LQM course in Faisalabad

Winter has arrived here. Suddenly it’s cold and grey. It’s chilly in the rickshaw as we travel across town to the National Hotel, vast, empty concrete affair where an impressive group of over two dozen Labour Qaumi Movement activists slowly appear.

The LQM is a general union with thousands of members; mainly power loom workers here in Faisalabad, perhaps the most successful example of organising workers in recent years in Pakistan. Five women, two of whom were on yesterday’s course. The students give sharp clear reports on their history of fighting on wages, to get health care, to protest the price of flour, to support the lawyers’ movement and much else.
Our room overlooks a main road with endless horns of everything kind, blaring.

We have just started when the room is plunged into near darkness. Load shedding, that is, power cuts. I appear to be the only person who is upset. The students, by contrast, carry on introducing each other unruffled. I have to laugh or I would cry when after twenty minutes - I was promised five- the emergency generator starts up and as the lights come on, the noise of the generator makes it near impossible for anyone to hear. Again, no one is fazed by this except me. Luckily within half an hour the power returns.

An evening at Tahir's house

Tariq takes me by rickshaw to Tahir’s house in a working class part of the city. Here we walk the last hundred yards down a narrow, ill-lit street past two large sheep, bikes and motorcycles. I’m welcomed into a large space with a three piece suite and low table, no carpet, in the front part of the house, all for coolness in summer, though now it is beginning to be cold.

I’m introduced to the family, three generations, Tahir’s 6 month old daughter, Toula-iman, which means ‘messenger of God’, his sister course today and two other women from today’s course, Shakila and Nabila. All very bright sparks. They see themselves as being an activist household. The grandmother has been campaigning on getting school places and getting the streets cleaned - not least because of the lack of proper sanitation. Soup is followed later by biriyani and aloo methi where methi is similar to spinach. Maria who is still a teenager is thinking of becoming a beautician. Nabila works as a receptionist at an insurance company. Just 8000 rupees a month - £60 - half of which goes on rickshaws because the transport situation for women is so bad. This was one of the problems raised on the course. When I suggest that anyone harassing a woman on a bus should be reported to the driver or conductor and thrown off the bus, the class laughs. The drivers and conductors are the worst offenders.

Home based worker course, Faisalabad

Photos: 1. Nabila writing a report 2. Anjum reciting a poem 3. group work

It’s hard to do justice to the thirty home based workers, all women, stitchers, glove makers, packers, shuttle winders together with local activists who make up today’s course for home based workers. . Most of them come in a large group an hour after the official start time, one sits down wearing a veil but takes it off a little later.

It’s a one day course and it looks very difficult to get enough done in the time we have but we set off at a good pace following the same programme as in Lahore and with the usual hesitancy getting used to being active in class it goes according to plan. Problems are presented and then investigated. Plans made to tackle them, a role play of recruiting people to join and we just manage to do a short session on reasons women should be active. The language barrier is a problem for me. I can’t follow the detail of what is said. But the lively body language is clear enough. Right at the end, Anjum, a well known local poet, one of a small group of actors and writers, recites one of his poems, about how people treat each other. Applause here is expressed saying “Wah”.

The only place that belongs to a woman in Pakistan is her own grave

Saturday. Things take off nicely with people making posters and role playing recruiting new members and finally in ‘Involving women’ there are a whole number of really lively responses to me and Tariq role playing the male chauvinists. A woman, Tafira, makes an impressive speech pointing out that women don’t even have rights in their own home. ‘The only place that belongs to a woman in Pakistan is her own grave’

Activists course in Lahore

Photos: 1)Near the hotel, a labourlawyer's office 2) three lady health workers on the course 3) a poster

A mostly new and inexperienced group of activists, a real mix. A handful of trade unionists, one woman from a bonded labour organisation, two lady health workers, half a dozen from labour rights centres, a couple of activists working with peasants and a couple of students. A good half of them are women. Some of them arrive wearing the abaya with veil but they take it off and I can’t tell who does and who doesn’t once the course gets going.

The initial nervousness slowly disappears and by this afternoon things are going well. Not helped though by the maulvi from a nearby mosque giving his Friday sermon at full volume through his speakers. We all try our best to ignore him. Nevertheless, almost all the men disappear a little later to go for Friday prayers.

The Mall in Lahore, perhaps the finest street in the world,

Photos: Lahore High Court, Zam Zam, Lahore Museum

Sun shining, not yet warm, the day starts with a short walk down the Mall, grand by any standard, one of the world’s finest roads . First the High Court, then the GPO and finally the Lahore Museum, all very large brick buildings surrounded with green with much in between. The street sellers are setting up their stands selling tea or nuts or, near the GPO, pens and stationery. In the middle of the road, opposite the museum, is the big brass cannon, known as Zam Zam. This is the spot where Kipling chooses to start ‘Kim’, where the young boy meets the guru. I ask a traffic cop to take my photo. On my way back, a man asks me if I like Pakistan. When I answer yes, he beams and tells me I have taken Islamic values to my heart. A good example, I think, of Muslim who is profoundly religious but whose Islam is completely unrecognised by those who go on about Islamic extremism.

A note on social security in Pakistan

At lunch Sharafat Ali, head of advocacy at PILER and Mir Mouledad, assistant librarian, explain the national lottery which awards some tens of thousands of rupees (up to a thousand pounds sterling) to 750 people a month to enable a fresh start in life. I object to the randomness of this. It turns out it is connected to a much bigger project – one of its authors is Kaiser Bengali, a close collaborator with PILER - which distributes smaller sums via local committees. Originally it was planned to help a million families. It’s now 3.2 million and this is set to double. Mouledad is on one of the local committees distributing the funds which come out of indirect taxes. He’s also on the local Zakat committee distributing the 2.5% which is annually levied on bank accounts.

Sharafat tells me about the Ismaili sect, which has built up its wealth through a 10% tithe that is used for the community including its health, welfare and, not least, security, most important given the level of hostility and violence towards non orthodox sects here.

The suspension of labour inspections in Peshawar

Today’s papers have an article on the suspension of labour inspections in Peshawar, NWFP capital. The minister has decided quote “the shopkeepers and local business men need relief in the prevailing uncertain circumstances. Inspector[s] violating this instruction would be liable to suspension from service”. The inspectors check minimum wage and weekly holidays as well as health and safety. Labour inspections were suspended in the Punjab, Pakistan’s biggest province some time ago. Nothing I’ve read has made me as angry as this. How blinded by narrow class interest does a minister have to be to do this?

An evening of solidarity with the haris

An evening of solidarity with the haris, enslaved by permanent debt to the landowners, generation after generation. It is the “Annual Peasant Conference” in Hyderabad. 400 seats, all full, “notables” in the front row, men on one side, and women on the other, many of them haris. All colourful, some obviously with money, some obviously not. Music with drums and tabla. Then an impressionist, a real performer - he does skits and sound effects and, most realistically, a storm. Together with colleagues from PILER and the Fisher folk and a bank manager, I’m welcomed by the compere.

A woman lawyer is presented with a statuette for her work defending the haris. It’s an Oscar sized cast metal woman with a clenched fist. A poem is read. More awards of statuettes. The Sindhi scarf is also awarded. A speech at top volume with references to Islam. It goes on. Then more music. A double pipe player with splendid orange pointed moustache and beard and castanet bells player join the troupe. Far too soon we get another speech from a TV director talking about landlord mafia. Applause. Now a singer, like the others an older man, with a hard, worn face joins the band only to be followed by the chief manager of the State Bank here in Hyderabad who presents a statuette. He’s an “influential” I’m told. He looks humourless.

Then without warning I’m summoned to the platform. I think it is the tradition of welcoming strangers. I’m presented with a Sindhi scarf. Cursing those colleagues who didn’t prepare me, I nevertheless resist the temptation to give the speech of a life time and confine myself to declaring solidarity with all those fighting with the haris against the landlord mafia. Now a comic act by our impressionist and then a Sindhi break dancer, not the youngest one could add.

A lawyer, recently kidnapped for 34 days, is given a statuette. Then Mian Qayyum, the Faisalabad textile workers leader, speaks at length, powerfully.

We leave with a group of young girls among them dressed in the brightest, cheapest clothes imaginable. Huge smiles on their faces as they say ‘Goodbye’ to me in English and disappear towards their buses to go home. Our minibus gets to PILER after two.

State of Pakistan and reasons to be cheerful

Despite Pakistan being in a state of chaos, fortunately, you could even say amazingly, Karachi is about as far from the epicentre of the main troubles as you can get, the least violent of all four provincial capitals, touch wood. This is despite stories such as that carried in yesterday’s papers of a shoot out between gangsters and police, real Hollywood stuff, with the police failing to catch the baddies in their hide-out. But it isn’t too difficult to avoid the gangsters’ hideouts. The main thing is that, unlike in the 1990s, the two biggest parties in Karachi have decided not to fall out with each other. They are the MQM, party of the mohajirs, the Urdu-speakers, often middle class, who migrated here after independence, mainly to take up government jobs, which they haven’t been successful in keeping in recent years, and the People’s Party, party of the Bhutto’s, with a strong base in the Sindhi population. Instead they try to divide the spoils; they have much to lose if they go back to settling their scores using guns of which there is a very large number in the city. It’s interesting that people talk of these parties with the same kind of contemptuous despair as they do in Britain. No one likes them but hardly anyone has any idea how they are to be replaced. With the exception of the MQM which operates differently, as a mafia constructing a state within a state, their corruption is beyond dispute, starting with the president, Zardari, Benazir’s husband and known as ‘Mr 10%’. It isn’t just him. Almost the entire elite have been listed as accused of one corrupt practice or another.

And then, of course, there is the Pakistan army committing unspeakable atrocities in its frontier provinces causing vast numbers of refugees and the Taliban matching these atrocities in Peshawar, Islamabad and Rawalpindi, wherever it sees the army and thinks it sees the CIA, not to mention the American drones which kill a hundred people for every targeted Taliban leader they manage to hit.
So it is important to be able to report that there is some good news. The best is probably the movement led by the lawyers earlier in the year which over two years of weekly demonstrations, often baton charged by the police, had protested, again and again, over the dismissal of the Chief Justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry by President Musharraf. His ‘crime’ was to tell the army top brass he would have them arrested if they did not produce before him - habeas corpus - people whom the secret service had made ‘disappear’. He went on to insist the privatisation of the state steel company be reversed as it amounted to little more than theft given the ridiculously low price it was sold for. When the Chief Justice drove from Lahore to Islamabad, a million people, mobilised by no one but themselves, came out to greet him. And eventually the protesters won and the Chief Justice was reinstated. So disorganised as people are here, they can show their strength.

When they begin to organise, as with this wonderful class of students from the informal sector, textile and garment workers and workers from brick kilns, typically working for £1.50 a day without permanent contracts or any kind of welfare system, you can see the potential for change. We’ve spent the last two days with them discussing the problems, planning to deal with them, role playing recruiting new members of the organisation and talking to the media and more. They can do anything.

Sexual harassment at work in Pakistan

One of the topics we covered was sexual harassment and at the end of the morning session one of the class came up with a fellow class member to tell the story of a woman in her factory who had been raped at work but because of the shame felt unable to report it. She wept a little as she told the story. In the afternoon we did an activity on involving women and she felt able to raise the story and a discussion followed. Such shocking stories are all too frequent and fit with the picture of misery painted by the collection of short stories by Pakistani women writers we have at home, ‘Neither night nor Day’, edited Rakhshanda Jalil, New Delhi 2007.

A writers' meeting

A writers' meeting in the Pakistani Medical Association, one of the tiny numbers of places available for meetings in this vast city. I arrive a little late and enter a dimly lit room with a large table and twenty people sitting round it, mostly older men. Four women, the youngest of whom is reading a love poem. This is followed by a courteous discussion. Then another woman reads short story about the fate of a married woman in a loveless marriage. Again there is a polite discussion about marriage and its compromises which reflects a depressingly backward attitude towards women. One of the comments, from a woman, about the need of the wife to accept the man’s view could have come from my mother’s generation.

The awfulness of caste prejudice in Pakistan

To illustrate the awfulness of caste prejudice, Karamat tells a story from 1972 when he was joint secretary of the union in a big textile factory. The other joint secretary was a Christian. He constantly struggles to be accepted by the Pashtun majority workforce. He also seems to have a wife he wants to divorce but can’t as he’s Catholic. He decides to convert to Islam only to find that he is told by his Pashtun colleagues they won’t accept without being circumcised. He has himself chopped and by way of celebration is carried on the shoulders of his colleagues who now welcome him. Only to find that when he says he wants to marry a Pashto girl they say ‘No, you can’t have one of our girls. You are a ‘jeura’, you are low caste ‘. So he converts back to Christianity to be in a community that accepts him as an equal.

A day with the IS Pak comrades

A day with the comrades, half a dozen of them doing a mini day school. Riaz starts with a talk on left parties. With the ever worse corruption of the ruling parties, there are attempts to bring the left together (*). Riaz makes good use of Gramsci’s distinction between ‘good sense’ ands ‘common sense’. This comes, perhaps from reading and translating into Urdu the ‘Rebel’s Guide to Gramsci’ which I’ve brought together with other books. (**) I speak on imperialism. Bangash talks about Afghanistan and the systematic sabotage by the Karzai government to cultivate relationships with could be called the moderate Taliban and at the same time to persecute any left or secular politics. Malalai Joya, former Afghan woman MP, is the best known example here. Afterwards we go for an ice cream - awful flavours apart from vanilla and get some much needed exercise walking round a small park.
Riaz makes lunch: curried chickpeas cooked in an earthenware pot and yoghurt salad. Rather good. Despite being a men only day school in a men only flat, it is all very civilised even if we only go to bed very late.

(*)(**) National Workers Party, the Workers and Peasants Party and the Communist Workers and Peasants Party.With further developments more recently:
"16 progressive parties discuss merger"

(**) By mid December, the Rebel’s Guide to Lenin has also been translated http://issuu.com/ispakistan/docs/rebelguidelenin-final2009?mode=a_p

Lecture on imperialism, meeting Shahid and the Anti Imperialist Front

The morning starts at the Federal Urdu University, in the middle of the city, a poor area. Many of the students are from poor backgrounds and the university itself looks neglected. Young Asghar, ISP comrade, who invited me to speak here three years ago when he was a student, is now on the staff and has invited me again. Same topic: imperialism, and a similar sized audience, about 80 - 100 students and staff. After almost endless introductions by senior staff and students and two sung recitations from the Koran, rather well done I thought, I get to speak for about half an hour, trying to speak clearly but not to compress the argument too much. Hard to tell how it goes down, everyone here is so very polite, but there follows a flood of questions, about Afghanistan, Palestine, etc, mostly very good questions delivered in clear English. So the session as a whole has a certain buzz. At the end I’m presented with ‘The Etiquettes of Life in Islam’ by the right wing, sexist, anti-American, Jamaat-e-Islami student group. Then off to the Directors office for tea and cakes and chat with staff. I’m given another book and flowers.
Now to meet Shahid Hussein at the Press Club. a left wing journalist who was tortured by the army when he was a student activist in the 70s but now, like many on the left who see the Taliban as the main enemy, has supported the army attacks on Swat earlier this year and currently South Waziristan because they see it as impossible to leave people under the Taliban whatever the price. In Swat, the army offensive, though it did break the Taliban, also caused many deaths, destroyed a lot of property and created 2 million refugees. Shahid does a short interview for his paper http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=211140
At five Shahid walks me round the corner to a nearby hotel. A meeting of the Anti Imperialist Front, eventually twenty people, discussing the follow up to a successful seminar they organised recently with a hundred people http://www.ustream.tv/channel/anti-imperialist-front-nov-06-seminar The meeting has a positive feel, much better than I expected.

Course writing, Mian Kayyum and LQM

With a group of young staff - Aiman, Farhat, Humaira and Rafiq, who are going to help deliver the courses in Karachi and Hyderabad, we write a course for activists in the ‘informal sector’. This includes over 90% of all workers in Pakistan, working without any formal contracts, usually in workplaces with no inspection or controls of any kind. For women this is often their own homes, the putting out system or cottage industry. We expect to have a mix of people, including some from the brick kilns, often bonded labourers, garment workers – often women working at home, power loom workers and activists working against child labour.



Last night I met Mian Qayyum, leader of the power loom workers in Faisalabad, called the Manchester of Pakistan, centre of Pakistan’s huge textile industry. He tells the story of the many thousand strong march to the HQ of the power company last December to protest the power cuts - load shedding as it is called here -which stop them, as piece rate workers, from earning a proper wage. They succeeded in forcing the minister to guarantee 20 hours power a day for the looms and 16 hours for domestic supplies. There were all kinds of threats and provocations on the march, including being shot at and, since then, attempts to buy off the leadership. The union, the Labour Qaumi Movement, LQM, has 20,000 members and is one of very few examples of workers in the so-called informal sector successfully organising.



P.S. A few days later, working out with Mian Qayyum the course we will do in Faisalabad in ten days time. I ask: ‘Having won recognition from the employer, pay rises etc, what does the LQM want next?’ He replies: ‘Political representation.’ Which is fine, quite logical. But it scares me, given what the political elite here does to those who threaten their power.

Awami Tehrik rally and IS Pakistan meeting

With a small group from PILER, we set off to Saddar, the old commercial centre of Karachi, where overlooked by some rare, fine stone buildings, there is a rally of a thousand greeting the People’s Movement’s marchers. It’s very colourful as there are lots of Sindhi women wearing bright reds and yellows and greens. Two of the speeches are by women. After it’s over, I’m briefly introduced to Palejo, the tall, elderly, austere leader. As I understand, they are on the radical wing of the Sindhi nationalist movement, fighting for provincial autonomy but not fighting for the full land reform which would mean confronting the Sindhi landlord class, often called ‘feudals’, a brutal bunch.
From the rally to the regular International Socialists branch meeting. Ten comrades. After the meeting proper we talk about Afghanistan and much else. Almost two before I get to bed. Fortunately these sessions are alcohol free. Two comrades had just come back from a few days in Quetta, capital of Balochistan, the largest and poorest province, always oppressed. There is an ongoing low intensity insurrection against government rule. Not a safe place to talk socialist politics I thought but it becomes clear I’m wrong. One of the new IS comrades worked for a couple of years in a street market in Moscow. We manage to converse a bit in Russian, his being better than mine.
People are fairly amazed to see me. Not surprisingly, foreigners seem to have largely stopped coming though most places aren’t any more violent than before. Peshawar, capital of NWFP, and Swat and Waziristan, NWFP, where the army is in occupation, definitely are but they seem to be the exception.
Everywhere people talk about the Taliban whose cruelty is extreme. There is a lot of support for the army attacks on the Taliban strongholds in Swat in early summer and now in Waziristan. But there is no support for the closer and closer relations with the US. On the contrary, there is a real fear of becoming a neo-colony. Quite a paradox as the attacks on Swat and Waziristan were effectively following orders from Hillary Clinton. The widespread fear of ‘Talibanisation’ is strange as the polls show consistently the great majority of Pakistanis have no time at all for the mullahs.

Arriving in Karachi and off to the Fisherfolk

I begin with an informal political briefing from Kutty, PILER’s (Pakistan Institute of Labour Education & Research) most senior member who is now working on the final draft of his memoirs covering all sixty two years since independence.

The situation is unsustainable, chaotic and sometimes extremely grim with the frequent bombings in Peshawar, capital of North West Frontier Province and other big cities in the Punjab including the capital, Islamabad. There is a palpable sense of crisis. Not for the first time but now with suicide bombs, a military offensive in South Waziristan, huge pressure from the US for Pakistan to be a “front-line” ally in what was called “the war of terror”, a low intensity war in Balochistan, Pakistan’s biggest province, food prices rocketing, a return to the clutches of the IMF, poverty and corruption, it looks worse than ever. A couple of months ago there was a national alert and Pakistan’s entire education system shut down for a week but, for the moment, life is as normal here as it gets. Karachi, despite it’s at some times hideous history of ethnic strife, is peaceful. The main political parties here have agreed they have too much to lose if they carry on in the old way of violent turf wars. Nevertheless there is real fear the violence in NWFP and elsewhere will spread here.

Mid afternoon, with Zulfiqar Shah, PILER joint director, and others, half a dozen of us set off in a minibus across Karachi to Ibrahim Hydari on the coast where we join the Pakistan Fisher Folk’s (PFF) celebration of International Fisheries Day. On the way we stop for twenty minutes to meet a couple of hundred marchers from the Sindhi People’s Movement, Awami Tehrik. They are sitting on the well watered lawn outside the elegant Aga Khan Hospital about to have lunch. They’ve been marching over six weeks across the province of Sindh, something like 700km. Everyone looks cheerful and not at all worn out by the trek. We are introduced to the men; some are old with leathery skins from life time working in the fields. Many are wearing the Sindhi shawl with intricate claret, white and black designs and the distinctive cap the topi. Walking 50 yards, we say hello to about eighty women also part of the march, sitting with their biryani lunch.

Another half hour and we get to Ibrahim Hydari, a fishing port - the smell gives it away. Well over a thousand are in a giant, carpeted, tent, sitting cross legged for three hours listening to speeches with occasional singing or dancing, a very loyal and disciplined audience, especially towards the end as various big wig politicians who we can see take the Fisher Folk seriously, speak at length. The PFF is a mass organisation with tens of thousands of members and a track record of mobilising in defence of the fishing communities, including mass sit downs to force the Rangers, paramilitary police, to stop stealing traditional fishing rights.

The Crisis of Working Class Representation

Most places these days the mood is of anger. Fighting the bullies we see the solidity of the post strikes, the all out strike of the Leeds refuse workers. Underlying these is the recognition that there is no one to look to for help, we have to do it ourselves.

So it makes sense to draw political conclusions about what is going on and argue that something has to be done about next year's general election. It's already late but the prospect of doing nothing is unacceptable. The old slogans 'Vote Labour without illusions, vote Labour and prepare to fight’ are simply not acceptable. We have to do something ourselves.

The conference title says it. There is a crisis of working class representation. Mark Serwotka's superb speech to the Manchester Industrial Relations Society last month spelt it out with particular clarity. Coming to his conclusion, he showed how the ‘Make Your Vote Count’ campaign, impressive as it has been in many ways, doesn't work if all three main parties give the same answers to the key questions. Mark's answer to this is to put it to the members of PCS that they vote on whether to put up their own candidates. Though it looks as if PCS is moving too slowly on this for an election that will have to be in May 2010 at the latest, the method of going to members, using the democracy of the union, is exactly what socialists should argue for.

But can the left get itself together? It isn't going to be done quickly. Labour has dominated working class politics for a century. It was 1891 when the Independent Labour Party was founded, 1900 when the Labour Representation Committee was established, 1906 when Labour made a break though in a general election, getting 29 MPs and calling itself 'The Labour Party' for the first time. And it was 1909 when the largest of the unions, a quarter of the TUC’s membership, the Miners' Federation finally decided to affiliate to Labour. The replacement of the Liberals by Labour as the main party to get working class votes at the ballot box took 20 years.

Today’s world is very different. Building a left alternative to Labour is a huge task and there will be many reverses on the way. Five years ago we thought we had made a solid start with Respect. Today it looks very uncertain whether there will be any nationally visible set of candidates putting a left alternative to Labour. Some things, though, don't seem too difficult. Judging by what people were saying at the conference, it may not be too hard to write the manifesto: no to war and privatisation, make the bankers pay. The name might be a problem. While there were some at the conference who wanted to argue that the EU should be a central target of any socialist campaign and hence the first - and most quoted half - of the name 'No2EU, Yes to democracy', the majority of speakers didn't mention the EU.

To put this alternative together is the task and it looks too big in the time available. As Joe Higgins from Dublin explained, you need six months. The degree of unity, the willingness to make real commitments of time and money, the numbers involved will make a real difference. Can we achieve these in time? If we move quick enough, in Manchester and Salford, it should be possible to have campaigns against Kaufman and Blears. From the conference, it was clear that local groups are getting together in quite a number of places. At a guess, I think we might have 30 or 40 candidates with good campaigns. Not as good as we want, but not the worst start. It has to be done. If not us, then who? If not now, then when?

An impressive dispute

It is now seven or eight weeks of action every Monday at the First Bus garages in Bury, Bolton and Wigan, that there have been impressively large pickets. Around thirty or more on the Monday just gone. And hardly a strike breaker despite management's efforts, including an injunction limiting the numbers of pickets, forbidding hte use of the word scab, wrting to each striker individiually at their home and putting adverts in the local press.

The dispute is over the company pay freeze which looks preposterous alongside the £134 million profits they have just declared. The strike is spreading with several thousand drivers now involved, though the Yorkshire drivers are currently considering a less than impressive offer of a £100 one-off payment before deciding whether to take action. What is clear is that with decent leadership the rank and file will fight.