 Pakistan is in the midst of a major political crisis in the aftermath of the assassination attempt on former Prime Minister Imran Khan on November 3. He was leading a rally to the capital Islamabad at that time. The rally was the latest in a series of mobilizations he has called for since his overthrow from power in April. Imran Khan's popularity has skyrocketed since, especially due to the new government's failure to handle the economic crisis. What led to Imran Khan calling for this march to the capital and how has the situation changed after the assassination attempt? What has been the response of the government and how have they tried to manage the economic crisis? Taimur Rahman, General Secretary of the Mazdoor Kisan Party, analyzes the situation. Since Imran Khan's government was overthrown in a vote of no confidence, his main demand has been that the government needs to re-hold the election. In his view, the overthrow of his government, that is the vote of no confidence, was regime change. And what he would like to see is that the elections are re-held as soon as possible. They are due in about a year's time, but he wants to see early elections. At the same time, the PDM, which is the coalition which is in power right now, would like to delay the elections as far as possible in order to be able to stabilize the economic situation. Now to force the PDM to hold the elections as soon as possible, Imran Khan began to organize a series of very large rallies, demonstrations in marches across the country. And as he built up the momentum, he tried to bring them all together into the long march on Islamabad. Now on the one hand, of course, the explicit and open demand of the march is that elections need to be held as soon as possible because the vote of no confidence was an instance of regime change. This is an illegal government. This is a corrupt government and so on. On the other hand, the discussion in Pakistan has been that one of the unstated goals of this march is to put pressure on the Pakistan military and establishment because in November, General Bajwa is due to retire and the army is due to select a new chief of army staff. So the general buzz around town is that the unwritten demand is that the army should elect a chief of army staff that is more favorable to the Pakistan Perikeh insaf. Since Imran Khan's attempted assassination, his popularity has gone through the roof. There was already the situation that all the other parties are on one side and Imran Khan's party is on this side. And he's able to defeat about 13 parties that are on the other side. In the bi-elections in which eight seats were recontested, Imran Khan's party won six out of eight seats and that shows you that his party is really doing quite well with the public at this particular point in time. With respect to the assassination, everybody saw the assassination on social media. They saw how he had been shot and how he had been saved by a young boy, how the bullet hit him in the leg, how he fell down. And more importantly, how he got back up again. He limped to his car and he waved to his supporters, et cetera, saying, I'm all right. Everything is okay. And then he went to hospital. These scenes naturally electrified Imran Khan's own supporters who came out in big numbers in his support in the last few days. And in some instances there was even some fear that the situation would escalate towards violence, but it didn't escalate towards any big violence at least for the moment. So now Imran is well again and he's on the march and he's called supporters to come back to Islamabad. Naturally, he's in a cast. One of his bones was also hit by a bullet. So I'm not sure whether he can fully stand the rigors of the march and walk, et cetera, but he's determined that the march must continue, though momentum is going with him. Both the current government and Imran Khan have a very narrow set of solutions to the economic crisis. Both have hoped to tap into the IMF and foreign aid. How does the left in Pakistan evaluate the economic crisis? Is there a way out? At this stage, if the PDM is unable to consolidate the stabilize the economy, they will definitely lose any election. If they hold an election right now, they are bound to lose because inflation is touching between 27 and 29 percent. But even if they hold the election in a year's time, they will still have a lot of trouble unless they can fix the economy. They are working very hard to try and fix the economy, but they need a lot of foreign investment to do that. That's their strategy. They're going to Saudi Arabia. They're going to UAE. They're going to China. They're going to the European Union. They're going to the United States of America and literally begging people to come and invest in Pakistan and also to give aid and assistance, given Pakistan's flood situation and how millions of people were affected by the floods and lost their lives and their property. And nearly about a third of the country was inundated with water. The situation is still very, very bad in the sense that there are whole areas where there's an emergency. There could be a public health hazard. Mosquitoes are everywhere. Malaria and dengue have spread everywhere. So Pakistan is in a lot of trouble at this point in time. So the strategy of the PDM doesn't seem to be working right now because naturally in order for other countries to invest in Pakistan, that will still require some time. And also there is still a lot of political uncertainty. Imran Khan is very popular. You can see that there's millions of people that are marching with him and walking with him and supporting him. And so given this sort of situation in which Pakistan seems to be on the verge of instability, I think people may not really be ready to invest at this point in time. So the PDM strategy to stabilize the economy is not necessarily working. The one main thing is that the reason why Pakistan's import bill is so high is that we are an oil importing country. About 25% of our imports are oil and gas or oil and gas related products. And those we buy off the world market. Now, the only way that that can be changed is if, for instance, Pakistan completes the deal with Iran and gets cheaper oil from Iran, or if it completes the TAPI gas pipeline and gets oil from that pipeline, or if it makes a deal with Russia and gets oil from Russia, then it could get cheaper oil. But if these things are not completed and they are very difficult to complete, especially with respect to Iran and Russia and, you know, even perhaps the TAPI pipeline, the Americans don't want to see the normalization of relations either with Iran or with Russia or with those countries that are seen to be allied with Russia. And hence that source of oil for the moment seems to be close to Pakistan. If the left were in power, I think the left would be very keen to pursue those sources of oil in order to create a situation where Pakistan's dependency on oil is reduced. And not only does the dependency on oil need to be reduced, at the same time, the overall dependency of the Pakistan economy needs to be addressed. For instance, Pakistan is long overdue for land reforms, even though Pakistan has five rivers, you know, and vast amounts of agricultural and agricultural productivity in Pakistan is actually amongst the lowest in the world. And this is mainly in our view because of the landed structure of Pakistan, which needs to be dramatically overhauled and changed. The remnants of feudalism need to be eliminated. New technology needs to be introduced into the agricultural sector. The commanding heights of the urban economy, specifically, I'd say, finance needs to be strongly regulated, if not controlled by the state, transportation, telecommunications, all these things, in my opinion, need to come back. And in the opinion of the left, need to come back under the control of the state rather than pursuing the neoliberal policy of privatization, deregularization and liberalization. Pakistan needs to pursue a different policy. It needs to move away from neoliberalism. It needs to protect its economy. It needs to bring it bring back the state sector in order to stabilize its economy. That in our view is the only solution to what is going on at the moment. Naturally, the long-term solution will be to construct a socialist society. But in the immediate future, we need to diversify our sources of oil so that our oil dependency is reduced. We need to modernize our agriculture by undertaking a land reform and introducing new technology into agriculture. And we need to take control of the commanding heights of the industrial economy, specifically taking control of finance capital, regulating it in such a way that it can be utilized for the growth of the economy and not for parasitic purposes.