Arrests Fail O Solve Crises

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Mr Bhutto, the deposed prime minister of Pakistan, and Mrs. Gandhi, the ex-prime minister of India, have been taken into police custody on corruption charges. The legitimacy of these charges is of less significance than their timing.

Mrs. Gandhi, after a few months seclusion came out with a forceful criticism of the right wing government. She not only criticised its various political, economic. and social policies but counterposed a programme which was radical by the standards of the Congress Her demagogy was all too effective in securing support.

Bhutto was arrested only four days after a massive election rally in Karachi which clearly outnumbered any of the PNA's meetings.

These frenzied reactions, and the postponement of elections in Pakistan show both the desperation of the six month old right-wing Desai government in India and the determination of General Zia's military regime to hand over power to the right wing PNA.

Both Gandhi and Bhutto were brought down through hysterical campaigns, based not on any cohérent political or economic programme but on a strange mixture of metaphysics and morality.

These campaigns gained support because neither ruler offered any solution to the problems facing the Indian and Pakistani masses and because both, after coming to power: their "socialist" programmes.

The only people campaigning The most recent outbreak of Middle Eastern *shuttle diplomacy" last week reached epidemic proportions with directly against them, on the political level were right wing coalitions.

They gained massive support. But the Desai government and the PNA backed military regime cannot assure a consolidated right wing rule in either of the countries.

The fact is that in the previous elections in India and in Pakistan the defeat inflicted on the supposedly 'left wing' Congress and PPP was not decisive.

These parties still retained considerable militant support as well as a bulk of the population which could be decisively won over.

It is obvious enough that neither a bourgeois democracy nor a fascist military regime is able to solve the problems inflicted on the people in those countries, and that the only system which can resolve these numerous political, economic and social problems is a socialist system.

Even more obvious is the historical conclusion drawn from the February and October revolutions in 1917, is that in the backward countries even basic democratic tasks of bourgeois revolution can only be achieved by a socialist revolution, brought about under the leadership of the organised working class with the help of peasantry and the petty-bourgeoisie.

Utter confusion on this question has been created by both pro-Moscow and pro-Peking Communist Parties in both India and Pakistan.

Their false policies are now clearly the decisive factor in preserving the system as well as letting a desperate population denied independent leadership face death and humiliation in the process of changing one reactionary bourgeois government for another and then back again.