Historical burden

Published February 3, 2014

THE phrase ‘abject surrender’ has been a recurrent feature of recent discussions on the Pakistani state. Not only has it come up in conversations concerning the state’s general inability to deal with the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other militant groups, but also in one-off incidents like the case of the lone gunman responsible for shutting down Islamabad.

In all instances, the idea is that the state is refusing to engage in decisive action, and more importantly, is losing the ability to curtail violence employed by other actors.

This disorder is visible in domains other than law and order as well. Service delivery and bureaucrat performance, in parts of the country that are not Lahore or Islamabad, is probably at its lowest ebb. The economy, long reliant on multilateral financial support to cover up revenue shortfalls, shows little sign of recovery.

A cursory review reveals that a host of lobbies, associations, and informal groups — ranging from the textile and sugar millers, to currency smugglers and restaurants in Lahore — are constantly battling it out for tax relief, policy favours and other forms of concessions. These vignettes point to a deepening crisis of the Pakistani state, and its growing inability to provide even for the elites, let alone the rest of the population.

What is less visible though is that the current impasse is not simply the unfortunate assemblage of multiple crises, but a fairly determined outcome of political and social change stretching back at least three decades.

At its simplest, history suggests that at some point in the past Pakistan was a largely rural country with few claimants to political power and resources — those being the domain of the army, bureaucracy, big landlords, and industrialists.

The nostalgic image of a metropolitan, peaceful Karachi, or the quaint charms of Lahore from the 1960s are slightly exaggerated reflections of this past. The state, at that point in time, is also often remembered as being ‘principled’, and definitively less ‘corrupt’. For fairly obvious reasons, elites from that generation hold a rose-tinted view of early Pakistan as a worthy successor of the British Raj.

This insulation of the state, and the somewhat enforced static nature of society, changed fairly rapidly during the 1970s.

Economic modernisation in agriculture and industry gave birth to a new middle class, and perpetuated urbanisation from 15pc in the late 1960s to close to 40pc by the 1990s.

Large-scale welfare transfers, in the shape of land allotments and public-sector employment, to middle- and low-income households by the Bhutto government further catalysed this process. Perhaps the biggest impact though was the export of labour, and the inflow of remittances that in the words of Jonathan Addleton, completely “undermined the centre” and developed new, unplanned pockets of socio-economic mobility and cultural change.

In tandem, mass elections provided a new route for many to reach for the state’s resources, and eventually led to the development of new political entrepreneurs — like our current prime minister. It is important to remember that while Pakistan has experienced two long-term dictatorships in the past three decades, the fairly regular event of elections — both local and general — has allowed the process of political claim-making to continue unabated.

Crudely put, if there were 10 people actively using roads, public hospitals, security and schools in the 1960s, there were 1,000 demanding the same by the 1980s, and 100,000 by the 2000s. What changed though was that these demands could be voiced through electioneering, and lobbying state officials with bribes, favours, or as we see in Karachi and elsewhere, sheer intimidation or violence.

In the face of such rapid socio-economic change, the bureaucracy, which had remained insulated and under the command of a small section of English-medium officers, eventually grew into the avenue of public-sector employment, and a favour granting machine that it is today.

Political turmoil, frequent military misadventures, and geo-strategic misfortunes from the late 1970s onwards have further prevented the entrenchment of responsive institutions — a fact perhaps best captured by the contemporary paralysis of the Pakistani parliament in the face of rampant violence.

A sinister supplement to this gradual decay in the state’s performance is that the insistence on military action against the TTP belies misplaced optimism. It holds that the state, if it were to get its act together, would be capable of eradicating, or at the very least, reducing the level of violence faced by the polity.

History though appears to contest that very notion, and casts a fair amount of doubt on the ability of the state to carry out a coherent, purposeful act — let alone battle a sophisticated insurgency.

A thorough reading of Pakistan’s political history highlights two important things — the first is the rapid increase in demands that have come out of socio-economic change in Pakistan, and the second is the gradual implosion of the state’s machinery — ie the executive — to satisfy a bare minimum from amongst these claims.

But perhaps what it really shows is that decisions taken in the past — like the outsourcing of domestic and foreign policy designs to non-state actors, perpetuating religious bigotry, and treating a particular region as an internal colony — have a crippling impact on the state’s ability to reform itself or to deal with fallouts. When seen dispassionately, the current crisis of the Pakistani state appears nothing more than the gradual culmination of our collective history.

The writer is a freelance columnist.

umairjaved87@gmail.com

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