THE failure of successive civilian governments and military regimes to carry out any meaningful land reforms or to dilute the feudal hold on national politics has been extensively discussed. Large agriculture incomes have continued to enjoy tax exemption in one way or another.

Over 60 per cent of the population depends directly or indirectly on agriculture, yet rural poverty is appalling and widespread. The share of agriculture in GDP has been declining and is reportedly 22 per cent now against 25 per cent two years ago. According to a Business Recorder editorial this month, agriculture contributes less than five per cent of the total taxes. The total income tax collection probably does not exceed Rs 1.5 billion, with Punjab’s collection stated to be around one billion rupees or less.

But feudalism in our context should not be considered merely in terms of the size of land holdings or incomes, although these, of course, contribute to making the feudal class powerful. It is the feudal mindset dominating politics that needs to be understood and countered. Even those of our political leaders who are not born feudals try to ape the ways of the feudal lords whom they secretly envy.

The military has also encouraged its officers to become feudal lords by generous doling out of farming land and when these officers come into power they also display a feudal attitude in running the country’s affairs — the same arrogance, the same impatience with dissidence and the same use of force to cow down opposition as the landed families. Indeed, a military-based society has inherent feudal overtones. Even the MQM, which began on the hopeful note of being a middle-class, anti-feudal party, succumbed to the use of feudal tactics of browbeating and intimidating opponents.

One of the first steps that should have been taken after the creation of Pakistan was to initiate land reforms and seek to end the feudal control of politics. But how could the Muslim League, dominated by and depending on the support of the big landlords, undertake to change the system? It goes to the credit of the then leadership in East Pakistan that a land reforms bill was passed in 1950, and the process envisaged in the legislation completed in the province in 1954 — but, then, East Pakistan was always far ahead of us here in terms of democratic progress. Here, landlordism and the feudal mindset have continued to influence our electoral politics, and people from a feudal background continue to be preponderant in our assemblies. This has prevented the growth of a vibrant, politically involved middle class, which is the backbone of any democracy.

Feudalism has thus been a major impediment in our democratic and social evolution (the enshrinement in the Constitution of religion as the guiding policy of the state has perhaps been another impediment, if not per se then because of the latitude it has permitted for the exploitation of religion for political purposes).

Feudal ideology and plain and simple tribal ideology have often taken the form of religious orthodoxy to block secular and liberal progress. The zamindar, the mosque imam, the patwari and the local police boss have been locked together in an oppressive, exploitative political equation in the hinterland.

Representatives of the feudal order have also provided unqualified support to military and dictatorial regimes except in cases where regional interests have clashed with federal policy, when ‘nationalist’ politics has been invoked as a tool to fight the centre. Feudal interests have often masqueraded in the garb of demands for provincial autonomy, which otherwise is, of course, a matter of urgent necessity for our survival as a democratic country. The real motive of the feudal elements is localisation of political and economic power in their own hands.

The feudal mindset has had a definitive influence in shaping the way we have been governed, the people being taken for granted like the serfs of mediaeval times. The system of perks and privileges enjoyed by the ruling classes is itself feudal. The manner in which opposition politics has been treated by all governments — the disruption of public rallies, the use of money to win over the loyalties of politicians, the kidnapping and harassment of those who don’t toe the line — also betrays a feudal approach. This has permeated down to the lowest level possible, and an incident may be cited here to show how.

When the Nawab of Kalabagh was the all-powerful governor of West Pakistan, he had kept an army of strongmen to deal with recalcitrant citizens. One of these strongmen was Accha Pehlwan in Lahore. The film critic of the daily Imroze had reviewed a film in rather unflattering terms, little knowing that the film was financed by Accha Pehlwan. On the morning the review appeared, the film critic found a hefty man waiting for him in his room when he went to work. Without waiting on any ceremonies, the man asked the critic whether he was the man who had written the review. The critic said yes. “Then come with us,” the man said, “Accha Pehlwan Sahib has asked us to fetch the man who wrote the review (‘bandey nu chuk liao’).” It required energetic efforts by the Imroze editor to get to Kalabagh’s military secretary to win a reprieve for the film critic.

That’s how it works, and if a particular ruler does not exactly have the services of loyal henchmen at his command, he always has the faithful sleuths of the intelligence services to do the needful.

The feudal attitude has also affected our social value system. Male domination is intertwined with feudalism, and hence the cruelty to women and the practice of honour killings. The entire jirga system has its roots in feudalism, and yet we continue to temporise over it. Bonded labour and private jails are also all manifestations of feudalism; bonded labour in addition provides a bank of captive electoral votes. Thus, feudalism is no longer a matter of the acres held by the landed gentry, but a phenomenon we encounter everywhere in our approach to governance.

How we get out of this vicious trap should occupy the attention of both political parties and civil society. The country’s two biggest parties are full of feudals, with the PPP headed by a representative of the feudal order and the PML-N by a person who is not feudal by background but has acquired all the worst features of a feudal. But a conscious effort can be made by them to field middle-class candidates in the next elections and give up leaning on feudal chiefs for support.

Some hope perhaps lies also in the present generation of feudal families who have had the benefit of a liberal education. Many from among them are now in the assemblies. True, they have been elected from family fiefdoms and enjoy their present positions because of their feudal connections.

However, they should be able to see that unless we discard our feudal trappings and work to establish a democratic, responsive society, so much else will be lost that the loss of their acres will pale into insignificance. Only regular elections, fairly held, can dilute the feudal hold and bring the middle classes to the fore.

NEXT Monday is the 61st birthday of Aung San Suu Kyi. Unless she is back in hospital, where she was recently treated for a stomach ailment, she will presumably mark that birthday on her own, in the rundown villa on the shore of Inya lake where she has spent more than 10 of her past 17 years under house arrest.

We don’t know what she will do, what she is writing or what she is thinking. Her isolation is almost total. According to recent reports, she sees only a housekeeper, the housekeeper’s daughter, a gardener and occasionally her doctor. It seems unlikely that she will even be able to talk on the telephone with her sons, Alexander and Kim, who live in the West.

We are told she spends much time meditating, playing the piano and keeping fit, but that is hearsay. The last foreigner to meet her was a UN envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, who said she was well and expressed his hope that she could make a “contribution” to political progress in Burma, now officially known as Myanmar. There were rumours that her house arrest would be lifted. A few days later the military regime extended her detention order for another year. So much for dialogue. As the local joke goes, George Orwell wrote not just one but three books about Burma: Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I will never forget meeting Suu Kyi in Rangoon — now officially known as Yangon — some six years ago, when she was still able to leave her house. I went on to lecture about transitions to democracy, with her chairing and interpreting, to an intense, brave group of activists from the National League for Democracy (NLD). Unthinkable today, in a country that has gone backwards while all around are going forwards.

I’m sure she will be bearing her solitary confinement with fortitude, grace and the Buddhist life-philosophy that is so important to her. Yet I feel a terrible sense of frustration in writing about her and her country’s predicament. What new is there to say? That she is a heroine of our time, an Asian Nelson Mandela. That the Burmese generals run one of the worst states in the world, spending some 40 per cent of the country’s budget on the military, while most of their people live in poverty and disease. (The Burmese health system is ranked 190th out of 190 countries by the World Health Organisation.) That dialogue with the NLD, which overwhelmingly won a democratic election in 1990, is the key to political change. All true. All said a thousand times already. All to no apparent effect. Groundhog day in Yangon. But if Suu Kyi doesn’t give up, we have no right to. Instead of saying “happy birthday”, which would seem grotesque in the circumstances, here are three modest thoughts about possible ways to thaw this frozen conflict. First of all, remembering Burma is itself a political act of the first importance. As the Czech writer Milan Kundera famously observed, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. Forgetting Burma is just what its rulers want us to do.

No news from Burma is good news for them, bad news for their people. (There’s a challenge for the free media of the world here: how do you cover the story when there is no story?) We have to keep hammering away, even if it means repeating the same lines for years and years. After all, though the comparison is hardly encouraging, Nelson Mandela was in prison for 27 years; and yet South Africa moved in the end.

Second, while paying all respect to Suu Kyi’s often repeated call for tight sanctions against the military regime, we should think again about the mix of our policies. For example, is there more we can do to alleviate directly the suffering of the population from the effects of Aids or drug addiction without giving an unacceptable payoff to the regime?

The Free Burma Coalition activist and analyst Zarni has recently argued that both the western policy of sanctions and the eastern policy of constructive engagement have failed. He suggests that the starting point for moving towards a more effective combination of the two might be to try to see the world through the greedy but also anxious eyes of the Burmese military. What mixture of carrots and sticks would have a chance of persuading them to loosen up?

One thing should be clear after 16 years: no western policy, however carefully designed, can work on its own. We simply don’t have enough leverage in this largely self-sufficient Asian country, tucked in between the two Asian giants, India and China, and its Southeast Asian neighbours, such as Thailand. If you doubt that we are already in a multipolar world, look at Burma. If the internal key to change is the reopening of dialogue between the military regime and the NLD, the external key is a change in approach by at least one, and preferably several, of its Asian neighbours.

Where to begin? Surely in India, a country where Suu Kyi went to school, and whose culture she studied and admires — and the world’s largest democracy. One hardly expects communist China to press for liberalisation and democracy in its disgraceful little neighbour, but it is disappointing that democratic India has been so timid in policy towards its Burmese neighbour.

If we look to India for leadership in this respect, then we must start by listening to what Indians themselves have to say. The shape of the conversation should not be (Washington speaking): “Hey, Indians, you must take our self-evidently correct western template and help us impose it on Burma.” It should be: “We’re wondering whether you think, judging by your own lights and values, that this is acceptable behaviour in your own immediate neighbourhood? And if not, how do you suggest we work together to catalyse peaceful change there?”

Better still, that debate should be initiated and carried forward inside India by intellectuals, commentators and politicians who argue that respect for human rights and respect for basic liberties are as much Indian values as they are western values.

This is the shape of the new world order, if there is to be one. We liberal internationalists in the West don’t need to change that much of what we say; but if we are to achieve liberal ends in an increasingly multipolar world, then we do have to rethink how we say it, and to whom. And we have to listen more than we have for the last 500 years.

“To see a world in a grain of sand” exhorted the poet William Blake — a line that Suu Kyi must have studied when she read English literature at St Hugh’s College, Oxford — just a couple of hundred metres from where I’m writing these words. And contemplating the lot of one brave woman in a lakeside house on a solitary birthday can lead us to a new understanding of the world we’re in. So: have as good a birthday as possible, Suu, and many happier ones to come. — Dawn/Guardian Service