 Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Today, we are joined by Dr. Taimur Rahman, the General Secretary of the Pakistan Mazur Kisan Party and one of the key members of the revolutionary music band LAL. Hello Taimur, thanks for joining us. Hi, thank you for inviting me. Could you first start by talking about the political situation in Pakistan right now? So it's been a couple of months since the Imran Khan government came to power and this was seen as the beginning of a new era. It's breaking the two-party system after a long time. So how do you assess the politics and the performance of the government, especially in the context of what this means, its relation to the military and issues like that? Well, I think the performance of the government has been absolutely dismal and I think the people of Pakistan have come to realise it themselves. It's not just an opinion that I have, it's a widespread public opinion. And the main reason for that is that the cost of living has been going up rapidly for the last nine months. And simultaneously the rupee has been devaluing relative to the dollar and development projects and other forms of capital investment have slowed down. And some of the reasons have to do with the overall structure of dependency in which Pakistan is within the context of the international political economy. But part of the reasons have to do with just the general incompetence of the government itself. And the third aspect is that the government has been trying to, trying but not, but very unsuccessfully to catch people who've been engaging in corrupt activities. The result has been on the one hand that they haven't managed to catch anyone, that really, or they have caught only a few people who've been engaging in corruption activities, but simultaneously that of course has caused both capital to become anxious about investing and it's also caused a slowdown in government development projects at the same time. What is really most interesting in this scenario is that while we in the left have been talking about the rising cost of living and the impact that this has had on the people of Pakistan and how every promise that the PTI has made, it has abandoned or it has taken a U-turn on it. It's completely gone in the opposite direction. But what is really much more interesting than that is that if we were to accept that Imran Khan and his team really came with really great intentions that they will in fact do away with corruption, which is of course eating away at the way capital works itself, we come to realize that within the context of the way in which Pakistan and many other third world countries are fitted into the global political economy, governments really have very little choice but to follow the dictate of the International Monetary Fund. We import more than we export. There's a massive trade deficit as a consequence of which we have to make up that trade deficit from one avenue or another. So if forced to borrow and when you borrow then you have to meet the terms and conditions of the people that you're borrowing from. And in this context Pakistan is getting a six billion dollar bubble out from the IMF and what do you see as the implications of this move as in what is Pakistan likely to surrender? The implications are really very very bad. First let me just fill your viewers in on an interesting little detail there. The economics and finance minister of the government of Pakistan was fired just before the conclusion of this contract with the International Monetary Fund. His name is Asad Umar and he happens to be a long time supporter of the PTI which was not just a supporter, a leader of the PTI since the party was really very small. And in his place we have people who are advising the government, people like Hafiz Sheikh and people who were working with the International Monetary Fund currently employed by the International Monetary Fund have moved to become the governor of state bank and so on. Now what everyone is saying is this is like the IMF negotiating with the IMF because you know you have someone who was just till you know a few days ago an employee of the IMF now moving into the government of Pakistan and negotiating on behalf of the government of Pakistan it's quite insane. More importantly there are certain things that cannot change in the way in which the budget is allocated let's look at the Pakistani budget. No politician to this date has ever managed to negotiate with the military establishment what proportion or how much money the military will or will not get. That is something the military demands and the civilian government mostly complies. So that part of the budget is really unmovable. The other part of the budget that's completely unmovable is the expenditure that the government of Pakistan has to make on debt resurfacing from previous loans etc. And so therefore in order to now to save money to improve the budget deficit the portion of the budget that has to be cut is the development expenditures that has to be cut and so on. And that you can imagine cannot have a positive impact on the growth of the economy it has the opposite impact because you know you're sort of winding down the government sector and it's not necessary that the private sectors were to invest in sufficient quantity to offset that. Last but not least no government has managed going to the way in which the class politics of Pakistan works no government has managed really to implement a proper income tax although it's there on the on the paper but they're just not able to implement it. What that means is that the government is making the vast majority of its tax revenue through indirect taxes which disproportionately affect the poor. So now you begin to see the overall scenario that you're sort of taking money from the lower middle class the middle class you're contracting your development expenditures that you know that the government is making. There is no change there is a growth in fact in the amount that you're spending on the military and in debt resurfacing and so the overall impact of all of this is an enormous rise in the cost of living and the destruction of the incomes of working people and their their life savings the the plummeting of the economy as a whole within the international market and no signs of coming out of this dark tunnel so far. So to take a step back how exactly how exactly do you see the class character of the Pakistani state itself I mean that is the aspect of the military of course and the various political power which has played a very important role in its polity so far and there's Pakistani bourgeois in a particular stage of development so how from a leftist perspective do you see that character itself. That's an excellent question I mean we've looked at from within Pakistan the Pakistani Marxist intelligence here we have people like Hamza Alvi and others who have spoken about the argued the case for the overdeveloped post-colonial state and that seems to be the framework that most Pakistani Marxists also operate with so basically the state is essentially bourgeois it is essentially part of the world capitalist system its logic of operation its thought process is all very much centered on capital right there is also of course a very large class of people which are land which is the land-owning class which emerges from the Jagirdari system and you can call them semi-bourgeois semi-capitalist and semi well we use the term feudal in South Asia but I actually don't really like that feud I prefer to land it class right landlords the main reason is that we have some distinctions from European feudalism although I mean South Asia versus Europe so so that is the mix but in the history of Pakistan the the configuration has been such that when Pakistan was created the bourgeois he was actually very weak so at that time and it didn't and the the party that existed the Muslim League which was meant to become the bourgeois party fractured into many many small you know sort of parts so Ayub Khan took over and when he took over he sort of handpicked 22 families and then and then gave them sort of monopolistic control over their own sector sectors and built them up and the idea then was that if we have this sort of functional inequality you'll hit six percent rate of growth and if you hit that then it'll trickle down some future point so and so this whole nonsense that was being taught at the time and you know Papua Nick Gustav Papua Nick and Samuel Huntington were advising the Pakistani government and saying this is absolutely great the result of that is that the bourgeoisie of Pakistan developed in a very peculiar way it developed in the way that it was very much part of state capital and state capital was very much used state monopoly capitalism was very much used to support it to develop it to encourage it for it to become profitable that's why the bourgeoisie of Pakistan although it's a well-developed class it has it sort of you know I mean there's industry and it has its points of views and it has its institutions its newspapers the whole thing but it's very much tied to state capital it's very much tied to the state and by state here I mean of course the military establishment which is central so the bourgeoisie itself a big portion of the bourgeoisie itself prefers in the context of Pakistan to have military dictatorship rather than to have elections and to have bourgeois democracy right and I think we are familiar enough we ought to be familiar enough with history to realize that the bourgeoisie all over the globe actually has not never preferred to have universal franchise but prefer to have a republic in which they you know they they would not had necessarily be under the monarchy but they never really wanted to give working people the right to vote they preferred that arrangement it was it was the chartists another working class you know in the Paris commune that forced the bourgeoisie to to institute and of course the Russian Revolution that forced the bourgeoisie to institute universal franchise so in the context of Pakistan as well so you see that the the the main sectors of the bourgeoisie say let's have the military they're just so much more efficient it's so much more easier there's a few people to deal with and you know they do what we need them to do and it's much better that's what the vast majority says but recently a change has started to come about that helps us understand the dynamics of what has happened recently and that is that parts of the bourgeoisie have been arguing now the case for civilian rule as opposed to military rule and that would be Nawaz Sharif firstly it would also be Asif Zardari said you know to a very large extent and and many other sort of arrangements similar similar people so that has caused you know not only have they been advocating that that you know those who are elected by the people ought to be in government but they've also been advocating that the that the military be confined to its constitutional rule this has caused the pushback so and there are several questions on which this has sort of emerged one was the question of one is always the question of how to deal with India what's going on in kashmir should we have good relations with India should we have trade with India what sort of relations we should have with India so on that front the military would like to be consulted first and foremost in fact it would like to call the shots and then consult the civilian administration a civilian administration would like to do it the other way around the second issue that caused the you know sort of difference between me and Nawaz Sharif and the military establishment was over the question of religious extremism there was a very important there was a few very important incidents in which certain reports were leaked in the press about meetings between the civilian administration and the and the and the military establishment and the way in which that was reported really upset the military establishment and they believe that the civilian government was responsible for the way in which it was reported in the mainstream news so overall that it is our understanding that that has caused the military establishment to say we are no longer going to be supporting the muslim league or the pvp anymore or when we're going to try and build a third option and that's why they've it's been argued by dawn and many other newspapers in fact by geo dawn and many other papers and many other writers that the military establishment has been building up imran khan through the mainstream media and brought into power where is real control even today is largely with the military too so that's the scenario and so they sort of want to stay and the military also has moved against the mqm against the pvp as well as against the pml this is the case being made so it seems like the military wants that there should be i mean the the case being made in the pakistani media from the from this side of the story is that the military wants to sort of get rid of the old established politicians and bring up a new crop of politicians that would more amenable to them that are who are more amenable to their views of course that it never works that way to be honest because the current crop of politicians was also at one point brought by the you know supported by the military establishment again against another group of politicians who at that time were recalcitrant or whatever you know so it never works that way thank you that's all we have time for today keep watching people's dispatch