ON Friday, Imran Khan addressed a PTI jalsa of thousands (estimates range from 15,000 to over 30,000) in the town of Ali Abad, district Larkana. As the party’s first, formal political event in Sindh, (outside Karachi), the crowd can be considered sizeable. It may not be a tsunami, but it is further proof of how the party’s ability to bring out people in different parts of the country is greater than that of its immediate rivals.
What is also clear — by looking at the rhetoric surrounding this foray into rural Sindh — is that the party’s understanding of the province comes from its core support base in urban Punjab. Fan posters, made by over-eager Insafians and put into circulation on Twitter and Facebook, use the vocabulary and imagery of liberation. The Great Khan riding into Sindh to rescue the oppressed and the destitute. Even the party’s Twitter account kept conjuring up visions of Khan freeing the province from the PPP’s ‘feudal’ clutches.
The image of Sindh as a homogenous, underdeveloped backwater has long persisted in the minds of urbanites in both Punjab and Karachi. The rural working class of the province has been characterised as either fundamentally oppressed (becharay), or lazy and ultimately responsible for its own problems (‘why do they keep voting for the PPP?’). The political elite is always, without fail, predatory and ‘feudal’, which despite being a technical term for a large landowner at a particular historical moment, is even used for those elected from towns and cities.
Sindh has suffered on several accounts, many times over and above the negligence of its political governments.
Part of the story is Sindh’s actual status as an underdeveloped, poorly governed region. Incidents like the Tharparkar drought, supreme negligence in basic health services, and frequently reported accounts of thousands of ghost schools, serve to reinforce stereotypes. But this is also where the error lies in our analytical narrative — nearly all problems of socio-economic underdevelopment are linked with the abilities (or lack thereof) of the political leadership. There is simply no recognition of how geographic and historical factors not only influence development outcomes, but also the politics, and indeed the political parties, of a particular province.
If Punjab is better governed than Sindh, this cannot be reduced solely to a difference between the strategies of the PPP and PML-N, and certainly not to any biologically ordained differences between Sindhis and Punjabis. The apparent difference has more to do with historical endowments — Punjab inherited smaller landholdings and greater investment in public infrastructure under the British, it also reaped the benefits of Gulf migration and high levels of state employment in the armed forces and the bureaucracy.
Over time, this resulted not only in social mobility, urbanisation, and the development of industry, but also of a powerful urban middle and upper class that stamps its footprint on regional and national politics. This is why Punjab’s two contemporary parties are controlled and supported most vocally by urban actors — traders, industrialists and professionals.
Sindh has suffered on several accounts, many times over and above the negligence of its political governments. It inherited a vastly unequal land ownership structure from the British that has reduced the impact of demographic pressure and inter-generational land fragmentation in terms of smaller holdings.
It has suffered at the hands of successive federal governments in terms of a provincial bias in labour force opportunities, and public infrastructure investment. And most of all, it has suffered from its geographic proximity to a megacity like Karachi, which devours all agricultural surplus — ie the profits made from cash crops that should be reinvested in the rural districts. No surprise then that according to the World Bank’s study on urban economic potential, the towns of Sindh — barring Hyderabad and Karachi — show the slowest amount of growth in population and GDP in the entire country.
Sindh’s politics emerges from this landscape — ie one marked by high inequality, unemployment, ethnic tensions, and a considerably underdeveloped urban geography. It is, therefore, no coincidence that the PPP’s rhetoric is ethno-nationalist, and its electoral strategy is premised on granting jobs in state institutions. It is also no coincidence that in all these years, the opposition to the PPP still takes the shape of even larger, more ‘feudal’ landlords with even more captive vote banks.
The greatest proof, however, of the degree to which Sindh’s underlying socio-economic structure exerts a great deal of influence is PTI’s own strategy. For a party committed to destroying the status quo, expediency and conditions meant conducting a jalsa in the hometown of the Unars, a landed clan whose affiliation with state power goes back to 1902; bringing in the Ghosia Jamaat through the help of its spiritual leader, Shah Mahmood Qureshi; asking the PML-F for some extra support; and gathering other assorted clans (like the Magsis and the Chandios) who’ve been cold-shouldered by the current ruling party.
This brief detailing of Sindh’s political economy offers two important corrections that need to be made to current views about politics in Sindh (especially for urbanites dealing in revolutionary rhetoric).
The first is that Sindh’s many socio-economic problems — and its status as an underdeveloped province — are not resolvable overnight, and neither are they reducible to the incompetence of one political party (though that does not absolve the party in question). Any uplift agenda will require both a concerted effort well beyond the resources of the provincial government, and a political settlement that will resolve Karachi’s position vis-à-vis the rest of the province.
And finally, the second corrective is that the very idea of a ‘backward’ province, which needs to be ‘liberated’ or ‘freed’ with outside help, is chauvinistic and perhaps even racist. It takes away all agency from the people of Sindh, and reinforces harmful stereotypes that are ultimately responsible for inter-ethnic discord.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
Twitter: @umairjav
Published in Dawn, November 24th, 2014