Daily Times: VIEW : Deliverance at last? — Dr Mubashir Hasan

The rich and the poor in the polity, elected or unelected, officials or otherwise, are today free to violate the laws, rules and regulations on the statute books

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto maintained that on August 14, 1947, Pakistan had transited from the British colonial to the American neo-colonial domination. The independence was a myth. He wrote a book of the same title, The Myth of Independence (Oxford University Press, 1969). He asserted “..the aim of Great Power is…to control the minds of men and gain the allegiance of the leaders of underdeveloped nations, through economic domination and other devices”(pp 11).

The great poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz lamented: Yeh dagh-dar Ujala yeh shab-gazeeda sahar/Woh intizar tha jisska yeh who sahar tou nahin.

And so it turned out; the working people remained oppressed and exploited. The yearnings of Faiz remain unfulfilled. The independence of Pakistan remains a myth as Bhutto had held.

Soon after independence, the beneficiary elite of the British period, the combination of civil and military officers and their feudal and big business supporters became the ruling elite of Pakistan. The preservation of their pre-1947 vested interests was their chief concern. To perpetuate dominance over the people, they chose not to change the system of governance of the British rule. They also chose the US as their imperial hegemonic master to replace the British.

The going was hardly easy. For 65 years, the poor and the downtrodden of our land have resisted the unjust rule of one regime after another, of 18 ‘elected’ prime ministers and four military dictators. Over thousands of years of human history, the poor and the deprived chose the path of passive resistance to bring down mighty empires. Our peasants, workers and other poor people have also offered stout resistance against the oppressors they come into contact with in everyday living. In the absence of a revolutionary avant guard, passive non-cooperation to the apparatus of the state has been their chief weapon, the only one available to them.

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