous consumption of the urban middle classes they uphold a muslim socialism based on charity, sharia law and austere patriarchal values.

Pakistan was, of course, the child of the British empire’s policy of divide and rule. Eg, Bengal was partitioned in 1905 under Lord Curzon. This was overwhelmingly opposed by hindus, but supported by most muslim political groups for purely communalist reasons. The All-India Muslim League, founded at Dacca on December 30 1906, was the main propagandist of muslim separatism, at first calling for autonomy (in 1930), but then demanding an independent Pakistan from 1940 under its leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who became the country’s first president.

Pakistan was almost perfectly designed for chronic instability. In part this was simply a matter of geography, the country being physically disunited at birth in 1947 by a full 1,000 miles of Indian territory. To the east was the former British India provinces of East Bengal and to the west Balochistan, the North-West Frontier Province, West Punjab and Sindh.

The political elite, the state machine, the great landowners were based or concentrated in West Pakistan, crucially in the Punjab, and tended to treat East Pakistan in an almost colonial fashion. In the absence of anything resembling a working class alternative separatist tendencies were bound to grow.

In 1970 the Awami League won 167 of the 169 seats allotted to East Pakistan - a landslide. This gave the party led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman a majority of the 300 seats in the national assembly and the constitutional right to form a government. But Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Benazir Bhutto’s father), the leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, refused to allow Rahman to become the prime minister of Pakistan and the president annulled the election results.

The eventual result was a bitter civil war. Bangladesh independence was declared in early 1971 in no small measure thanks to the Indian army, which had been invited in by the Awami League. But over two million are estimated to have been killed in the conflict.

Having lost over half its population through Bangladeshi independence, the rump of Pakistan stumbled on from one crisis to another. To a large degree this can be explained by the fact that in Pakistan social relations remain extremely backward, with the landlord class retaining huge economic sway. Because of this and the associated web of patronage, it functions as the political class too. Votes are delivered through a system of gift-obligation.

This endemic corruption breeds frustration, not least amongst the educated middle classes which constitute the officer caste in the army - a pampered, swollen and self-willed social stratum. The country was from the beginning locked into military rivalry/conflict with its much bigger Indian neighbour. The threat of war is never far away.

Military presidents ruled Pakistan from 1958 to 1971, 1977 to 1988, and from 1999 to date, so the 17 years of civilian rule in the last 50 have always been under the shadow of military intervention. (General Zia-ul-Haq hanged prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979 after making himself president.)

Today Pakistan is riven with contradictions. The judiciary is in open rebellion. After 9/11 the US has been demanding that Musharraf join its ‘war on terror’ and paying him nearly $10 billion to do so. But this has not been to the liking of the ISI, and Musharraf’s former islamic allies have taken to the streets. Whole towns have temporarily been seized. Promoting anti-Indian/anti-hindu chauvinism, in the attempt to maintain national cohesion, no longer works. Musharraf’s regime is patently disintegrating and a deal with Bhutto at least offers a lifeline. If islamists gain control, what with Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons, Washington and Whitehall fear that terrible consequences will inevitably follow.

What about the working class? Partition, anti-hindu chauvinism, landlord power and military rule have meant -especially since the defeat of the great 1968-69 upsurge - that class politics in Pakistan have been frozen or have taken highly distorted forms.

Programmatically, a subcontinental perspective is clearly called for. Communists should be demanding the voluntary reunification of the Indian subcontinent - a greater India if you like, but not in any nationalist sense. Such a subcontinental perspective obviously centres on India but would seek to involve countries that cannot hope to progress without the decisive intervention of the Indian working class: Afghanistan, Bhutan, Burma, Nepal, Sri Lanka - but crucially Bangladesh and Pakistan.

It goes without saying that this project requires a break with the nationalism of Stalinism and the formation of genuinely internationalist communist parties.

From the 1920s there has certainly been a communist tradition or sorts and wide interest in Marxist theory in India. While the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the 1964 breakaway, the Communist Party of India - Marxist (CPI-M), now larger than the CPI, are in the mould of ‘official communism’, they contain in their ranks many hundreds of thousands who clearly want democratic change and socialism.

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