Showing tributes to veteran peasant leader Chaudhry Fateh Mohammad, Awami Workers Party leaders on Thursday warned that if the sale of substandard seeds and locust attacks were not controlled, peasants would be forced to take their own lives,
The AWP Karachi chapter held a condolence reference for Fateh Muhammad to highlight several aspects of his struggle in Pakistan’s peasant and left struggle since the country’s independence and termed his services a beacon of light for its young workers.
Keeping in line with the government-issued SOPs, the party ensured a limited number of attendance, and encouraged people to join the event through Facebook instead, Advocate Akhtar Hussain, AWP’s central general secretary, said that today peasants are in desperate need of an ideological leader like Fateh Muhammad, who bore many hardships but never compromised on his principles.
“Capitalist political parties have been making false promises to the peasants, but none of them has ever practically attempted to distribute the land among them -- the only way to bring about a change in a peasant’s life.”
AWP Central President Yusuf Masti Khan said that there was no other way to change the current system without the peasants and working-class leading a united movement. Condemning the green-lighting of thousands of Pakistan Steel Mill workers, Khan observed that “when Imran Khan wanted votes he spoke against the mill’s privatisation, but after he became the prime minister he shook hands with global capitalist institutions like the IMF and the World Bank. He also chose to lay off thousands of Steel Mill workers in accordance with their directives.”
Likening Fateh Muhammad’s death to the end of an era, Hasan Askari, the AWP central secretary for peasants, said his demise was a huge loss for the peasants. He said the government was not even willing to control the unprecedented locust attack.
AWP Karachi president Shafi Shaikh vowed that not only would the party fight for the workers laid off in the PSM and other workplaces, but it would also continue to highlight the issue of substandard seeds and locust attacks, besides challenging the neoliberal policies gripping Pakistan’s economy, exactly in line with Fateh Muhammad’s revolutionary politics.