ONE of the biggest problems confronting this country is our obsession with the ‘West’. On the one hand are those embattled liberals who think that everything wrong in Pakistan can be explained by our refusal to internalise the values of Western society — by eschewing rationality in favour of superstition and tradition we have mired ourselves in backwardness and bigotry.

On the other hand are more powerful conservatives that believe we have taken far too much from Western society already, and that ‘secular’ values need to be once and for all displaced by ‘genuine Islam’.

Intriguingly, both sides tend to blame society’s ‘elite’ for the underlying crisis. For the pro-Westerners, the elite is unable and unwilling to spearhead a European-style ‘reformation’ and for the anti-Westerners the elite’s shameless aping of Western culture prevents the rightful adoption of Islam as the organising principle of all social and political life.

For the most part, the elite has strategically sat on the fence.

So who is this elite that everyone seems to caricature and blame at the same time? For the pro-Westerners, the elite features a mythical jagirdar who keeps his rural dependents captive and directly or indirectly employs religion as a tool to inculcate fear and parochialism and thereby impede the spread of a scientific worldview in society. For the anti-Westerners, the elite is highly urbanised, partakes of a heathen lifestyle and enjoys the patronage of anti-Islam foreign powers.

The second narrative is far more destructive than the first but both are equally vague and rhetorical.

The truth of Pakistan’s structure of power — and the composition of its elite — is decidedly more complex. It is telling that on both sides of the divide I have mentioned here, the state itself is almost absolved of any responsibility. It is as if the illusion of the state somehow standing above society has been deeply internalised — in both of these interpretations the elite somehow manages to keep the state hostage to its narrow agenda. The aspiration, for both sides, is to magically liberate the state from elite capture and have it play the lead role it is ‘supposed’ to and resolve our fundamental contradictions.

In fact, the state is not an uninterested group of institutions that needs only to be pointed in the right direction. It is very much at the centre of all of Pakistan’s crises and those who have controlled it over time are arguably the most identifiable and influential segment of the otherwise nebulous ‘elite’.

By the state elite I mean those individuals and factions that occupy crucial positions in the military, bureaucracy, judiciary and police, including those at the local level who exercise wide-ranging influence over the lives of ordinary people. This state elite has, by virtue of its control over public office, ensured that it retains extraordinary privileges including access to economic resources and opportunities. This configuration is not exclusive to the Pakistan years — its genesis can be found in the British Raj when the state emerged as the primary vehicle through which colonial modernity was enforced.

Is this elite part of the pro-West or anti-West camp? Neither. For the most part it has strategically sat on the fence, a reflection of the complicated sensibilities of those who spearheaded the Pakistan movement. The legitimating ideology that the state elite has propagated as a cover for its own accumulation of power and capital has sometimes demanded a vociferous assertion of our ‘Islamic essence’ and at other times a validation of the realist principles that define the modern world-system.

Indeed, it appears that the state elite is now internally divided given that it is no longer politically correct globally to espouse the conservative worldview that acquired a great deal of influence during the Zia years. Yet its internal divisions notwithstanding, all factions of the state elite remain committed to the use of public office for private gain. We need to acknowledge that the state elite has no commitment to a collective project of reform/rehabilitation rather than continuing to assume, consciously or otherwise, that the state is a neutral entity simply in need of a benevolent elite to guide it.

Of course, we all know — although in the present climate very few are willing to say it — that if there is a coherent project to which the elite is committed, it is defined and executed by what has now come to be called the ‘deep state’. In the confusion about whether we are too pro-West or anti-West for our own good, we continue to give this deep state a mandate to act with impunity in the name of our security. And then we reward it by institutionalising the perks and privileges of the ‘guardians of the state’ in a way that makes all other segments of the state elite look like small fry.

In the final analysis, being pro-West or anti-West is besides the point. We need a state that is pro-people.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, January 27th, 2017