This article is part of a series titled “Is there a way forward for Pakistan?”. Read more about the series here.
Is a script that is all too familiar in Pakistan: an elected Prime Minister is ousted under dubious circumstances and is replaced by a rival who ‘wins’ a rigged election. It is clear that this sequence of events has been orchestrated by the military establishment, just as it is when, a few years later, the cycle repeats itself as yet another civilian leader is removed from power through questionable means. The constitutionality of the mechanisms employed to achieve these outcomes remains the subject of vociferous partisan debate. And as has been the case since the late 1940s, these developments are accompanied by vicious recriminations, accusations of corruption, and vows of ‘accountability’ and vengeance hurled by antagonistic political parties.
Amidst all the rallies and speechifying, the courts make repeated interventions in the political arena, tilting the balance in favour of one faction or another using judicial logic seemingly based more on expedience and ideological bias than any consistent set of principles. As these shenanigans unfold, becoming yet another chapter in the unending ‘crisis’ that confronts Pakistan, the specter of economic meltdown looms ever larger; despite, or perhaps because of, a record number of IMF-bailouts, numerous five-year plans, grandiose claims about ‘geo-economics’ and trade, countless campaign promises, and the oft-repeated mantra that things will be different this time, Pakistan’s economic prospects remain perennially bleak.
Watching the chaos in Pakistan, it is often easy to get swept up in the roiling currents of everyday events. The contemporary media landscape, with its polarized online discourse and unending competition for attention through ‘breaking’ news and breathless, endless punditry and ‘analysis’, distorts and magnifies the importance of even the smallest political pronouncements and acts; rallies are always unprecedented in size, persecution always unique in its savagery, and legal cases always unmatched in their implications.
Yet, the apparent ferocity of all this political conflict, and the seemingly apocalyptic stakes involved in its resolution, ultimately serves to do little more than mask the truly ephemeral nature of these events. The more things change, the more they stay the same and if the aim is to try and make sense of Pakistan, it is important to look beyond the banal gladiatorial theatrics that dominate the airwaves and instead look to the structural causes of perpetual crisis.
The first step in this direction should be, perhaps, to identify exactly what it is that does not change in Pakistan. First, while it has been a decade and a half since a dictator formally ruled Pakistan, the fact remains that the powerful military establishment remains firmly entrenched as the locus of power in the country, presiding over a vast economic empire, claiming a substantial share of public revenues both directly and indirectly, exercising influence over ‘civilian’ politics, and directing vast swathes of domestic and foreign policy. Second, the civilian political elite remains relatively small and privileged; research suggests that just 400 ‘dynastic’ families have dominated electoral politics in Punjab since the 1970s, and the Pakistani ruling class continues to be comprised of land and capital owning elites who, for all their factional disputes and differences, remain united in their common commitment to perpetuating and strengthening an economic status quo within which they are able to protect and pursue their interests at the expense of the country’s working classes. Third, state power in Pakistan remains centralized with Islam being used to legitimize a parochial official narrative of nationhood and citizenship while also being employed to crush dissent articulated in ethno-national, leftist, or other terms seen as threatening to the continued exercise of power by those holding public office in both its elected and unelected forms.
These three features – praetorianism, ruling class domination, and religious legitimation – are embedded within the institutional framework of Pakistan’s politics and are arguably interlinked. In my own research, for example, I have explored the colonial roots of elite domination in Pakistan, examining how the exercise of power by the British necessarily rested on the creation and continuous reproduction of a bargain between an authoritarian state elite and influential local landholders whereby the former traded patronage for the political support of the latter.
Driven by the imperatives of economic accumulation and the maintenance of order, yet perennially confronted with the possibility of resistance, the colonial state saw traditional landed elites – wielding economic and social power based on their ownership of property and their position within networks of caste and kinship – as powerful bulwarks against the growth of anti-colonial and possibly nationalist sentiment. In the years following the Revolt of 1857, all the way up to 1947, colonial policy in much of modern-day Pakistan was explicitly geared towards empowering these traditional elites, granting them property, political position, electoral legitimacy, and even legislative authority in exchange for their continued support for British rule. The net effect of these measures was to further strengthen and entrench these elites, leaving them well placed to capture state power in any post-colonial dispensation.
Following independence, many of the same pressures that shaped British policy were faced by an ‘overdeveloped’ military and bureaucratic apparatus that seized control of the state but which found itself searching for political allies as it struggled to assert its authority. The same traditional elites who underpinned colonial power struck a similar bargain with Pakistan’s new military authoritarians and while the nature of these allegiances would shift as different factions of this elite jockeyed for influence, the fundamental contours of the arrangement remained unchanged as the decades went by; in its quest to secure its own interests, the military establishment dispensed patronage to propertied civilian elites who, in turn, used their position to mobilize support for the state and, not coincidentally, further entrench themselves within the framework of politics. As and when challenges to this monopolization of power by the ruling class emerged, the brutal use of state coercion was supplemented by the strategic deployment of Islam, which proved to be a potent ideological mechanism through which resistance could be delegitimized and discredited.
A lot has changed over the past eight decades, but this pattern of politics has proven to be incredibly resilient. The landlords who dominated civilian politics in the years following independence gradually diversified into industry, constituting the core of a new capitalist elite. The expansion of the ‘democratic’ and electoral area, through for example the introduction of local governments, was designed to reinforce centralized state authority and served as a pathway for the creation and cultivation of new propertied elites. The diversification of the economy, accelerated by ‘liberalization’ since the 1980s, created new opportunities for the military and civilian elite to extract rents, and the ‘new’ middle classes emerging in Pakistan’s rapidly growing cities were either co opted by the state through the strategic provision of patronage, or limited by the barriers erected by the entrenched propertied classes. While popular movements – fighting against military authoritarianism and elite power, and for the dignity and rights of Pakistan’s women, ethnic and religious minorities, and working classes – sometimes offered glimmers of hope that a different world was possible, their radical potential was rapidly extinguished, replaced by state-sponsored religious nationalism and empty populism.
It is in this context that Pakistan now faces the crises that it does. When the structure of the state was designed, from its very inception, to pursue the interests of the military establishment and its civilian allies, it should be unsurprising that the economy is thoroughly cartelized and oriented towards continued accumulation by propertied elites motivated by a desire to do nothing more than protect their own positions. When political competition and outcomes have always been engineered, it is no wonder that elected and unelected holders of public office feel no obligation to serve voters who are not, in any case, beholden to the acquisition of power. When there is little accountability through democratic mechanisms like voting, and when the state has historically been able to rely on geo-political rents in the form of aid to sustain its existence, what could possibly compel those in power to look beyond their own interests when charting a path forward for Pakistan?
Democratizing Pakistan must involve a direct confrontation with Pakistan’s traditional economic elite, the landholders, industrialists, and financiers who command the heights of the country’s political economy.
This necessarily generalized and perhaps stylized view of Pakistan’s politics may lack some nuance, but it does capture that fundamental issue at the heart of the country’s governance and it is here that It becomes possible to imagine what it might take to change things for the better. In one word, what Pakistan needs is democracy. Yet this oft-maligned word requires clarification and elaboration. For Pakistan to prosper, it must be democratic yet this democratic future must be fundamentally different from the country’s ‘democratic’ past. Democracy, in this context, must mean something much more substantive than simply holding election. It must involve a fundamental restructuring of the entire political order and crucially, the extension of democratic principles to the governance of the economy.
What would this mean in practice? First, and perhaps most importantly of all, any meaningful effort to democratize Pakistan must begin with a principled and uncompromising commitment to challenging the power of the military establishment. The military’s involvement in politics – from its coups to the engineering involved in rigging elections, crafting backroom deals, and pitting different factions/parties against each other – has arguably been the main impediment to the development of democratic institutions and practice in Pakistan. By banning and persecuting political parties and leaders, empowering so-called ‘electables’ drawn from the traditional elite, exerting influence over the judiciary, and playing a lead role in suppressing dissent in all its manifestations, the military has effectively severed the connection between democracy and accountability in Pakistan. And this is in addition to the corrosive effect of its economic interests, foreign policy priorities, and parochial, self-serving approach to ‘national security’.
Second, democratizing Pakistan must involve a direct confrontation with Pakistan’s traditional economic elite, the landholders, industrialists, and financiers who command the heights of the country’s political economy. As discussed above, this class has historically been aligned with the military, and even those fractions that have remained avowedly ‘apolitical’ have nonetheless benefitted from their proximity to power, influencing policy and extracting rents. These elites have also dominated Pakistan’s political parties and the hollowness of their commitment to democratic principles is perhaps best exposed by their relentless competition to strike deals with the very same military establishment they often claim to oppose. The alternative to these elites, and the parties that control, would be any movement that explicitly commits itself to mobilizing the country’s working classes, building coalitions from below based on the inclusion of, and extension of dignity to, the poor, women, ethnic and religious minorities – and all those brutalized and exploited by the civilian and military elites who have ruled Pakistan.
By banning and persecuting political parties and leaders, empowering so-called ‘electables’ drawn from the traditional elite, and playing a lead role in suppressing dissent, the military has effectively severed the connection between democracy and accountability in Pakistan.
Third, building on the first two principles, democratizing Pakistan necessarily means exercising democratic control over the economy. The structural problems underpinning Pakistan’s dismal economic performance are numerous, and opinions on how to deal with them may differ, but it seems clear that elite domination and the logic of the market have both combined to create a situation in which ‘growth’, such as it is, benefits the few even as the many struggle to make ends meet.
For an economy to be governed through democratic principles, it would not be sufficient for it to be subject to formal control through parliament; instead, it would be characterized by a fundamental commitment to the pursuit of welfare over profit, and equity over growth. The institutional and organizational form taken by such an economy would, in the final analysis, be determined by the strength and ideology of any popular movement that might seek to bring it into existence – would it have collective ownership, competing cooperatives, or simply high levels of regulation and redistribution etc. – but it would nonetheless be an economy that put people – the toiling majority – first.
The word utopia means ‘no place’, and has often been used to describe political outcomes that, while desirable, are ultimately unachievable. The demands and realities of practicality often provide the justification for compromise and while many may agree on what needs to be done, far fewer will commit to actually achieving such goals.
Pakistan’s history shows that the power of the military and civilian elite – and all that flows from it – is deeply entrenched and difficult to dislodge.
Genuine attempts to change the status quo in the past have foundered, and there is little reason to believe things will be different in the near future. Yet, recognizing the difficulty of bringing about change should not lead to a willful limiting of our political imaginaries. Indeed the utility of utopian thinking may lay in precisely how it serves to help us uncover precisely what it is we oppose and hope to achieve, setting benchmarks that we aspire to through political struggle. As Gramsci famously said, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
The writer was previously an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Lahore University of Management Sciences and is currently based at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, Canada.
