The Pakistani state’s capacity to deliver services—health, education, security and other civic and social amenities—to its masses has been dwindling since the 11 year rule of military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq. Ever diminishing fiscal space, an ineffective and sometimes non-existent state machinery and a political elite completely devoid of any capacity for policy planning has gradually deprived the Pakistani state of any ability to take care of the social and economic needs of society.
This gradual process of dwindling state capacity was taking place in the context of slow and unimpressive economic growth. Ironically, we are surrounded by the two fastest growing economies in the world—India and China —both states who have lifted a large portion of their impoverished populations above the poverty line during the last two decades. Key to India and China’s ability to achieve this feat has been relative stability in their politics during the past two decades.
Ours is a highly unstable society, led by a political elite with a penchant for promising greener pastures to the people of the country, amidst a crisis like situation that has exposed the Pakistani state’s capacity to deliver services to its people. Obviously, Pakistan’s political leaders have to rely on this same state machinery to fulfil their promises they make to the people of Pakistan during their election campaigns. Hardly anyone doubts that the state’s capacity to deliver has dwindled.
The dwindling of state capacity didn’t come to us alone. It was coupled by the rise of the elder Bhutto’s style of politics, loud and populist, which promised grand outcomes to the people at the same time as our state’s capacity to deliver simply evaporated into thin air.
Ours is a highly unstable society, led by a political elite with a penchant for promising greener pastures to the people of the country, amidst a crisis like situation that has exposed the Pakistani state’s capacity to deliver services to its people.
The 1990s was the period when the Chinese and Indian economies galvanized to benefit from the process of globalization, the benefits of which South East Asia was beginning to reap, as a parallel process of deindustrialization in western economies was bringing investment in the shape of capital, expertise and technology to this region, where cheap labor was available in abundance. The availability of cheap labor in China, India and other South East Asian countries made these countries popular destinations for investors and capitalists from around the western world and Japan.
Experts also point towards a socially liberal cultural environment as a factor which attracted international capitalists and investors towards China and India, and not towards Pakistan, where political elites in the 1990s were flirting with the idea of Islam as a political ideology in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Pakistan simply missed the train—foreign investment remained minimal, and the process of globalization didn’t benefit us the way it did the Chinese and Indian economies.
Let’s recall our obsessions in the 1990s, while the Chinese and Indian economies were liberalizing to benefit from the process of globalization. We were obsessed with installing a friendly government in Kabul; our obsession played no small part in ruining the prospects of peace post-Soviet withdrawal in Afghanistan, and contributed substantially in starting a civil war in our own neighborhood.
We were obsessed with maintaining a favorable military balance with India and to ensure that we were obsessed with developing a nuclear bomb. As a result, we ignored the education of our youth, we ignored our economic and manufacturing capacity, we ignored our social and political stability. As if nuclear bombs, strategic depth, a favorable military balance with India and a friendly government in Kabul were all that we needed.
A comprehensive package of failures—long bouts of political and social instability, economic hardships felt at the grassroot level and a completely inept political elite, which took us on a long and incessant daydreaming tour, has consequently made our society delusional. Yes, delusional. As a nation, we demonstrate clear signs of living in delusion.
We vote for candidates and parties which promise the world to us. We collectively engage in an exercise of daydreaming, knowing very well that the promises that are being made to us are not within the realm of possibilities. Everyone at the grassroot levels knows that the Pakistani state is running on borrowed finances to meet its expenses. Yet we believe and vote for leaders who promise us the world. This has been going on since the 1990s. By the time Imran Khan appeared on the scene, with his promise of a welfare state, Pakistan’s fiscal and monetary balances were running on fumes. But Imran Khan was using the same populist style of the elder Bhutto.
Our political discourse is completely devoid of any attempt to comprehend the nature, ideology or structures of the Pakistani state.
Everybody knows the reality is that the Pakistan state doesn’t have the financial capacity to fulfil any of the promises made by populist political leaders who are vying to take control of the state machinery. Ironically, Pakistani media doesn’t even question the claims made by these cyclostyled Bhuttos during the course of election campaigns. What word would you use to describe this state of affairs. I think delusional is apt.
Our political discourse is completely devoid of any attempt to comprehend the nature, ideology or structures of the Pakistani state. Mostly, intellectual discourse on the Pakistan state revolves around two parallel currents: Islamist and Marxist. This has been followed in recent years with an attempt to reify the state as an institution that should be loved, if not worshipped, by all and sundry. Our political discourse doesn’t prescribe any reformist agenda for our political structure. Take this example: the Pakistani state machinery is good for only one task: coercion. As has been pointed out earlier, its capacity to deliver services has dwindled drastically.
Pakistan’s two major populist political leaders, Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan have personally experienced the coercive powers of the Pakistani state. But neither have made any claims about reforming the structures and institutions of the Pakistani state. None of them have pointed out that the state’s capacity to deliver has dwindled, and that before any promises can be fulfilled, we will have to build this capacity. In fact, none of the political parties’ election manifestos made any promises to build and reinforce the capacity of the state.
Every political party is attempting to take control of the state machinery, and yet no one has a coherent plan of what they intend to do with this state machinery. Obviously, a state machinery devoid of any capacity to deliver services to the masses will not be of any use to these political leaders whose wish and desire to attract more and more voters to their parties never diminishes. As a result, these political leaders engage in using public resources to buy votes by providing subsidies to their favorite, selected segments in society. Building a sustainable economy or increasing the manufacturing base is way beyond their capacity.
Political parties are being managed and run on charity from capitalists - big businesses, rent seeking industrialists and the landed elite - and when parties come to power, political leaders act as the true representatives of these moneyed interests, dropping only crumbs for the masses.
Till the 1980s, we had a very vibrant Marxist intellectual discourse on the role state as a political institution that represents the interests of the economically dominant classes of the society. With the end of the Cold War and the triumph of capitalism, the Marxist discourse evaporated into thin air. Islamist discourses on the institution of the state were to a large extent already facilitating the control of the economically dominant classes on the political and power structures of the society.
One of the side effects of the worldwide victory of neoliberal capitalism and its corresponding influence on political discourse in our society was that the downtrodden in Pakistan became voiceless. Political parties are being managed and run on charity from capitalists - big businesses, rent seeking industrialists and the landed elite - and when parties come to power, political leaders act as the true representatives of these moneyed interests, dropping only crumbs for the masses.
This is true about every major political party in the country which has any real chance of coming to power in Islamabad. The dominant classes remain dominant, and the state truly represents the economic, social and cultural interests of the dominant classes. Marx's analysis of the capitalist system couldn’t be more accurate when it comes to describing Pakistan’s political system. Any political party which doesn’t include the agenda of reconfiguring the productive base of the nation’s economy as its primary election program cannot claim to represent Pakistani masses.