On its 75th independence anniversary, Pakistan faces acute crises in the realm of politics, economics and institutional structure of the state. In the mainstream discourse this is explained via ‘bad’ decisions made by men sitting at the top of the political parties and/or powerful state institutions. Pakistani media and politics is obsessed with role of individuals but what remains under appreciated is the broader logic of the system which has created silos of affluence for the privileged few and oceans of deprivation for the overwhelming majority. In this short exploratory article, I outline the broad contours of the prevailing postcolonial political settlement and delineate why it is as the underlying cause of the systemic crisis of the state and society.
In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx noted that “men [women] make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” In the case of Pakistan like many other former colonies, it was the legacy of the colonial political settlement which was inherited in 1947. I argue that in the past 75 years, a lot has changed but some core aspects of the colonial political settlement have remained largely intact and they define the nature of the postcolonial political settlement. In particular, I explain the postcolonial political settlement via the following three: 1) imperial state bureaucracy, 2) extractive economic regime and 3) uneven development of state and society.
Imperial State Bureaucracy
Under British colonial rule, the colonial state bureaucracy was the de facto ruler and the ordinary people were subservient to the diktats of the state functionaries. The former considered themselves to be ‘superior’ and ‘civilized’ vis-à-vis rest of the society. Using this orientalist/racist logic, colonial bureaucracy felt entitled to rule with an iron first over the natives. In 1947, newly formed Pakistan inherited this imperial state bureaucratic apparatus. Despite multiple reform efforts, the state bureaucracy remains entrenched in colonial practices. Imperial state bureaucracy makes it a catch 22 situation for the political elites. On the one hand, political elites want state machinery to be more responsive to the needs of their electorate. But at the same time, political elites are not interested in any serious project of decolonization given their own political power is rooted in the existing power hierarchies in the existing institutional structures of the state and society. Not to mention, political elites have short time horizons in the public office, thus, they rather prefer to assuage state bureaucracy to keep state machinery rolling rather than undertaking a painstaking exercise of decolonializing the state bureaucracy. Thus, the postcolonial state bureaucratic state apparatus can be best explained by the following: “the old is dying and the new cannot be born” (Antonio Gramsci). At the moment, not a single mainstream political party has a clear-cut agenda of decolonizing the state bureaucracy.
Despite multiple reform efforts, the state bureaucracy remains entrenched in colonial practices.
Extractive Economic regime
One of the core objectives of the colonial political settlement was to maintain ‘law and order’ in the colony so that economic surplus can be extracted out to serve the political and economic interests of the British elites. Therefore, to avoid unrest in the colony, British colonial state accommodated local landed elites in the prevailing political settlement. Colonial political settlement produced not only produced local losers but also crated local (natives) winners. In fact, a large number of political elites in Pakistan can trace back their political rise to colonial era. At the time of independence, colonial era’s elites (landed gentry) became the Pakistani elite. In addition to landed elites and the bourgeoisie, the postcolonial political settlement over the years has accommodated real estate developers, banking/finance executives, powerful figures of the religious clergy and media tycoons as a part of the permanent elite. As a result, the postcolonial elites are much more diverse than the colonial era but what remains constant in both colonial and postcolonial eras is the ‘extractive’ nature of the economic regime. That is, postcolonial elites extract cheap rents through political lobbying, and as a result, the productive base of the economy remains underdeveloped.
In other words, Pakistan can be characterized as a ‘dependent’ economy on the core countries of global capitalism due to its internally disarticulated economic structure. Dependency, a structural political economic constraint, also helps explain why bourgeois elites (including the mainstream political parties) have been unable to undertake any substantive democratic reforms in the country.
Pakistan can be characterized as a ‘dependent’ economy on the core countries of global capitalism due to its internally disarticulated economic structure. Dependency, a structural political economic constraint, also helps explain why bourgeois elites (including the mainstream political parties) have been unable to undertake any substantive democratic reforms in the country.
What remains under acknowledged in the mainstream media is the fact that class interests of all mainstream political parties (e.g., PML-N, PPP and PTI) are broadly similar; business and landed classes are united in their suppression of the economic interests and rights of ordinary Pakistanis. For example, all elected civilian governments since 2008 have undertaken forced evictions of toiling classes from their land/homes for high-end real estate development. In other words, handful of large estate developers and business elites have substantive control economic policy matters of mainstream political parties. Not surprisingly, in the past few decades, real estate sector has been the most profitable in Pakistan. At the same time, there has been a systemic shortage of decent employment opportunities for the young and educated segments of the society. This has forced a large number of working- and middle-class families to look overseas for employment. In addition to brain drain, systemic male overseas migration results into double work (both inside and outside the house) for women at home. Not to mention, Pakistan has been consistently rated one of the worst places in terms of gender parity. But elites are happy with overseas migration because it helps them accrue foreign exchange reserves. Thus, there is a functional role of the chronic unemployment and underemployment in the postcolonial political settlement, i.e., export labor to earn foreign exchange reserves. Because on the macroeconomic front, Pakistan has been continuously facing twin-deficit crises since its inception. Mainstream political parties have adopted neoliberal ‘austerity’ policies under the dictates of foreign creditors, translating into economic distress for working people due to withdrawal of state subsidies, growing pressures on agrarian livelihoods, and contractual labor arrangements. This economic paradigm has been adopted wholesale by mainstream political parties, thus precluding the mobilization of working people to generate a countervailing force to challenge the postcolonial political settlement. To state the obvious but sad truth is that not a single mainstream political party has any economic programme of going beyond the prevailing ‘extractive developmental’ model.
Political and constitutional rights of historically marginalized segments of the society, especially in ethnic peripheries, are not just aggressively undermined but there is also a complete indifference among mainstream media and politics on this account.
Uneven Development of State and Society
One of the defining aspects of the postcolonial political settlement is uneven development of state and society. While, uneven socio-economic development can easily be noticed—physical and knowledge infrastructure is much more developed in Punjab as compared to other parts of the country. Similarly, when we look at key socio-economic outcomes such as income, consumption, housing, access to health care facilities, schools, hospitals, sanitation, electricity, gas, Punjab performs disproportionately better than rest of the country (UNDP, 2016). One of the most telling facts is that the best performing districts in Balochistan are comparable with the worst performing districts of Punjab (UNDP, 2016: 48). Similarly, other measures of development such as agricultural and industrial development exhibit a similar spatial pattern in favor of Punjab. Uneven socio-economic development is intricately tied to uneven access to state and its resources. As a result, the idea of ‘Pakistani’ nationhood is far from entrenched in ethnic peripheries of the country. Political and constitutional rights of historically marginalized segments of the society, especially in ethnic peripheries, are not just aggressively undermined but there is also a complete indifference among mainstream media and politics on this account. And this creates fissures and tensions across ethnic and linguistic lines in the country. Moreover, uneven development cannot be addressed without some sort of redistribution and affirmative action policies, and this may not necessarily yield political benefit in the electoral sense for the mainstream political parties. But given that the mainstream politics is primarily driven by the electoral math and patronage networks, thus, it has little incentive in addressing the issue of uneven development across ethnic peripheries of Pakistan.
The lesson of the past seventy-five years is that the pathway to decolonization is unlikely to go through the mainstream political parties as they are part of the problem rather than the solution.