Seminar: "Critique of current European politics" at RPC

Seminar: "Critique of current European politics"

at Research and Publication Centre (RPC), 2nd Floor, 65 Main Boulevard Gulberg, Lahore.

Time and date: 6:30 pm, Wednesday, November 2, 2022.

Speakers: 

1. Michael Wallace, Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from the Independents 4 Change party in Ireland. Wallace is considered one of the most eccentric and unconventional figures in European politics. He is an uncompromising critic of neoliberal austerity and has advocated the abolition of NATO. "The people of Europe must campaign for the abolition of NATO, it has nothing good to offer anyone that prefers peace to war."

2. Clare Daly, MEP from the Independents 4 Change party in Ireland. She is an outspoken advocate of socialist and anti-imperialist causes and has condemned the use of drone warfare in third world countries. Daly is also a trenchant critic of the war in Iraq and has opposed Western military intervention in the third world. 

Wallace and Daly are part of the Left in the European Parliament – GUE/NGL. 

Rashed Rahman

Editor, Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) (link: pakistanmonthlyreview.com)

Director, Research and Publication Centre (RPC) (on Facebook).

Business Recorder Column October 18, 2022

Even six swallows may not a spring make

 

Rashed Rahman

 

Imran Khan and the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaaf (PTI) are feeling extremely chuffed at his winning six of the seven National Assembly (NA) seats he stood on in the by-elections held on October 16, 2022. And despite the (usual) charges of ‘rigging’, they do not seem too perturbed at the loss of two NA seats that they held previously. On the other hand, most of the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) coalition parties have been left red-faced for their lacklustre showing in failing to win even a single NA seat. These worthies include the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F), Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) and the Awami National Party (ANP). The exception to this ‘honour roll’ is the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which has managed to wrest two NA seats, one against Imran Khan in Karachi, the other against the PTI in Multan.

The ANP’s Ghulam Ahmed Bilour has proclaimed that he will challenge his loss by 25,000 votes to Imran Khan in Peshawar NA-31. He claims it was the PTI government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) that helped defeat him through foul means. Bilour garnered 32,252 votes to Imran Khan’s 57,814. The turnout in this constituency was 20.28 percent, a low figure typical of by-elections generally, and these by-elections too. No other losing PDM candidate has challenged the results.

Imran Khan won by 76,681 votes to JUI-F’s Maulana Qasim’s 68,181 from Mardan NA-22. The turnout was a comparatively better 32.9 percent. In Karachi’s Malir NA-237, Imran Khan suffered his only loss to the PPP’s Abdul Hakim Baloch by 32,567 votes to 22,493 with a turnout of 20 percent. In the same city’s Korangi NA-239, Imran Khan defeated the MQM-P’s Syed Nayyar Raza by 50,104 votes to 18,116. With an even lower turnout of 14.8 percent, the result in this constituency reflects the decline of MQM-P in both mobilising voters as well as obtaining their support. Imran Khan also won in Faisalabad NA-108, defeating the PML-N’s Abid Sher Ali by 99,841 votes to 75,226, and the PML-N’s Shezra Mansab Ali Khan Kharal by 90,180 votes to 78,024 in Nankana Sahib NA-118.

In a battle of heirs apparent, the PPP’s Ali Musa Gilani, son of former Prime Minister and currently Senate Leader of the Opposition Yousaf Raza Gilani, defeated the PTI’s Shah Mahmood Qureshi’s daughter Meher Bano Qureshi by a margin of 107,327 votes to 82,141. Imran Khan refrained from contesting this seat, no doubt in deference to Shah Mahmood’s desire to secure the seat for his family and heirs. However, this reversal gave the PPP something to celebrate, given that this was the first Punjab NA seat they had won in four years, and only the second Punjab one in the last 10 years. How far this single victory will help in reviving the once mighty PPP’s fortunes in Punjab, only time will tell, but it does seem a long way to go yet to restore the PPP’s once unassailable hold on Punjab.

Speaking of holds on Punjab, the once immovable PML-N in the province came out looking rather lame on the NA front, while only managing to win one seat out of the three being contested for the Punjab Provincial Assembly. Although in the aftermath of this underwhelming performance the PML-N has been busy dishing out its mea culpa, the outcome has not pleased PML-N supremo Nawaz Sharif in London.

The usual post-polling charges and counter-charges of ‘rigging’ aside, the by-elections were by and large peaceful except for a few clashes between the rival parties in Karachi, Khanewal, Sheikhupura, Faisalabad and Peshawar. The heavy security forces deployment managed to scotch such violence fairly quickly and easily, and made a few arrests. The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has firmly rebutted all suggestion of ‘rigging’ no matter from where it has emanated, but particularly the PTI’s claims, which appear strange considering their ‘triumph’.

On the basis of these by-election results, is the post-polling ‘triumphalism’ of the PTI justified? A few considerations must be kept in view. One, by-elections normally produce low turnouts, rendering them an unreliable barometer of the electorate’s overall mood, both in individual constituencies as well as the country as a whole. So too much should not be read into the PTI’s wins. Second, given that Imran Khan ran on seven out of the eight NA seats being contested, and despite his strong showing in winning six out of the seven he stood in, does it not colour the PTI as a ‘one man show’? In a sense Imran Khan’s victories are logical and to be expected since his opponents, veteran and new, did not enjoy the same high profile as him, especially in the light of his relentless pursuit of the rally trail since being ousted from power. To that extent the PTI’s satisfaction if not triumphalism may be justified, since it points in the direction of the PTI winning the battle of narratives. But on the other hand, as admitted by Rana Sanaullah, the PML-N was unable to mount a cohesive, effective election campaign in any constituency it was contesting. The losing PML-N candidates for these seats have attempted to shift the blame onto Maryam Nawaz’s departure to London instead of being available to lead the campaigning. So on the one hand we appear to have the one man show of Imran Khan, and on the other the one woman show of the PML-N. Somewhat pathetic, is it not?

It may be recalled that these by-elections were triggered by the acceptance of nine PTI MNAs’ resignations by the Speaker of the National Assembly, Raja Pervaiz Ashraf, out of the entire mass resignations submitted by the PTI MNAs following the defeat of Imran Khan in the no-confidence motion. The PTI seems to have set aside its irritation at this ‘selective’ acceptance of its MNAs’ resignations and decided to turn the tables on the government by fielding their trump card, Imran Khan, on seven vacant seats. Victory aside, the PTI may have to go back to the drawing board once Imran Khan has to surrender five of the six seats he has won, a prospect that invites a better organised campaign and showing by the PML-N if it hopes to generate some momentum to win back its erstwhile stronghold Punjab.

Despite the ‘feel good’ of PTI’s victory, the government is still not buying into the former’s demand for immediate general elections. That implies the PTI twisting in the wind till at least August 2023, while the PML-N and its PDM coalition allies will have to get their act together to combat what appears to be Imran Khan’s political momentum.

 

 

 

 

 

rashed.rahman1@gmail.com

rashed-rahman.blogspot.com

The October 2022 issue of Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) is out

The October 2022 issue of Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) is out. Link: pakistanmonthlyreview.com

Contents:

1. Rashed Rahman: Revolutions: past and present.

2. Vijay Prashad: We will march, even if we have to wade through the Pakistani floodwaters.

Rashed Rahman

Editor, Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) (link: pakistanmonthlyreview.com)

Director, Research and Publication Centre (RPC) (on Facebook) 

Business Recorder Column October 11, 2022

Terrorist hydra raises its head/s again

 

Rashed Rahman

 

Since the victory of the Afghan Taliban in August 2021, and contrary to the fond hopes of our establishment that their ‘friends’ now ensconced in Kabul would help restrain the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Pakistan has seen an uptick in terrorist attacks and show of armed force by the group in Swat and the former FATA tribal regions. In the light of this development, one must question COAS General Qamar Bajwa’s claim in his address at the Pakistan Military Academy Kakul that the army had successfully turned the tide against terrorism. In 2014, in the wake of the massacre of children and teachers in the terrorist attack on the Army Public School Peshawar, the military’s Zarb-e-Azb offensive, as this writer had pointed out at the time, had merely ‘exported’ the problem (to Afghanistan), not scotched the snake. The many-headed hydra of terrorism with which Pakistan has been afflicted for decades since our involvement in the Afghan wars, now appears to be raising its head/s again with a vengeance.

First some  historical perspective. TTP came into being in 2007 in reaction to the Lal Masjid incident in Islamabad. It was composed of tribal areas Pashtun groups closely associated with the Afghan wars, first with the Mujahideen, later the Taliban. There is also some evidence of an alliance with, and mentoring by, al Qaeda. When so-called Islamic extremism first reared its ugly head in the former FATA after 9/11 and the US invasion of Afghanistan, these Pakistani jihadists fell out with the Pakistani state for whom they had previously fought in Afghanistan and Kashmir over its support for the US’s War on Terror. They provided safe havens and sanctuary to al Qaeda, Afghan Taliban and other militant elements fleeing Afghanistan. Under US pressure, General Musharraf’s regime started a crackdown on such groups starting 2004. These suppression efforts proved halting and contradictory, and were often punctuated by ‘peace’ agreements with the militant groups that more often than not were broken by the latter. In their early campaigns, the terrorists did not hesitate to carry out indiscriminate attacks on civilians and religious minorities such as Shias. They also killed hundreds of tribal maliks(chieftains) who constituted the state’s ‘political management’ structure in the tribal areas, an arrangement inherited from British colonialism.

Reportedly on al Qaeda's advice, by 2018 the TTP had changed tack to the extent of ‘abandoning’ pan-Islamism (i.e. denying any ‘expansionist’ plans for other regions, concentrating on Pakistan alone) and redirecting their attacks away from civilians and religious minorities and towards military and intelligence personnel. They have also, particularly since the Afghan Taliban’s ascent to power last year, redoubled their attacks on the border and inside the country as a whole, as well as conducting a show of arms in areas such as Swat and the tribal areas. Given this resurgence, it was exceedingly strange that the military establishment entered into negotiations with the TTP (with the Haqqani Network’s facilitation). These talks were neither officially announced nor was parliament or the public taken into confidence. A tentative ceasefire soon broke down on the unacceptability of the TTP’s demands for their version of shariato be enforced in Pakistan, a reversal of the merger of FATA with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, release of TTP prisoners and, as icing on the cake, no sports for women. Although these demands were inherently unacceptable to the state, the last demand rendered a women’s sports festival in Gilgit-Baltistan ‘suspect’, and it could only be held in muted fashion after it was renamed a ‘gala’.

As part of its refashioned strategy, the TTP has issued statements of support for the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) and the Tehreek-e-Labaiq Pakistan (TLP), despite the fact that the latter is a Barelvi movement while the TTP is Deobandi. This flexibility is an effort on the part of the TTP to remain relevant in the mainstream political discourse.

Negotiations with the TTP began under Imran Khan’s government, in line with his long held view that terrorist militancy could not be handled by military means and had to rely on negotiations. However, what Imran Khan failed to realise, and has yet to realise, is that religious extremists, terrorists and fanatics are impervious to reason. In the past, if they have negotiated agreements for ceasefires, these proved to be mere tactical measures that were abandoned as soon as the religious extremists felt they could return to the offensive. This has been the pattern since 2004, including such edifying episodes as the terrorists playing football with decapitated soldiers’ heads.

The critical mistake the military establishment made during the Afghan wars was to allow the Pashtun tribesmen to act as facilitators if not fighters for the Afghan Mujahideen and then Taliban. It was inevitable that cross-border Pashtun solidarity, not to mention closeness of political views would radicalise our tribesmen in the same vein as the Mujahideen and Taliban. Pakistan is having to potentially pay the price for this error in horrendous terms once again, given that we are currently experiencing the highest rate of terrorist attacks for the last 5-6 years. The people of Swat and other regions that have experienced TTP terrorism in the past are literally up in arms at the seeming neglect of the threat once again posed by the resurgent TTP and are demanding action by the state, failing which they say they will be compelled to take up arms themselves against the ‘intruders’. The military establishment would be well advised  to take parliament and the country into confidence on the state of affairs surrounding the resurgence of the TTP and chalk out a fresh plan to nip the evil in the bud, something neglected in the past, exacting a horrendous cost, and likely to exact an even higher cost if not carried out today.

 

 

 

rashed.rahman1@gmail.com

rashed-rahman.blogspot.com

Business Recorder Column October 4, 2022

A fighter to the last

 

Rashed Rahman

 

Veteran Baloch progressive leader and president of the Awami Workers Party (AWP) Yousuf Mustikhan passed away early morning on September 29, 2022 after a prolonged struggle against cancer. Wrapped in the red and white flag of his party, the icon of Baloch nationalism was laid to rest that same afternoon in the presence of a large number of political leaders and workers, journalists, lawyers, trade unionists, peasant leaders and of course, the leaders and workers of the AWP. Yousuf Mustikhan was one of the closest companions of one of the ‘big three’ of the Baloch national struggle, Mir Ghaus Baksh Bizenjo. Yousuf Mustikhan remained a lifelong, passionate advocate of the Baloch national movement and the struggles for justice and against oppression of the working class, peasantry, the poor and marginalised. He ran for elections twice from the Baloch-dominated neighbourhood of Lyari, Karachi. He was a leader of Karachi’s Indigenous Rights Alliance, which organised anti-eviction campaigns against land grabbing big real estate developers like Bahria Town.

Hailing from a well-off family settled in Karachi, Yousuf Mustikhan started his lifelong political journey as a student in the radical 1960s. He joined the Baloch Students Organisation (BSO) while studying in the Sindh Arts College, Karachi. He worked closely with Baloch Marxist leader Lal Baksh Rind, who nudged BSO towards becoming not just a nationalist, but progressive movement. Yousuf Mustikhan joined the National Awami Party (NAP) along with Lal Baksh Rind in Lyari, while conducting underground work for NAP inside Balochistan.

When NAP was banned by the Supreme Court on a reference filed by the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto government in 1975 in the context of the Baloch and Pashtun resistance to Bhutto’s repression in Balochistan and (then) NWFP, Yousuf Mustikhan joined its ‘successor’ party, the National Democratic Party (NDP) as a member of its central committee. Later he was elected president of NDP Karachi.

There is hardly any nationalist/progressive/democratic movement that Yousuf Mustikhan was not a part of over his six decades of political struggle. In 1981, he joined the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD) against the dark night of General Ziaul Haq’s military dictatorship. By 1983, when the MRD movement was brutally crushed, particularly in Sindh, the NDP became more or less moribund, particularly after the disillusioned ‘retirement’ from politics of its leader, Sher Baz Mazari. The splintering of the old Baloch-Pashtun political alliance delivered divergent paths for both in the emergence of the Awami National Party (ANP) of Khan Abdul Wali Khan and the Pakistan National Party (PNP) of veteran Baloch nationalist leader Mir Ghaus Baksh Bizenjo (and other factions).

It needs mentioning here that Mir Ghaus Baksh Bizenjo had been a mentor to one of his closest colleagues and followers, Yousuf Mustikhan, from the period of the NAP government formation in Balochistan (1972), adoption of the interim and final Constitution/s (1972-3), and the Hyderabad Conspiracy Case trial (1976-77) after the Balochistan government of Sardar Attaullah Mengal was dismissed by Bhutto in 1973 and a military offensive launched in Balochistan. After his longstanding mentor’s passing away in 1989, Yousuf Mustikhan was elected the president of PNP. In 1999, Yousuf Mustikhan led the way to the formation of the National Workers Party along with veteran Left leaders Abid Minto, Akhtar Hussain, and other Leftist elements.

It may be recalled that this was a period of a sense of defeat and retreat after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1991. This conjuncture signalled for many a permanent demise of Left politics. Yousuf Mustikhan steadfastly remained in the ranks of those who saw beyond the conjuncture and continued the struggle against national oppression, class exploitation and militarisation of state and society.

In 2012, Yousuf Mustikhan was one of the moving forces behind the formation of the AWP. He served the party as its Sindh president, federal senior vice-president and, finally, as its president (2018-2022). In June 2022, he presided over the formation of a new platform to unite the progressive, nationalist and democratic forces in Islamabad: the United Democratic Front. At that conference in Islamabad and a subsequent conference in Lahore just a few days later, both of which I was a participant of, I cautioned my dear friend and colleague Yousuf Mustikhan against the strain he was putting on his health by excessive travelling and political activity. Little did I know then that my words would soon prove so tragically prophetic.

Yousuf Mustikhan fought all his conscious life and until his last breath for justice for the oppressed and smaller (in population) provinces, arguing for their being made equal partners in a truly democratic federation while recognising their historic national rights, amongst which must be counted their separate culture, language, identity, and ownership of their natural resources. Despite coming from a comfortable background, he had contempt for the pursuit of wealth and was never lured by the temptations of material advantage or power. He inspired generations of fighters for national and social justice.

People like Yousuf Mustikhan are becoming rare in our society. For one, it appears it is departure time for many of his generation. For those still surviving, and for the young, Yousuf Mustikhan’s lifelong principles and struggle contain a profound truth. History unfolds not according to our subjective wishes and desires. Those who have internalised the seeming truth about the neoliberal capitalist triumph that has come to define our global culture today must revisit history’s objective processes and paths, acquire strategic patience, conduct theoretical work to update and clarify our understanding of today’s world (and Pakistan in it) (Lenin: “Without a revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement”), and organise the masses for a struggle for their, and our collective better future.

Nothing could be a greater and better tribute to the life, struggle and principles of our dear departed comrade Yousuf Mustikhan. Rest in peace, my friend, you did more than your share, always.

 

 

 

 

 

rashed.rahman1@gmail.com

rashed-rahman.blogspot.com