Pakistan on the Brink: Down with Capitalist PDM Rule!

International attention in recent days has been fixed on the unprecedented social and political crisis wracking Pakistan. Following the arrest (and temporarily release pending trial) of deposed former Prime Minister Imran Khan, a wave of social unrest not seen in years has been ignited. Protests of his supporters have shaken the entire country which will no doubt continue even after his temporary release, with Khan calling for “freedom protests” this coming Sunday.

Roadblocks have been mounted cutting off access from Islamabad, where the government is based. Protestors have targeted the residence of senior state officials, police commanders and army generals. In one widely shared video, protests raided the house of the local corps commander in Lahore, stealing expensive food, golf clubs and even peacocks. Reports emerged in the last week of Khan supporters taking to the house of current right-wing PDM (Pakistan Democratic Movement — a loose coalition of 13 bourgeois, regional and Islamist parties) coalition government leader Shehbaz Sharif, with his luxury cars allegedly being torched by the crowds.

A torrent of state repression has been the due response of the Pakistani state. Social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have been entirely closed down. Schools and universities as potential sites of opposition to the military have been forcibly closed. Official reports at the time of writing state between 9 and 14 protestors have been shot dead and 4,000 arrested since the unrest began. This is quite likely to be an under-estimate, and shows the brutal lengths to which the state will go in order to crush the alleged “conspiracy” by Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party to drag Pakistan into a civil war.

Although Khan was released after a judgment by the Supreme Court, he faces charges relating to the alleged personal sale of state gifts (given to Pakistan by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman) along with allegedly failing to declare his personal wealth to the Electoral Commission. But these are only part of a multitude of charges, including but not limited to terrorism, corruption, contempt of court, rioting and blasphemy.

Backdrop

Whether Khan is actually guilty of these charges cannot be exactly determined, but it is also not the main issue. This is not why the PTI has been placed on trial in the first place. Far more serious crimes have been and continue to be committed by all factions of Pakistan’s ruling elite. Khan’s real crime in the eyes of the military elite and the PDM coalition government is exploding the facade of military rule, at a time of unprecedented crisis for Pakistan’s ruling class which has pushed the country to the brink.

The crises for Pakistani capitalism are deep and unique even by the standards of South Asia. Its economy is crumbling under the pressure of sovereign debt to imperialist powers, be it the IMF or Chinese state and commercial banks. Society is further held back by an openly factional, warring ruling elite. Last year’s devastating floods still leave millions in poverty or without homes. Long queues are commonplace as the rapidly growing army of the unemployed struggle to find food to survive. The Economist magazine quoted a media capitalist in Taliban-run Afghanistan, that his country “is better managed today than Pakistan”.

Khan’s posing as ‘anti-establishment’ and an opponent of the military-capitalist elite and the hated Sharif government has therefore struck a deep chord in society. He is by far the most popular politician in Pakistan today, which strikes fear into the heart of the military establishment given the scheduled upcoming October elections.

The fight between Khan and the PDM is not simply one between the capitalists, landlords and generals on the one hand, and ‘the people’ represented by Khan. Khan has indeed mobilised wide layers of the Pakistani masses to his own banner. But his own record needs to be brought out. In fact, Khan represents another wing of the same capitalist elite which has fallen out of favour with the military hierarchy. But only after that same military elite engineered his coming to power in 2018.

Khan in power

Since partition in 1947, Pakistan has been consistently burdened with the outsized role played by the military. When necessary (as cannot be ruled out over the next period), this has taken the form of overt dictatorship, infamously in the form of the bloodthirsty Zia-ul-Haq regime. More frequently, the facade of ‘democracy’ in Pakistan has depended on a system of military patronage. Those in power are whoever wins the favour of the generals and secret service chiefs, who themselves form a key link in the chain of Pakistan’s capitalist and feudal landlord classes.

Khan won such support at the exact point in 2018 when all other options had exhausted themselves. Popular disgust at the neoliberal policies of the PML (Sharif’s party) and the Pakistan People’s Party had grown to such proportions that a new, clean face was needed for the generals to lean on. It is an open secret that Khan’s victory that year came from the torrent of intimidation and propaganda from the military.

Through his time in office, Khan’s policies remained firmly within the confines set by imperialism and capitalism. Two IMF-mandated austerity packages were forced through during his government. He willingly carried out the generals’ preferred policy of balancing between US and Chinese imperialism, integrating Pakistan deeper into the debt trap of the Belt and Road Initiative via the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which consequently allowed him to lean on anti-US rhetoric at key opportune moments. In return, the military top brass opened up corruption cases against rivals of Khan, not dissimilar to those facing him today. Far from siding with the poor and oppressed, the class character of the PTI in this period was summed by the comment of Khan’s Kashmiri Affairs Minister Ali Amin Gandapur in 2021 when news arrived of growing inflation: “Can’t we sacrifice a little and reduce the quantity of the sugar in our tea and eat less bread?”

Chaos within the elite

The honeymoon was never going to last for an entire term. Since the birth of Pakistan, it has always been customary for the military to turn against its own governments after only a short time in office. Not a single one of Pakistan’s 22 Prime Ministers have ever finished an entire term. What has been unique about Khan’s removal from power has been the extent to which he has openly challenged it, unintentionally calling into question the entire established way of forming and deposing governments.

The reason for his discarding in early 2022 was simple: Khan simply grew too big for his boots for the liking of the generals. Khan broke the elite’s oldest taboo in wanting to declare himself kingmaker, over chief of army staff at the time, General Qamar Bajwa. Instead of accepting Bajwa’s choice to appoint Asim Munir as his successor, Khan vouched instead for his closest ally Lt General Faiz Hameed, as a maneuver to extend his own time in office. The result was a stage-managed vote of no confidence which ended Khan’s time in office and brought the PDM to power in April 2022.

Now the dirty laundry of the entire ruling elite has been aired in public, in a way not seen in decades. In a game of tit-for-tat attacks over the last year, Khan’s and Sharif’s followers have gone to the end of the earth to dig out dirt on one another. As a result, the fraud of Pakistani ‘democracy’ now lies in tatters.

Khan is distinguished not only by his willingness to take the fight to his enemies in the military high command, but to mobilise his own mass base in high-profile marches, twinning this with a superficially anti-US, ‘anti-imperialist’ image. Khan has staged multiple national demonstrations and dissolved regional governments in his local bases of Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as maneuvers to call an early election to bring himself back into power.

It is no surprise then that this factional battle over the previous year has turned to bloodshed. First, key Khan ally and TV presenter Arshad Sharif was assassinated in exile in Kenya last October. Just over a week later, a gunman made an attempt on Khan’s life during a rally in Northern Punjab, only wounding Khan while killing one of his supporters. While the military and ISI have publicly denied involvement and issued their ‘condolences’, you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to know where responsibility almost definitely lies. You can only look at the fates of Benazir Bhutto, as well as her father Zulfikar to see the extent the generals have been prepared to go in the past to wipe out political figures who outlive their usefulness to them and become a nuisance.

Multifaceted crisis

While the elite factions line up and wage war for their privileged positions, the masses of Pakistan are living in a quagmire of economic, climate and social hell, as a result of the capitalist policies of the ruling class.

Pakistan’s annual inflation hit 36.4% in April, with food-price inflation running at 48.1%. Hundreds of factories continue to close down, with millions of workers losing employment monthly. Staple supplies such as medicine have reached record-low levels. Salaries are being slashed, privatisations are gaining pace and fees increasing. Increasing numbers of young people are fleeing the country, including educated student youth who have left studies to find not even menial work on offer.

Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves have dwindled to only $4.5 billion, only just about enough to cover a month’s worth of imports. Since the floods last year, 45% of Pakistan’s total food producing land has been eradicated. These floods submerged more than a third of Pakistan’s total land underwater, killing more than 800,000 livestock. One million houses were washed away, bringing particularly acute devastation to the nationally-oppressed regions of Balochistan and Sindh, both hubs of Pakistan’s textile industry.

This shows the sheer destruction which the escalating global climate crisis will have in the neo-colonial world. The policies of the super-rich monopolies and corporations, and generalised chaos of the capitalist system have left the poorest globally to pick up the bill for crimes not of their making.

But the response from imperialism underlines its sheer brutality. Rather than cancelling Pakistan’s sovereign debt in the wake of the floods, the IMF has only doubled down on the estimated $77.5bn in loan repayments expected by June 2026. The Sharif government meanwhile has eagerly responded by raising the prices of oil, gas, electricity and introduced general sales taxes on the poor. Pakistan is now on the brink of a crisis mirroring that of Sri Lanka, which defaulted and declared bankruptcy last year.

While Pakistan is contested between the imperialist powers, attention has somewhat shifted out of the region compared to the period of the ‘War on Terror’. As key resources and attention have instead shifted to Ukraine and the South China Sea in the New US-China Cold War, meagre sums of £53m from the US and £25m from British imperialism were provided in aid, compared to the dozens of billions forked out in spending to prop up the Ukrainian military. China, meanwhile, facing internal shocks from its own economic and Covid crises, has complicated the expansion of its international influence, drawing question its role as a fledgling imperialist power over the region.

Anybody who tries to put this down to Pakistan’s status as a ‘poor country’ is wrong. The total declared wealth of the Sharif family sits at $1.8bn. Nishat Group chair Mian Mansha, the ultra-rich mill owner whose family profited from the 1947 partition, boasts $3.7 billion. For real estate mogul Malik Riaz, his declared wealth is $1.5 billion. Former President Asif Ali Zardari, the former husband of Benazir Bhutto sits on a net worth of $1.8bn. The list goes on. If, instead of the criminal racket ruling Pakistan today, there was a government of the workers and oppressed, which seized the wealth of the capitalists, generals and landlords, and invested it into the real needs of the people of Pakistan in a planned socialist economy, the lives of the people would of course be utterly transformed.

Where next?

Despite Khan being a bourgeois populist and opportunist, the growing support for him is still an expression of deep discontent with the ruling elite in Pakistani society. He is looked to by many as a figure prepared to take on the rottenness and corruption of the capitalist parties of the PDM coalition, under whose rule unemployment, hunger, inflation and terrorist violence have skyrocketed.

This is why the ruling elites fear this mobilisation. By targeting the generals, the protests have unknowingly gone beyond simply saving Khan’s own career. What the ruling class fears is a revolutionary explosion which could pose a serious challenge to the establishment and alter the balance of power in the region. There are clear signs of splits in the Pakistani state, with the lower echelons of the judiciary, army and even potentially the police indicating growing levels of support for Khan.

Where events take Pakistan over the next period is not entirely clear. It is not even ruled out that the generals could dig up the heritage of the Zia regime and attempt to form a new military junta if they feel control slipping out of their hands.

Events may also take the turn of what happened last year in Sri Lanka, where after declaring bankruptcy to the IMF and facing harsh austerity measures, a mass hartal (total stoppage and general strike) paralysed the regime, leading to the storming of the palace of President Rajapaksa. Were this to happen in Pakistan it could have deep ramifications. This is a country with the fifth-largest population in the world.

A revolutionary upheaval would likely see the women of Pakistan come to the fore expressing their seething anger against sexism, patriarchal violence and fundamentalist oppression. It could echo the events shaking Iran last year and this year, while giving a signal to the people of Afghanistan that mass resistance to Taliban rule is possible and necessary. It could also boost the confidence of the oppressed peoples in Sindh and Balochistan, intensifying calls for national self-determination.

Like the people of Iran have re-discovered the best traditions of 1979 and the revolution against the Shah, the people of Pakistan — the unemployed, workers, women, and nationally oppressed peoples will need to rediscover the traditions of the 1968–69 revolution, when a mass movement of students and factory occupations posed a serious challenge to military rule. But building a movement for revolutionary change will require acting independently of all wings of the capitalist elite — whether PDM or PTI. It is quite possible that Khan, in exchange for lenient terms and a forgiving treatment, will be prepared at some stage to place a dampener on these protests.

Events have shown that the working class is more than capable of acting independently. Recent strikes, of health workers this January in Sindh against privatisation, of the victorious 40,000 strong strike of power loom workers in Faisalabad last August and others provides a glimpse into what the exploited poor and working-class majority in Pakistan is capable of when organised. The now-six year tradition of Aurat Azadi feminist Marches, bravely challenging fundamentalist patriarchy and violence against women and gender non-conforming people against police repression, provides a small window into the heroic role that women could play in the struggle to transform society, as they have in Iran.

The workers and the oppressed of Pakistan must rely on their own strength to win fundamental change. This will mean setting up organisations of the unemployed, to link up with a militant Pakistani labour movement. This would provide a powerful basis on which to challenge the wealth and power of the capitalist elite, and to fight for a democratic socialist Pakistan, in a confederation of South Asia, and a socialist world.