Lackeys of Imperialism

There is a constant pressure on us for rolling back the 18th Amendment of the Constitution. Every matter is being centralized because the IMF or the Western donors want to talk only to the federal government and not to the provinces. Our import tariffs, our taxes, rates of our utilities, which are inputs of whatever production capacity is left in our country, are decided elsewhere.

This chain of our dependence on others started at the time of our independence when the colonial power thought it fit to leave the issues of river waters and Kashmir disputed. The regional conflict pushed up our defence spending, which led to budget deficits and which in turn led to borrowings from international money lenders. Now our debt servicing has reached the level of three times that of our defence budget and instead of providing any relief to our people and upgrading their standards of living we have to put more burden on our people through more taxes and inflation almost on a daily basis. All of this has to be changed.

To end our dependency on the international financial imperialism, we have to shift to the road of self-dependence. Those like Liaquat Ali Khan who established the PIDC in the public sector and who built the Pakistan Ordinance Factory or those like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto who nationalized banks, insurance companies and key industries and used these assets to jump start production in key public sectors, were quietly eliminated by the agents of imperialism. Imperialism and its lackeys are afraid of free and fair elections in the country.

The times for military dictators are long gone but free and fair elections which would give our people the opportunity to choose their true representatives able to provide pro-people solutions to our ever increasing problems remain a dream yet to be fulfilled. When the two major political parties agreed on a Charter of Democracy, a third pro-establishment party was manufactured which boasted that they and the Establishment were on the same page.

Religious extremist groups were formed and patronized to fight an imposed war externally and to crush democracy internally. That brave and unparalleled champion of democracy and tolerance Shaheed Benazir Bhutto was eliminated by these extremist elements. What is to be done? That remains an unavoidable question. Those who think that Long March will be over with the change of the government are missing the obvious point that Chairman Bilawal Bhutto since long has been calling the ruling party not by its actual name but as PTIMF and that from the day Imran Khan took oath the PPP Chairman has been calling this government ‘Selected,’ instead of elected.

If only 128 Forms 45 out of a total of 78, 471 on the ECP website have been signed by the polling agents of political parties and independent candidates and if polling agents have been forcibly thrown out of polling stations when vote counts started than what the present government certainly lacks is its legitimacy.

No wonder that instead of following its own election manifesto this government has been blindly following the agenda of international financial imperialism. The PPP firmly believes in its founding principle of “All Power to the People”. Their political consciousness is our only strength. The Party has once again embarked on a mass mobilization campaign. Not only this agent government has to go, but the system has to be changed diametrically. The least that we hope to gain from this Long March is a dynamic rise in the political consciousness of our people and remember that political consciousness is irreversible.