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While we were opening the World Social
Forum in Karachi last weekend with virtuoso performances of sufi
music and speeches, the country's rulers were marking the centenary
of the Muslim League [the party that created Pakistan and has
ever since been passed on from one bunch of rogues to another
till now it is in the hands of political pimps who treat it like
a bordello] by gifting the organisation to General Pervaiz Musharaf,
the country's uniformed ruler.
The secular opposition leaders,
Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, who used to compete with each
other to see who could amass more funds while in power, are both
in exile. To return home would mean to face arrest for corruption.
Neither is in the mood for martyrdom or relinquishing control
of their organizations. Meanwhile, the religious parties are
happily implementing neo-liberal policies in the North-West Frontier
province that is under their control. Incapable of catering to
the real needs of the poor they concentrate their fire on women
and the godless liberals who defend them.
The military is so secure in
its rule and the official politicians so useless that 'civil
society' is booming. Private TV channels, like NGOs, have mushroomed
and most views are permissible (I was interviewed for an hour
by one of these on the "fate of the world communist movement")
except a frontal assault on religion or the military and its
networks that govern the country. If civil society posed any
real threat to the elite, the plaudits it receives would rapidly
turn to menace.
It was, thus, no surprise that
the WSF, too, had been permitted and facilitated by the local
administration in Karachi. It is now part of the globalized landscape
and helps backward rulers feel modern. The event itself was no
different from the others. Present are several thousand people,
mainly from Pakistan, but with a sprinkling of delegates from
India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, South Korea and a few other countries.
Absent was any representation
from China's burgeoning peasant and workers movements or its
critical intelligentsia. Iran, too, was unrepresented as was
Malaysia. The Israeli enforcers who run the Jordanian administration
harassed a Palestinian delegation. Only a handful of delegates
managed to get through the checkpoints and reach Karachi. The
huge earthquake in Pakistan last year had disrupted many plans
and the organizers were not able to travel and persuade people
elsewhere in the continent to come. Otherwise, insisted the organisers,
the voices of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and Fallujah would have
been heard.
The fact that it happened at
all in Pakistan was positive. People here are not used to hearing
different voices and views. The Forum enabled many from repressed
social layers and minority religions to assemble make their voices
heard: persecuted Christians from the Punjab, Hindus from Sind,
women from everywhere told heart-rending stories of discrimination
and oppression.
Present too was a sizeable
class-struggle element: peasants fighting against the privatization
of military farms in Okara, the fisher-folk from Sind whose livelihoods
are under threat and who complained about the great Indus river
being diverted to deprive the common people of water they had
enjoyed since the beginning of human civilization thousands of
years ago, workers from Baluchistan complaining about military
brutalities in the region.
Teachers who explained how
the educational system in the country had virtually ceased to
exist. The common people who spoke were articulate, analytical
and angry, in polar contrast to the stale rhetoric of Pakistan's
political class. Much of what was said was broadcast on radio
and television with the main private networks---Geo, Hum and
Indus--- vying with each other to ensure blanket coverage.
And so the WSF like a big feel-good
travelling road show came to Pakistan and went. What will it
leave behind? Very little, apart from goodwill and the feeling
that it has happened here. For the fact remains the elite dominates
that politics in the country. Little else matters. Small radical
groups are doing their best, but there is no state-wide organisation
or movement that speaks for the dispossessed. The social situation
is grim, despite the massaged statistics circulated by the World
Bank's Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz.
The NGOs are no substitute
for genuine social and political movements. They may be NGOs
in Pakistan but in the global scale they are WGOs (Western Governmental
Organizations), their cash-flow conditioned by restricted agendas.
It is not that some of them are not doing good work, but the
overall effect of this has been to atomize the tiny layer of
left and liberal intellectuals. Most of these men and women (those
who are not in NGOs are embedded in the private media networks)
struggle for their individual NGOs to keep the money coming;
petty rivalries assumed exaggerated proportions; politics in
the sense of grass-roots organisation is virtually non-existent.
The Latin American model as emerging in the victories of Chavez
and Morales is a far cry from Mumbai or Karachi.
CounterPunch
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