On May 29, the Marxist members of the National Assembly of Pakistan, Comrade CH Manzoor Ahmad, CH Qamar Zaman Qaira and CH Zulfiqar Gondal addressed a press conference in which they discussed the reasons why they did not get permission to visit India. The comrades explained in a collective meeting with the press that they had been invited by the World Social Forum to participate in a conference in which they were going to discuss about the prospects for peace between India and Pakistan. But the state intervened with a manoeuvre by not issuing them with the stickers, which are required for members of parliament of the SAARC countries for travel across the subcontinent, and to SAARC member countries.
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Comrade Manzoor Ahmad said that the ruling classes of India and Pakistan are not serious about peace in the region. Both countries are spending more than 60 percent of their budgets on defence expenditure and he explained that if they spent this money on education and healthcare for the poor masses of both countries this would be quite decisive in improving the living standards of the working class of both countries.
Secondly the ruling military dictatorship on the one side and the rulers on the other side of the border always use military escalation and brinkmanship to distract attention from the real problems and to gain an advantage, such as in the build up to elections or when other important issues come up, and thus make sure that things go in favour of the ruling class. Whenever the government has to carry out such measures as privatisation, downsizing, the imposition of new taxes, or increase the prices of commodities used by the layman, the government use these artificially created non-issues to divert the attention of the working class. They said the poor working classes had had enough and now the time has come to put stop to it.
They also added that a solution to the Kashmir problem and peace in the subcontinent can only be achieved through the socialist victory of the workers of the whole of the subcontinent.
The comrades explained that the workers of the subcontinent have no enmity with each other. By using religion and fomenting nationalism to poison the working classes of the subcontinent they have created hatred. They explained that by developing and using these types of manoeuvres the government was putting itself in a position where it could no longer play for time and would soon have to act.
They stressed that the working class learns from its own experience. The working class and the poor masses of the subcontinent have started to see what the real situation is. The workers are reaching the conclusion that peace on the subcontinent and throughout the whole world can only be guaranteed by the working class of the subcontinent in unity with the workers of the world.