Editor's Note: This piece is intended as a response to Yousuf Nazar's piece titled "Pakistan's Crisis of Competence," published on April 13, 2024.
Yousuf Nazar’s suggestion that the citizens of Pakistan submit to another decade of military rule will come across as a cruel joke to the millions of young people who want a better future for themselves.
Military dictatorships raise people’s hopes in the beginning, but quickly empower unresponsive and oppressive bureaucracies that work to entrench their own privilege and serve the interests of landed and business classes. As the people of Pakistan have lived through several long periods of direct military rule during which no serious effort was made to combat mass poverty and to put the country on the road to progress, there is no reason to believe that another spell of authoritarian rule will benefit the country.
In the existing political context, implementation of Nazar’s suggestion, if that were even possible, would only exacerbate the crisis of legitimacy that the government of Pakistan is presently coping with. Under extra constitutional military rule, the state will find itself faced with the task of suppressing all political parties and dissent, while it attempts to force urban business groups and agrarian elite to do things like paying taxes, that they have never done before. Quite simply, the proposal calls for the creation of a dysfunctional state that will be politically isolated and lack the capacity to formulate and implement a bold policy program.
The colonial state set up by the British Raj, which Prof. Hamza Alavi described as “overdeveloped,” survived as long as it did because it was structurally designed to be an agency for suppression and domination of all political groups and social classes and was not concerned with the provision of public goods and services to people. The postcolonial state in Pakistan cannot survive and function for long without a minimal degree of legitimacy. This is why, according to Alavi, the bureaucratic-military oligarchy that forms the core of its state apparatus seeks partnership of political parties, as well as ideological backing of religious leaders, media, and intelligentsia.
Alavi also points out that individual members of the bureaucratic-military oligarchy, also share a commonality of interest, as well as connections with leading members of the landed and business classes, often going back to the colonial period. Given this reality, is it reasonable to assume that the bureaucratic-military oligarchy would have an interest in seriously questioning the privileges of agrarian and business interests for the sake of structural reform?
The dominance of the industrial elite of Karachi has reduced significantly at the cost of the Punjabi industrial class that emerged since the 1980s, and the state has also accommodated powerful business interests from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, but this has not reduced the cohesiveness of the ruling elite as a whole.
Rosita Armytage conducted ethnographic research between 2013-2015 on strategic family alliances among members of Pakistan’s ruling class factions. She concluded that owners of Pakistan’s major industrial and businesses interests, politicians, people serving in influential positions in transnational corporations, and senior members of the bureaucracy and military personnel have cultivated close connections and alliances with each other, and their ethnic diversity has not come in their way as they have accomplished this task.
Armytage also found that the degree of ruling-class integration found in Pakistan is “unprecedented” in South Asia. Since the 1970s, the composition and relative influence of factions of the ruling-class has altered significantly. The dominance of the industrial elite of Karachi has reduced significantly since the Punjabi industrial class emerged in the 1980s, and the state has also accommodated powerful business interests from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as well, but this has not reduced the cohesiveness of the ruling elite as a whole. Members of the elite consciously strengthen inter-ruling class connections, even pursuing non-consanguineous marriages as a strategy to seal alliances to increase their influence within the bureaucratic-military oligarchy.
When Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in 1998 and faced crippling sanctions, the political class could have sought to undertake structural reform in the economy as a requirement for national survival, but the option was not considered.
Given the cohesiveness of the inter-connections between members of the military, bureaucracy, industrial, business, and agrarian factions of the ruling elite, it is inconceivable to expect them to act contrary to each others’ core interests, no matter how important that may be to promote robust economic growth that would benefit the country as a whole.
When Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in 1998 and faced crippling sanctions the political class and the military could have sought to undertake structural reform in the economy as a requirement for national survival, but the option was not considered. When General Musharraf toppled the government in 1999, and the country faced draconian sanctions and international political isolation, the option of structural reform was again rejected out of hand.
If history is any guide, it is evident that the military has no interest in the kind of changes Yousuf Nazar implores them to undertake.
It is also important to analyse the validity of Nazar’s thesis that authoritarian rule is necessary for the achievement of robust economic growth. He cites examples of People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Vietnam as places where economic progress was achieved under authoritarian rule. What he fails to do, however, is to analyse the specific steps that each of these states took to make meaningful economic progress possible. Yes, in all the above-mentioned cases, strong states stood up to transnational capital and reactionary agrarian interests to undertake structural changes, pursued public investments and promoted research and development, but did they accomplish these tasks mainly because they were authoritarian? If that alone was the criterion of economic success, Burma, Philippines, and Pakistan would also be prosperous places today.
The substantive nature of a state’s approach to progress is often determined by its formative political movements. Even authoritarian states seeking legitimacy will often formulate and implement policies that reflect the popular and democratic legacy of their countries political and cultural history. China and Taiwan designed their development strategies to achieve the goals of the Chinese Revolution of 1911, that were democracy, national independence and “people’s livelihood.” Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the key organizer of popular struggles that led to the 1911 Revolution proclaimed these objectives as the founding principles of the Chinese state. Despite vicissitudes in their complicated history that ranged from alliances to civil war, the Chinese Communist Party, and Kuomintang (the political party that has governed Taiwan for most of its recent past), continue to revere Dr. Sun Yat-sen, and claim they remain faithful to his goals.
The first step that China and Taiwan took to achieve “people’s livelihood” was land reform. While China’s socialist revolution overthrew the landlord class, in Taiwan, the chastened Kuomintang decided that it would also not defend landlord privilege in the island and undertook “thorough” land reforms. As a result, poor and often illiterate cultivators of the soil eventually became independent farmers, with the ability to be consumers of commodities and taxpayers.
In South Korea, land reforms were first done during the brief period when communists were in control during the Korean war and were continued by the government of South Korea after the truce. In 1960, a popular revolt by the working class and students that is remembered in Korea as the April Revolution toppled the government of President Syngman Rhee. This rebellion alerted the Korean elite that unresponsive government relying mainly on political repression could result in massive public protests and make the country ungovernable.
In Vietnam, the communist movement led by Ho Chi Minh that struggled for independence from French colonial rule, had aims similar to those of the Chinese revolutionaries, and instituted land reforms in North Vietnam soon after defeating France in 1954. By the time the US backed government in South Vietnam was defeated in 1975, the massive destruction of the countryside caused by the war had already changed the agricultural landscape in a way that ended large landholdings. After unification, the Vietnamese government attempted to collectivise agriculture in the South, but restored the farm organization based on small land holdings when the effort failed.
Pakistan cannot embark on the path of progress traversed by China, Taiwan, and South Korea if it skips land reforms, an essential step that ended mass poverty there.
Land redistribution ensured that the state was freed from the reactionary political influence of the agrarian landlord class that could oppose structural change. Today, the state in Pakistan, which has not had meaningful land reform, is still saddled with the enormous political influence of an agrarian elite that does not pay taxes, opposes structural change, and compels the actual tillers of the soil to live in poverty.
Pakistan cannot embark on the path of progress traversed by China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Vietnam if it skips this essential step that ended mass poverty there. If we look at pockets of relative prosperity in India, such as Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, and Punjab, we find that all these states have had comprehensive land reforms. These states have also seen a significant reduction in the rate of population growth, confirming the prediction of distinguished scholar Amartya Sen that this would happen when progress was accompanied with the provision of access to healthcare and education. There is every reason to believe that high rate of population growth would begin to decline in Pakistan too, should it take determined measures to end mass poverty.
Besides implementing thorough land reform, the state bureaucracy in South Korea and Taiwan also planned and meticulously implemented a strategy of industrial development that included a hands-on approach to dealing with transnational and local capital, and supervision of research and development of technology and its transfer to specific enterprises. This was followed up by the protection of the domestic market to shield locally produced goods from foreign competition.
Peter Evans notes that partnerships between transnational capital, the state and local capital in South Korea and Taiwan were distinct from those in Latin America in that the former were dominated by the state, instead of transnational capital. This meant that economic development in these societies was vastly more inclusive and equitable than was the case in Latin America.
Singapore’s founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, a flawed politician who compelled his opponents to spend their lives in prison, is widely admired in Pakistan for the swift modernization that occurred on his watch. Singapore though, is a city state, whose society does not resemble Pakistan’s much. It is much more important for Pakistanis, particularly young trainees in the bureaucracy, to study how the public servants of South Korea and Taiwan quickly stepped out of the shadow of their Japanese colonial past, and supervised the implementation of egalitarian land-reform, as well as a creative and successful industrial policy to bring prosperity to their countries.
The implementation of the mechanics of progressive economic transformation do not require the existence of authoritarian rule in society. It does, however, depend on political consensus in society, public and media pressure on the ruling classes to stop opposing structural change, and on the existence of a smart bureaucracy with a keen understanding of the international and domestic political economy.
Land reform, and creative and consistent state role in the planning and execution of an industrial policy are the key steps that Pakistan too will need to implement to achieve progress. There is no reason why a democratic dispensation could not accomplish these tasks.