Problems of Democracy in Pakistan Essay

by and byward years of armed services authoritarianisms followed by fraudulence majority rule, the situation in Pakistan has reached such a point that the dopees argon yearning for thoroughgoing change. Their pathetic is immense as the people at the top continue to enrich themselves at the expensive of the workers and peasants, collaborating with imperialism as it rides rough-shod over the people of Pakistan. Everything is moving to an inevitable renewalary explosion. Pakistans Supreme hook in its verdict of 16 December, 2009 declared the notorious NRO null and forfend ab initio.The interior(a) Reconciliation Ordinance of October 2007 was promulgated by the then President of Pakistan General Parvaiz Musharraf. It was the out sum up of a deal he had taken with(p) with Benazir Bhutto, life Chairperson of the Pakistan Peoples Party in a covert meeting in Abu Dhabi. The deal was brokered by the United States and Britain. The suggest was to create a new setup that could fac ilitate the imperialist fight and former(a) interests in this turbulent region. According to this ordinance all cases of politicians including corruption, murder, extortion, kidnappings and other heinous crimes would be withdrawn.Some of the major beneficiaries are now in power including Benazirs widower Zardari, now the President of Pakistan and some of his virtually sinister ministers. The other main beneficiary is the Muteheda Qaumi Movement, MQM, whose leader, an absconder resident in capital of the United Kingdom for several years, and its other leading figures were facing charges of murder and other crimes. The MQM is a mafia-type organisation with neo-fascist tendencies and its main ideological baggage is based on heathen conflict. The present egalitarian dispensation is the product of such a nefarious design. after(prenominal) Benazirs assassination in December 2007 Musharrafs fate was sealight-emitting diode.The syllabus B came into action and Zardari having a long st anding relationship with US officials was ca smashulted into the presidency with his firm assurance that he would be more implemental to the Americans than Musharraf or Benazir could ever expect been. The Electoral College for this election are comprised of members of the subject field and provincial assemblies who were elective in the February 2008 elections, the results of which were tailor-made in Washington to arrange the imperialist strategies. Ironically this unanimity, or reconciliation, between all the lead offies inParliament was prompted by a collective fear on the part of these representatives of the rule signifier in the wake of the beginnings of a mass purport that they witnessed on the arrival of Benazir from behave in Karachi on October 18, 2007 and recentr after the explosion of the wrath of the workers, peasants and youth at the news of her assassination on December 27, 2007. After a long rate of flow of suffering, the oppressed in Pakistan had risen up in the hope that the leader of their traditional company, the palatopharyngoplasty at a lower place Benazir Bhutto, would be a beacon of change and free them from the cruel misery and distress.The Americans had already d ane their homework with the palatopharyngoplasty leaders, who mainly come from the moneyed classes, to divert this outburst into a popular election and window dressing of democracy. These leaders drowned the mass anger and revolt in lugubriousness and despair. They refused to call for a cosmopolitan strike for the elections to be held on the schedule date of January 8, 2008 and blocked the causal agency. This gave an opportunity to the Pakistani body politic and its imperialist know to regroup their forces and stave off the threat of a revolutionary upheaval.The armament in Pakistan has ruled directly for more than half of the countrys 62 years of chequered history. All the host administrations were supported and propped up by US imperialism. During th e democratic intermissions the plight of the masses continued to deteriorate. After the first decade (1947-58) of democratic regimes, such was the crisis that when Martial Law was obligate by Field Martial Ayub Khan there was hitherto a sense of relief amongst several fragments of society. Ayub Khan had the impertinence to say in one of his initial statements we must to a lower placestand that democracy cannot work in a hot climate.To have democracy we must have a cold climate like Britain. General Ayub told the first meeting of his cabinet, As far as you are concerned there is exactly one embassy that matters in this country the American Embassy. The Ayub tyranny embarked upon an ambitious frugal, agrarian and industrial programme in the 1960s, mainly sponsored by US Aid and the creation border. Although Pakistan achieved its highest growth rates under Ayub, Keynesian sparing policies failed to improve the cumulation of the masses.The aggravated social contradictions e xploded into the revolution of 1968-69 that was fundamentally of a state-controlled character. See Pakistans Other Story-The 1968-69 Revolution. The failure of the existing left leadership to give a clear revolutionary programme and perspective to the movement resulted in the rise of the Populism of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Due to the absence of a Bolshevik-Leninist revolutionary party the revolution was lost. unless it did shake the whole of South Asia. The view classes initially tried to impose Martial Law over again. However, its failure to curb the soar up resulted in the first elections based on the adult franchise in 1970 where the PPP became the largest party in West Pakistan.Having failed to curtail the revolutionary rock that pierced through the ballot, ultimately the ruling classes resorted to a war with India, which led to the break-up of Pakistan and then Bhutto was given power who, forced by the pressure of the masses, initiated radical reforms from above, but only to exhaust the revolution brewing below. Bhuttos elected left reformist government was subsequently overthrown by a military takeover led by General Zia ul Haq in July 1977, who later hanged Bhutto at the behest of US imperialism.The el stock-still-year brutal dictatorship of Zia was perhaps the most traumatic period for the working masses in Pakistan. In connivance with the Americans, Zia propped up and unleashed the sentient cosmos of Islamic fundamentalism to crush the left. The continuance of that grotesque monstrosity is what produced the present solar day fundamentalist terror that is ripping apart the social fabric of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Zia tyranny began to crumble after another(prenominal) upheaval on the return from exile of Bhuttos daughter Benazir in April 1986. The contradictions in the already weakened dictatorship were thus sharpened.General Zias plane was conveniently blown up in mid air in August 1988 some have speculated that this may have been done at the request of the Americans, whom the megalomaniac and insane general had begun to disobey seeking his own personal agenda. From 1988 to 1999 there was another democratic interlude, where Benazir and Nawaz Sharif alternated in short stints of rulerships. This period was marred by an bacchanalia of corruption, incompetence, spiralling scotch decline and chaos. General Musharraf took power in a bloodless coup by overthrowing Sharif.Musharraf then introduced a quasi-democracy in 2002 but the 9/11 episode in the USA once again made another dictator another main American collaborator. This time the facade was not against communists but we had the so-called war against terror. Musharrafs demise and the regime that ensued once again brought unprecedented agony and pain for the people of Pakistan. narration has turned full circle. This vicious cycle of Pakistans political superstructure dictatorship to democracy and back to dictatorship has brought no respite to society.Only the s uffering has intensified. In reality this is a reflection of the ongoing social and economic crisis built into the foundations of this tragic country. The Pakistani ruling class after its liberty from direct British rule came onto the scene of history too late and with this came an inability to develop the economy. It was a weak class fifty-fifty at its inception. It could not produce enough surpluses for its profits and capital needed to tap the resources of the country and send out its historical role of the national revolution that its pioneers had envisaged.It adjusted itself accordingly, and its survival depended on the one hand by universe subservient to imperialism and on the other allying itself and compromising with the landed aristocracy created under the Raj. The founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, as early as November 1947, less than three months after the establishment of Pakistan, had sent his emissary to Washington asking for a $2bn loan. The reaction he go t was a mere $10million of loose change. The failure of Pakistans ruling elite is evident 62 years later. None of the national democratic tasks have been completed. Several agrarian reforms have failed to abolish feudalism.Pakistan came into existence not as a nation but as a state comprising polar nationalities. National oppression continues and the national question has become a festering wound on the body politic of this country. The task of the formation of a modern nation state is far from being achieved and impart in fact further deteriorate with the imminent crisis. This state of tenderness of the tasks has wrought havoc on the social and economic life of Pakistani society. The social and political infrastructure is in a state of collapse. National sovereignty is a farce and hardly anybody believes in the states independence.Imperialist intervention and domination is on a greater subdue today than it was in 1947, the year of Pakistans creation. Except for a a few(prenomi nal) years under Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, all the finance ministers have been employees of the World Bank or other imperialist financial institutions. Now the US is as yet trying to control sections of Pakistans armed forces and intruding its military corporeal contractors to take over security in several vital separate of the country. These include former Blackwater now XE securities, DynCorp and others. An embittered general described the strategical relationship as Americans using Pakistan as a condom.The conflicts inwardly the army are also the result of this aggressive hegemony being scoke into the Militarys domain. This is already giving rise to bloody conflicts among different agencies and sections of the armed forces representing black money and other sections of finance capital. This conflict is being waged covertly at the present time. But if a desperate imperialism faces an impending defeat in Afghanistan and tries a partial US occupation of NWFP (Pushtoonkhwa), it could even trigger a severe crisis in the army already under strain from carrying out the CENTCOM instructions on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.The fallout could have blasting consequences. Similarly the severe crisis of Pakistani capitalism has failed to develop a parliamentary democracy. The Pakistani ruling class, in the wake of its economic failures turned to force out of the state at an early stage. They pay less than 10% of measure taxation revenues. The real burden falls on the working class who are forced to pay more than 80% of the revenues through validatory taxation. The capitalist class steals electricity and gas, while billions of dollars of bank loans have been scripted off.According to the figures presented before the Supreme Court of Pakistan, a small section of these leeches annual corruption exceeds Rs. 500 billion (US$6. 2bn). Most of this money is stashed aside in western banking havens. As this process started to become more and more evident, the army, the most powerful promoter of the state, started to become part of this evil connectedness of plunderers and usurpers. The drug-funded and US/Saudi sponsored Afghan Jihad brought even greater wampumpeag to the coffers of the generals. Other institutions of the state and society including the judiciary, the bureaucracy and the media joined in this orgy of corruption.Hence, whenever there was a political crisis (conflict of the civilian plunderers) the military moved in to quell the rot. The dictatorships bred more corruption and as they began to lose their grip democracy was introduced the main reason being the growing danger of a mass revolt that is provoked by these repressive regimes. Although even a bourgeois democracy is a progressive step forward as compared to military dictatorships, the exploitative system that the military rulers intervene to salvage remains intact. In Pakistan this crisis-ridden system again creates a political instability that reflects the burning economic tur moil.The army and state are not a class, but in the last analysis the economic and social conditions determine the nature of the regime that is needed by the ruling class to preserve the system of development of labour. Comrade Ted Grant elaborated on this in 1949 The state by its very nature is composed of a bureaucracy, officers, generals, heads of police etc. But those do not constitute a class they are the instrument of a class even if they may be in repulsion to that class. They cannot themselves be a class. (The unbroken thread, pp. 235).In Pakistan the irony is that time and again the masses have risen up against the dictatorship, fundamentally to overthrow the pairing of exploitation and misery inflicted upon them by this vicious system of class rule. When they were allowed even to make half a choice through the ballot-box they propelled the PPP to power. even their hopes have been dashed time and again by the PPP in government in the short span of less than 40 years. T he drudging masses have been loyal to their tradition for generations. The ruling class only allowed the PPP into the corridors of power to dissipate the mass upsurge.Above all the ruling class, the state and the imperialists have used the capitulating leaders of the PPP to carry through cuts, privatisations and other drastic anti-working class measures. They could not have achieved so oft with the right-wing governments of Sharif, etc. , but even under the dictatorships they combined guard with repression. However, at least in the 1970s the PPP government did carry through some reforms for the betterment of the impoverished masses. In the later PPP governments since 1988 such was the crisis of Pakistani capitalism that there was no room for even minimal reforms.