PIA strike: reminder of times past

Islamabad diary

There was a time in Pakistan when trade unions were powerful and workers’ rights mattered. Socialism was then not a taboo word and the slogan ‘The East is Red’ – imported from China – was heard at mass rallies. Today we import other things from China.

The PIA strike has come to a sticky end. The government, with its inherently anti-worker bias, has not held out even a face-saving lollipop to the Joint Action Committee which spearheaded the strike. But while it lasted and flights were grounded and PIA suffered heavy losses – and private airlines made a killing by jacking up their fares – it was a reminder of those bygone days when the voice of the organised working class was not so easily dismissed.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto did not allow full rein to the working class. He kept the power of the trade unions in check and those of his comrades who took his socialist slogans seriously – such as the Faisalabad trade union leader, Mukhtar Rana, and the Karachi socialist, Mairaj Muhammad Khan – soon found themselves out in the cold. But even if kept in check the trade union movement remained very much alive.

This changed with the coming of Pakistan’s counter-revolution…Bhutto toppled and the army seizing power, and General Ziaul Haq proclaiming himself soldier of Islam. There was no room for union activity anymore. Several trade union leaders, I remember, were hauled before military courts and had their backs whipped, the standard procedure in those days to suppress any kind of dissent.

Bhutto had nationalised banks, insurance companies and heavy industry. The mantra of those times was that these heavy guns were best kept in the public sector. In the 1970 election campaign Bhutto had railed against the ‘22 families’ who between them were said to own much of the country’s wealth. Nationalisation thus was not just economics but also politics in that it became a means to cut the 22 families down to size. It was also spectacular theatre as it played wonderfully to the climate of the times, and kept the masses entertained.

Nationalisation benefited the unions. In all the taken-over industries unions came into their own as collective bargaining agents – not rebelling against the managements because that would have meant rebelling against the state but happily coexisting with the new arrangement. However, the greatest beneficiary of nationalisation was the bureaucracy because nationalisation a la Bhutto meant control by the bureaucracy.

This was the reason why nationalisation could not be undone by Gen Zia. His principal mandarin was Ghulam Ishaq Khan, bureaucrat extraordinary, and it was no part of his thinking to curb the power or cut the wings of what after all was his own constituency. The irony of this we can savour. Zia disliked everything about Bhutto but he did not dismantle one of the biggest hallmarks of his regime.

Bhutto’s nationalisation took place in two phases. One was the action against the banks and heavy industry soon after he came to power. But in 1976, just a year before the elections, Bhutto did something that was to prove fatal for him in the coming days: cotton ginning mills and even flour mills were taken over by the state.

This hit the Punjab middle, or trader, class hard. The PPP’s strength lay in the villages, amongst the landless and the artisan classes, and in towns amongst the working population. The better-off trader or merchant was already against the PPP. Now his hatred turned to fury. No wonder he stood in the forefront of the anti-Bhutto agitation in the summer of 1977.

Soon after Zia’s coup the ginning and flour mills were returned to their owners. Maulvis were not Zia’s only supporters. The Punjabi middle class, and the trader and merchant class, were also solidly behind him – as indeed were the big-money industrialists who never forgot what Bhutto had done to them.

In time Zia’s Punjab constituency – the trader, the merchant, the better-off – achieved a measure of power through the local bodies system. Three local elections were held in Zia’s long tenure. They threw up a new class of political notables who came to form the frontline of the regime-sponsored Pakistan Muslim League when it was conjured into existence.

Nawaz Sharif did not create this base of support. This was Zia’s legacy. But when Nawaz Sharif was anointed Punjab chief minister in 1985 this legacy passed into his hands. His achievement, however, remains that he made of the PML (later PML-Nawaz) a popular party.

We must not forget another act of de-nationalisation. Bhutto had taken over the Sharif family-owned Ittefaq Factory in Kot Lakhpat, Lahore. This was a traumatic experience for the family. What had begun as an iron foundry on Brandreth Road had become through years of struggle and hard work a thriving enterprise, and at a stroke it was gone. This is part of the family memory. Mention socialism or something like nationalisation and a cloud comes over their faces as they recall that bitter time.

I mention this only to point out that the philosophy of the public sector, of government-run enterprises, has no place, at least none commanding any sympathy, in the mental outlook of the Sharif brothers. Indeed it would not be farfetched to say that in their list of antipathies something like nationalisation would be at the very top.

Trickle-down theory may be a theory for economists. For the seth, the cut-throat industrialist, the big financier, the real estate tycoon it is an article of faith. Visit any market in Lahore – Liberty, M M Alam, Hall Road, Brandreth Road – and the denizens will tell you that the Federal Board of Revenue is the biggest evil under the sun. The seth is for charity and voluntary contributions. The shopkeeper will do that, give for charitable causes. But taxes are an entirely different matter.

At a small gathering of journalists in Lahore a bit prior to the 2013 elections Nawaz Sharif was in favour of no taxes – or at the most, when he relented a bit, in favour of a ten percent slab on all income.

In his first coming as prime minister one of Nawaz Sharif’s first steps was to privatise the State Cement Corporation. No sooner had the seths got their hands on the cement plants they doubled the price of cement. Since then there has been no looking back for them. The cement sector is prospering which would be a wonderful thing if it did not mean at the same time the environmental destruction of the Salt Range and the Kahoon Valley.

Musharraf may think the lawyers did him in. My own feeling is that the encouragement he and his carpetbagger prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, gave the cement robber barons provoked the fury of the gods.

The received wisdom is that Bhutto’s nationalisation wrecked the economy. Maybe. But de-nationalisation then should have worked wonders and made of Pakistan an Asian tiger. Why hasn’t that happened? Now they want to take apart PIA. What guarantee is there that it becomes another Emirates?

Make PIA wet, as it used to be, and it will soon wipe out its losses. This is the most sensible suggestion I have heard during this standoff. But who’ll have the guts to do this? Or indeed the imagination.

Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com