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IS Pakistan in ‘danger’ of becoming liberal? Religious groups appear to think so, and are quite keen on mobilising against these changes to the country’s intellectual and legal foundation.
What we do know is that there are two sides to the state’s apparently ‘progressive’ turn in recent months. The first is a reassertion of the monopoly on organised violence. The army’s operation in the northwest, the ‘encounters’ against militants in Punjab and Karachi, and an accompanying crackdown in Balochistan is cited as proof of this reassertion.
The second aspect is the cultural agenda of tolerance exhibited by new laws protecting women and minorities, the very public agenda of normalising women’s participation in the workforce and on the roads, and other campaigns related to religious and communal harmony.
There are two sides to the state’s apparently ‘progressive’ turn in recent months.
If taken to their actual logical end with sound and firm intentions, there is reason to believe these government and military-led campaigns will lead to a reduction in non-state violence in the very short run. In the long-run, there may even be some chance of impacting cultural norms and values regarding gender roles and the role of religion in society, but as pointed out by others on these pages, the transition will most likely be fraught with resistance and more violence.
So why has this turn taken place? Did Pakistan hit rock bottom with the Peshawar attack, thus instigating a major rethink amongst the state elite? Was there a collective moment of mental clarity manifesting itself in clear-cut policy proposals?
This is often given as the explanation for the current ‘turnaround’. The army led the charge against extremism, the government had no choice but to follow suit, and so we find ourselves with a state trying to rein in a regressive society.
While the role of mental clarity and a change of ideas amongst the top leadership is no doubt important, it is most likely overstated. What is perhaps equally, if not more, important is the role of the context in which the economy operates, and structural factors shaping capital accumulation in Pakistan. The biggest change on that front is the spectre of China, and their proposed imprint on Pakistan’s economy.
For the past three decades, Pakistan has not seen stable conditions for capital accumulation. This is problematic for investors and businessmen, but also for the state, which does not have a reliable base to extract revenue and fill its own coffers. The international community has often met the fiscal shortfall of the state, but this is now becoming increasingly difficult in a slumbering world economy. Thus the state now more than ever finds itself structurally compelled to do something about the domestic economic base it aims to predate upon and govern.
The Chinese though have offered a way out of this perpetual malaise. By off-loading low-value-added industries, and using Pakistan to reduce transit costs, they may help in generating positive externalities for the local industry. This will allow for greater accumulation, and thus a bigger pie that the state can regularly eat a slice from. It’s a relatively easy bargain, because it doesn’t ask for the state to enhance its capacity over the existing pie. It just increases the size of the pie.
Crucial to this plan of national fiscal salvation are a set of domestic conditions — little violence, improved security for foreigners, an increase in the size of the labour force by getting more women to work, and most of all the public declaration of intent by the state to deliver on all these fronts. The last is important because it helps build the confidence of foreign lenders, investors, and local businessmen prior to the actual achievement of the stated end results.
This particular bargain, being brought in from abroad, is reminiscent of some earlier views on politics in the country.
Writing in 1972, sociologist Hamza Alavi theorised the Pakistani state as being heavily responsive to metropolitan interests, with the civil and military bureaucracy coordinating domestic affairs on their behalf. Local elites, like landlords and industrialists, were slotted in as junior partners in this overall arrangement of power.
Many observers subsequently criticised Alavi’s formulation for being empirically incorrect, given how extractive foreign direct investment has never been a major component of Pakistan’s economy (unlike in Latin America or Africa).
If, however, the CPEC bonanza goes through as some insist it will, this could be the first time that foreign capital starts to play a bigger role in the country’s domestic politics. Instead of Alavi’s civil-military bureaucracy, we now have a coordinating committee consisting of the army and a local political-business elite that sees its interests in this new arrangement. Thus the roots of any change in state behaviour, whether it’s a crackdown against militants or public campaigns against intolerance, need to be traced beyond just the realm of new ideas and sudden realisations. Cold, hard, interests often play a major, and far more durable, role.
The question left to ask now is whether this arrangement will hold and whether the requisite domestic conditions will be achieved. Some observers say that top-down efforts by the state can only bring cosmetic changes in a radicalised society, unless accompanied by grass-roots politics that induces change in attitudes, behaviour, and norms. Otherwise, local resistance will undermine any progressive legislation and crackdowns will generate further radicalisation.
My own view is slightly more ambivalent. The state certainly doesn’t have the coherence, the capacity or the reach to de-radicalise society, but I also think changes in law, demographic transformation, and the advent of new economic relations may achieve this task in a long-drawn-out, convoluted manner. What remains to be seen is whether this will happen relatively peacefully, or with social conflict, resistance and violence.
The writer is a freelance columnist.
Twitter: @umairjav
Published in Dawn, March 28th, 2016
