No country for the poor

The dream of Pakistan was not to just create a country for Muslims but to create a country where the poorest sections of society would be taken out of the centuries of poverty they had gone through. The 1945 Muslim League manifesto included promises of land rights for the landless and rights for the working class. Much of these promises led to the popular support that the party was able to gain in the last election before independence. The dreams of poor peasants and poor workers were shattered quite quickly. Bureaucratic rule was followed swiftly by military rule in the new country. Party-based elections were not held for more than two decades.  The political stifling produced a context which allowed an undercurrent of pro-working class, pro-poor politics to topple the Ayub dictatorship. When elections were held in the 1970, left-wing political parties were elected in all four provinces of West Pakistan. In the 1970s, Pakistan experimented with state-led socialism, which despite its failures gave hope to the poor that ‘roti, kapra and makaan’ were their basic rights. The rights of food, clothing and housing had become entrenched in the public imagination of the poor – but the dream was trampled over by another military dictatorship.

Politics in Pakistan changed fundamentally after the 1980s. While we focus on the Islamisation project of the decade, what is ignored is what the decade did to working class politics in the country. Workers’ unions and farmers’ organisations were declared illegal and many were broken through violence. When democracy returned to Pakistan, those that came into power belonged to the economic elite. Elections became more and more about who could spend the most money in the electoral process.  No poor person can contest elections – even going down to the local bodies level. If we scour our legislative assemblies, they are made up of the who’s who of local and national elites. Can the poor hope for their deliverance from a legislature and executive made up of the richest people in the country? There is something fundamentally wrong with the social contract that has been given to the poor. Seventy years later, over 30 percent of Pakistan’s population still lives in abject poverty. Public-sector hospitals and public-sector schools are getting poorer every year. This is a failure of the process of representation. Pakistan’s failure to develop economically is claimed to be one of the fundamental reasons why people continue to live in abject poverty. But no one who witnesses the lavish lifestyles of the richest families in Pakistan can say that we have not seen economic development. Instead, it is a reminder that the question of the redistribution of wealth which was raised in 1945 and then again in the 1970s must be asked again.