Karachi
It is less than a year since Mr. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto became president of Pakistan. In this brief space of time Pakistan's problems have multiplied and a whole series of class and national contradictions have developed to bedevil the new regime, which has shown as little capacity to solve these problems as its two military predecessors. The essence of the matter is simple: Since the establishment of Bangladesh, Pakistan itself is tottering on the edge of a precipice. The question being asked is not whether Pakistan can survive, but how long it can survive as a separate state.
tor the past two years the country's economy seems to have come to a virtual halt and the per capita income has declined (even according to official statistics) during the same period. There has been a dramatic fall in the rate of production; and the rate of investment, according to official government sources, fell from 15% in 1970-71 to 10.2% in 1971-
72. In the private sector, investment has declined by 41%.
Price rises have been phenomenal, and since Mr Bhutto assumed office prices of essential foodstuffs have risen dramatically. Thus in the last week of August alone there was a 20% increase in the price of flour (from which the workers and peasants make their daily chappatis or wheat cakes), vegetable oil, and other essential commodities. This, coupled with extremely high rates of unemployment (and large-scale graduate unemployment is an increasingly important factor) vividly demonstrates the critical situation which confronts Mr Bhutto on the domestic front.
Like generals Ayub and Yahya before him, Bhutto has announced the familiar series of "land reby now forms," "educational reforms," etc. As far as the masses are concerned these have added up to zero and have clearly been seen to be somewhat pathetic attempts to cover up the blatantly naked capitalist character of the People's party government.
A short-term solution whereby the October 16, 1972
new regime could have allocated more resources to social expenditures would have required cutting down the size of the army and drastically reducing its annual budget which amounts to Rs4,230 million for the year 1972- 73, about Rs50 million more than the money allocated for development projects. This Mr Bhutto is not prepared to do, despite the decreased strength and influence of the army following the debacle in Bangladesh last year.
He realises perfectly well that the army has to be constantly flattered and "kept happy" if he is to be able to use it to quell the mass movement within Pakistan. One of the reasons Bhutto dismissed General Gul Hassan and replaced him with the man who organised large-scale butchery in East Bengal, Tikka Khan, is because Hassan refused to allow the army to be used to intimidate striking policemen and workers in several important cities of Pakistan.
Tikka Khan, it is thought, will be more amenable to such a plan; but if he shows signs of wanting to rule the roost as well (and these signs are becoming more and more clear) then even he will have to go, to be replaced by officers more loyal to Bhutto. That is why the army plays such a vital part in the Pakistani president's calculations.
Another complication which confronts Bhutto is the fact that while he holds power at the centre and the two major provinces (the Punjab and Sind), in the remaining two provinces, namely, Baluchistan and the North
Frontier Province (NWFP) West power is wielded by a coalition dominated by the National Awami party of Wali Khan, which includes in its ranks most of the country's pro-Moscow "Communists," who find themselves so much at home in the solidly bourgeois environment of the NAP that they find it redundant to set up an independent party.
The politics of NAP are indistinguishable in their essentials from those of the People's party, but Mr Bhutto's megalomaniacal tendencies make it difficult for him to conceive of actually sharing political power with politicians over whom he has little control, a fact which Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in Bangladesh understood perfectly well after the military occupation in March 1971. As a result there is continuing tension between the two parties and it is a dangerous tension since it is seen by the Pathan and Baluchi inhabitants as the alltoo-familiar effort of the Punjabi landlord and capitalist politician to exploit the other provinces for all they are worth.
Efforts by the NAP and the People's party to come to an agreement have been thwarted by the central government and the mass media under its control. The regime's propaganda minister, Kausar Niazi, is reputed to be an old admirer of Goebbels and certainly there seems to be more than ample justification for this claim, as the National Press Trust (which Bhutto pledged to disband during his election campaign), radio, and television have become even more servile than during the twelve years of military dictatorship and are used consciously and persistently to attack the NAP and any other opposition, be it from the right or left, which happens to disagree with Mr Bhutto.
The main dispute between Mr Bhutto and Wali Khan centres on the question of the country's constitution, which is in the process of being drafted. Wali Khan believes in maxiprovincial autonomy and mum argues that the powers of the central government should be confined to foreign affairs, defence, communications, and currency. Bhutto, on the other hand, wants as much more power to be concentrated in the centre as possible, with the provincial governments remaining governments merely in name and existing only to carry out the wishes and desires of the centre as incarnated in the person of Mr Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.
However, there is a certain air of unreality which dominates bourgeois politics in Pakistan. While the NAP and Bhutto argue over constitutional niceties, the social and economic crisis continues unabated. It is felt most acutely by the toiling masses of the country in both the cities and the countryside. The bourgeois politicians, not surprisingly, continue to talk as if things were normal. Not surprisingly, because their lives are normal. From air-conditioned houses they move in air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned offices in the morning and return via the same route in the evening, oblivious to the problems of the workers, peasants, and increasing sections of the petty bourgeoisie that form the vast majority of Pakistan's population.
In the same cities where the bourgeois class and its political representatives live in conditions of unmatched luxury with their hordes of servants and other flunkeys, there are working-class suburbs where water- plain drinking water-is in short supply and has to be bought from travelling vendors.
In these conditions it is hardly surprising that the workers' movement has developed at a very rapid rate over the last five years. Since the mass
Ayub upsurge which overthrew in 1968, the ruling class has not been able to inflict a decisive defeat on the workers. In addition the pre-election rhetoric of Bhutto further aroused the workers and poor peasants.
The People's party politicians told them that if Bhutto came to power, they would see the abolition of feudalism in the countryside and land would be distributed to the tillers of the soil; they told them that the factories would be seized from the capitalists and given to the workers; they promised that the large mansions of the rich would be emptied and converted into dwellings for the poor. Needless to say none of these promises have been fulfilled.
But the advent of Bhutto did start off a wave of factory occupations and strikes which the new regime found difficult to control in the early stages. As a result most of the country's leading businessmen began to withdraw large sums of money abroad and refused to show any confidence in the new regime.
Over the last few months both the central and all the provincial governments have been showing their skill in the art of repression. In the NWFP, the NAP government has arrested scores of peasant leaders and has aided local landlords in dealing with rebellious tenants. Most of the leaders of the small but militant populist Mazdoor-Kissan party have been arrested.
In the Punjab striking workers have been detained without trial and the government ordered the police to fire on a demonstration of a few thousand Christian women demanding 1116
protection for religious minorities as a result of which three Christians were killed.
In the Sind, where Mr Bhutto's "talented cousin" Mumtaz Bhutto is in control, there are nearly 2,000 political prisoners. This follows largescale strikes in Karachi, the country's leading industrial centre, during the course of which the People's party attempted to strangle the workers' movement by ordering the police to crush the strikes. Thirty workers were killed by the police, and random firing also took the lives of innocent bystanders including women and children. In fact there are more political prisoners in Pakistan today under the NAP and People's party governments than there were under the two military dictators (excluding, of course, what is now Bangladesh, where the dictators hardly regarded the Bengalis as human beings).
The options open to Mr Bhutto, or for that matter any other bourgeois regime in Pakistan, are extremely limited. In the first place he has to help to restore confidence in Pakistani capitalism. This means smashing the workers' movement and creating a "stable atmosphere" in Pakistan via political agreements with NAP and possibly other opposition groupings.
Given the lack of any national workers organisation capable of resisting the capitalist offensive, it is possible that Mr Bhutto could succeed, even though for a very short period, in convincing the capitalists that Pakistan is worth investing in, and already the governor of the state bank of Pakistan, Mr Ghulam Ishaque Khan, has been telling businessmen not to worry too much, as things are beginning to look up. In a recent address at the annual general meeting of the bank (an address, incidentally, whose full text was printed in virtually every major newspaper) he told investors not to take the rhetoric of the People's party too seriously:
"It is significant that Government has opted for a mixed economy and has made it clear that it has no intention of extending its control beyond the industries whose management has already been taken over. These industries account for less than 20%
of the organised industries which means that over 80% of the organised industries would continue to be controlled by the private sector.
"... the need for an energetic and
BHUTTO: Can he bottle up mass unrest?
enterprising business class which did so much for developing the country's resources in the past is as relevant today as it was before."
He also gave a clear indication of the government's attitude to workingclass militancy:
"In the sphere of labour-management relations, despite the coming into force of the new labour laws providing for the amicable resolution of disputes, militancy in settlements has not altogether disappeared. Recourse is still not infrequently being taken to illegal means to get unreasonable demands accepted. The tensions resulting from such confrontations are discouraging investment and at the same time doing considerable harm to the cause of production and employment."
Nevertheless even a temporary solution to Mr Bhutto's problems requires looking outside Pakistan and not only to the United States, which controls the country's economy whatever the regime in power, but to the neighboring states of India and Bangladesh. For the United States, the Pakistani ruling class has been always slightly anachronistic and medieval in its aims. It has taken the military defeat of the Pakistani army to enable the United States to force Pakistan's most chauvinistic politician, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who not so long ago used to speak rather absurdly in terms of a 1,000-year war with India, to visit India and seek a rapprochement with the Indian bourgeoisie.
The real enemy of both the Indian and Pakistani bourgeoisies is the mass movement at home, and the United States understands perfectly well that in the long-term interests of preserving capitalist hegemony in the subcontinent it is essential that the two bourgeoisies get together well in advance of the next wave of insurrections and explosions.
This is what the Simla Summit represented. It is a charter whose main aim is to preserve the status quo in South Asia and as such it has been actively supported by the Kremlin leadership and has been welcomed by Peking. For the revolutionary movement in South Asia as a whole this means that it will have to fight alone against both its own bourgeoisie and the big powers. Thus the Simla Summit necessitates working-class unity on a subcontinental level to combat this remarkable coalition of diverse interests. The experience of Ceylon reveals exactly why the revolutionary movement has to operate on a subcontinental level if it is to achieve success even in certain zones.
Resumption of trade with India and freeing of other restrictions would certainly boost the Karachi Stock Exchange. What is unlikely is that it would in any way change the conditions in which the average Pakistani lives.
Recognition of Bangladesh and the resumption of trading links would fulfill a similar need. However, the question of Bangladesh has assumed serious political overtones as the rightist politicians in the country have succeeded in pressuring Bhutto to delay recognition. Some of these politicians still seem to imagine that Pakistan can be reunited; others merely want to embarrass Bhutto by using tactics in which he was himself considered a master before political power sobered him.
The hands of Bhutto and the other leading People's party politicians are by no means untainted, as they were all firm supporters of the military action which resulted in the massacre of tens of thousands of Bengalis, and thus contradictions on this question exist within the ruling party itself. Only Wali Khan and his party have come out firmly in favour of an unconditional recognition of Bangladesh.
However, despite all these problems the long-term interests of U.S. impe- October 16, 1972
rialism necessitate a coherent and unified bourgeoisie within the subcontinent to prevent the rise of mass movements of workers, peasants, and other layers.
If Mr Bhutto can manage to hold together Pakistan as at present constituted and use it for this purpose, the country can continue to hold together possibly for another decade. If a state of near-anarchy continues to exist and the army has to be called out again or if there is a new military coup, then Pakistan will cease to exist and new formulas will have to be found. The only basis for the continued existence of Pakistan would be a radical change in its existing social structure which would give the state a socioeconomic unity and rally the large majority of the people behind the new system, but this at the present moment seems a utopian dream as the extreme left is weak, hopelessly disorganised, and still suffering from the aftereffects of Peking's opportunist policies in relation to the Pakistani state.