By Qalandar Bux Memon

Pakistan is in a state of crisis. The history of Pakistan looked at from a human perspective may suggest that it has been a state in perpetual crisis since birth. The ruling elite have operated from the beginning on the basis of cronyism, nepotism, and legal and illegal corruption. Due to this they have always been inefficient and indifferent to the plight of the masses.

The masses meanwhile have got on with life in the narrow boundaries the state has accorded them. Without educational facilities they have gleaned their knowledge from oral history and passed down traditions; without healthcare and with the British destruction of Islamic and local traditions of healthcare they have turned to the occult of saints and indigenous remedies; given the brutal repression meted out for claiming rights, they have learned to operate dubiously – bowing heads and ‘yes-saying’ in front of masters. Above all, they have learnt to survive by getting on with things themselves with support from each other.

Yet, even within this grand and perpetual drama of the elite and the masses, some stake out to turn the page and set course for a new Pakistan. One such group was the Progressive Writers Association – formed in the 1930s, it was a potent force until the 1980s and still continues today. They were writers, poets, artists, intellectuals and filmmakers, but also political workers and activists. Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Habib Jalib, Sardar J’afri and Ahmad Faraz are but a few of those who identified with this group.

They wanted Pakistan to operate by the highest human principles – of care for humans, of humans, and of nature. They fought for participatory democracy (not just an election every five years) and argued for services from the state for the masses – a welfare state. In foreign affairs they were radically anti-imperialist, and formed by the mood of anti-colonial struggle they wanted to chart a path for the Third World that was independent of the Cold War and focused on human development and not the development of weapons and wars and schisms.

The Progressive Writers were jailed, tortured, and hunted into exile. They had dreamed of an egalitarian society where the state functioned for the people and delivered services to them, where people did not have to lose dignity or bow their heads for being poor. Instead they saw society gripped ever more firmly by militarisation, landlordism and embroiled in imperial slavery – first in the Cold War and now in the ‘War on Terror’.

Dreams of doors that wait to be opened

The recent floods have devastated the country, 20 million people have been affected, and inflation is set to rise by 20 percent due to the destruction of agricultural land and the 200,000 animals that have died. Hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in tents, having lost what little they owned. The suffering is borne by the 40 percent of Pakistanis who live below the poverty line. It is their houses that have been destroyed and inflation will affect them hardest, possibly bringing half the country’s population below the poverty line over the next year.

The government’s response has been well documented – indecision, inefficiency, and indifference, none of which are surprising. The cabinet is a talking shop without the teeth, experience or capacity to deliver goods to the people at the best of times, let alone in times of crisis. They, and the army when it has been in power, have abrogated responsibility for most of the country to local landlords and chieftains and lately NGOs.

This ‘thin state’ has also been encouraged by international financial institutions. Conditionalities on loans have demanded the privatisation of government services, the withdrawal of subsidies on such items such as oil and gas that benefit the poor, and the institutionalising of regressive taxation such as VAT.

Pakistan has an external debt of $55 billion. In 2009-10 alone Pakistan paid up to $3.4 billion to its external debtors. A campaign has recently been launched demanding the cancellation of Pakistan’s external debt. At a multiparty conference on 29th August in Lahore, 28 progressive groupings met to form a united platform. Khaliq Shah of the Campaign for the Abolition of Third World Debt pointed out that most of Pakistan’s external debt has been incurred by dictators – in particular, Ayub, Zia and Musharraf. For example, external debt stood at $35 billion when Musharraf took power, but had ballooned to $49 billion by the end of his term.

Supporting Shah’s assessment, Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, academic, writer and activist with the Workers Party Pakistan and a campaigner for debt cancellation, pointed out the clear link between western military agendas and the granting of loans. Western governments and international financial institutions had rewarded dictators and governments in return for Pakistan’s involvement in the Cold War under Ayub and Zia and in the War on Terror under Musharraf. Donors had seldom taken care to see that the money granted was used for the purposes of development. The complicity of international donors and power-hungry generals must be accounted for; the Pakistani people cannot be held responsible for the decisions of generals and bank executives. But this is precisely what has happened throughout Pakistan’s history: the burden of paying back illegitimate debt has fallen on working people. And this burden will intensify dramatically in the wake of the floods if the illegitimate debt acquired over the past five decades is not written-off.

Debt cancellation would allow Pakistan to envision a new path. Over $3.4 billion dollars would be available this year to rebuild the houses, farms, and lives of those millions affected. To guard against government corruption, the multiparty conference suggested that a new committee consisting of civil society, the public and parliamentarians be given teeth to supervise the use of this money. The campaign held a demonstration in Islamabad outside Parliament and another outside the headquarters of the World Bank in support of their demand. More demonstrations are planned in the coming months in Karachi and again in Islamabad. Meanwhile, the online petition site Avaaz.com has had over 120,000 sign a petition calling for donors to cancel Pakistan’s debt. Sajjad reflects hopefully that if debt is cancelled or the political will is there for defaulting, then the “people of this country will be given some much needed respite”.

Dreams of the aggrieved

Unable to sleep in the heat and humidity of Lahore's summer, I got up to idle away a few hours in the night. I opened an email from a local political activist and read that Fazal Ilahi, Akbar Kamboh, Muhammad Riaz and Barber Randhawa were still in jail.

I had met them briefly in July. They, along with 250,000 power loom workers, had been on strike for eight days demanding a 17-percent increase in wages as had been recommended by the Minimum Wage Board, a government committee monitoring labour issues.

The strike was called by the Labour Qaumi Movement (LQM), of which Riaz Ahmad was a member. The LQM was founded by 60 or so power loom workers who used to meet at a tea stall in 2003. It was instigated by fate.

In early 2002, in the industrial city of Faisalabad, Mian Qayyum was walking back to his power loom station after taking his lunch break at the tea shop of his friend Malik Nazir when he heard noises from the neighbouring factory. He hurried over. Three policemen were beating up a middle-aged worker. The worker, already fallen to the ground, was taking fists and kicks from the three police officers. Enraged, Mian ran over, threw the police off the worker, and started fighting one of the policemen. Seeing this, other workers joined in. The police officers, outnumbered, ran off. Mian then returned to work.

Mian was 28 with four children. He recalls: “I was worried and sweating, thinking what is going to happen now. I was worried for my family. Will I have a job? Are they going to arrest me? My clothes were covered in sweat, and that night at home I did not sleep. I was worried; each knock or noise alarmed me. What will happen now?”

The next day came and brought nothing but the drudgery of the next day. Soon word got around. Workers began to seek out Mian for help at his lunch break at the tea shop. He helped, offering advice to some, negotiating with bosses for others, collecting donations for more, and settling disputes for yet others. His boss, frightened by Mian’s growing reputation, laid him off, politely. “Take your salary but don’t come to work,” he told him.

Mian refused the money and embraced dignified unemployment. With more time, he had ever more demands on his hands from the factory workers of Faisalabad. He helped as best he could. Workers began to sit around the tea stall and analyse their situation. Why were they so poor despite working in the heat for 12 hours a day? Why were the political parties not doing anything for them? What use would it be if they followed the religious parties with their message of division and hatred – Sunni against Shi’a? Would this solve their basic problems of hunger, unemployment, bad working conditions, and low wages?

Mian, unable to find work at other power loom factories, began to sell biscuits, bread, and sweets house-to-house, riding a cycle borrowed from Malik Nazir. He made about Rs400 per day, and this kept his family going. But the tea stall meetings continued and the questions kept developing. What was the law there for? Why didn’t they get their legal wages? Why did the police always attack them at the behest of the owners? Weren’t the police meant to protect them too? And what was their sin that they suffered so much misery while a few zamindars enjoyed the fruits of this bountiful land? What could they do to see the workers get legal rights and protection? How could they support each other?

While these questions rang in the ears of the 60 or so workers who now gathered around the tea stall, Mian Qayyum continued to ride his cycle to make a living and support his family and lobby for his fellow workers. Until the answers started to arrive: we will fight as a collective for workers’ rights; we will unionise where we can; we will work with all those who want to help better the condition of the workers; we will support each other and stay away from religious parties that divide us on superficial basis - worker against worker - or political parties that talk of the worker but wallow in riches looted from their sweat; we will serve each other and unite; we will come together on the basis of what unites us, “that we are workers”. Mian returned to the tea stall to find that he had been chosen to be the first full-time worker of the newly formed LQM. Sixty workers pooled together contributions to employ Mian, and the tea shop became their headquarters.

That was 2003. Today, LQM has grown in reputation and strength. The 250,000-worker strike in late July had been preceded by a 20,000-worker strike in Jhang.

The strike began in middle of June and centered around two demands. Firstly, that the workers be given 17 percent pay rise, and secondly that they be issued with a social security card that was their legal right. Farooq Tariq, spokesperson of the Labour Party of Pakistan, explained the background in relation to social security cards:

“Only 2.1 million workers out of 45 million Pakistanis in the labor force have secured social security cards. That is less than four percent of the total workforce. By law, every worker must be issued a social security card; however, many bosses never register their workforce with the Social Security Department. Most factory owners pay for a few workers while the rest remain at their mercy. Why is this so? The answer is that bosses are required to pay at least seven percent of each worker’s total wages into the social security system.

Paying seven percent of each worker’s wage would of course mean less profit for the bosses – less money for those shopping trips abroad, less money to sustain those vulgar grand palaces in Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad, and the hordes of servants swimming around them (out of necessity not desire), less money for the Rolex watch and the Chanel glasses to be updated on a yearly basis.

What of the government and the social security department – why don’t they get workers registered? Farooq Tariq answered: “The labour department responsible for implementing the law enjoys a cordial relationship with the bosses. In fact, since 2003, the government in Punjab has banned factory inspections by the labour department, thus giving the owners a free hand.”

For 17 days, workers struck, moving out from strike camps near main roads. Women, children, and workers stayed together in the camps. Entertained by dhol (a large drum), poetry, and the skills of Bawa Latif, they spent the nights and days hungry but determined. On the 16^th day of the strike, they moved the camps around the office of the District Commissioning Officer (DCO), a bureaucrat charged with local administration, often the judge, jury and executioner rolled into one. The strategy paid off, and after failed attempts by the police to raise the camps and pressure the leadership, the DCO gave in and informed the bosses that the workers had to be registered with the social security board and issued cards. Bawa smiled as he told me of this victory. “We had finally had our day.”

The victory in Jhang alarmed the bosses, and when they heard that another strike was planned they sent out a warning to the LQM. On 6^th July, in broad daylight at 1pm, ten people burst into a district office of LQM run by Mustansar Rindhawa. He was with his brother listening to a worker who wanted help. One of the ten had a Kalashnikov rifle and started to fire. Naseer, Mustansar’s younger brother, was shot dead. Mustansar managed to run into the second room and locked the door. It didn’t help. The murderers broke in and shot him dead too. His blood soaked body sparked days of protests in the city. It also hastened a 250,000-strong strike. But no arrests.

After the deaths of Mustansar and his brother, the LQM and the workers continued to suffer arrests and beatings at the hands of the police and by the goons of the factory bosses. Mian Quayyam, however, is steadfastly against violence. It is “counter-productive”, he told me. “We have too much of it in our society already. We want to set a new Pakistan where the workers get their rights and can live decent lives. We don’t want violence.”

The strikers operated by supporting one another with money and held fast to their demands. On the tenth day of the strike the bosses gave in and accepted their demands. It was a historic moment. I did the calculations: 250,000 people had each got a raise of 17 percent. If we assume they are each now getting at least the minimum wage of Rs7,000, then it would mean Rs1,190 per worker (per family) more per month. The average family in Pakistan is estimated to consist of around 7.5 people. Given this, the workers’ victory would positively affect nearly 1,875,000 people.

Fazal, Akbar, Muhammad and Barber were picked up by the police on the sixth day of the strike as a message to other workers. On the previous day the police, rather than protecting the strikers, had attacked a rally of the striking workers along with goons in the pay of the factory bosses. The next day, the police invited Fazal, Akbar, Muhammad and Barber ostensibly for clear-the-air talks. When they turned up they were arrested. Even though the strike was won they remained behind bars. They have now been in jail for nearly two months. Their crime: struggling for a different Pakistan, dreaming the "dream of the aggrieved".