People in our part of the world by and large don’t treat assets owned by the state as their own. In fact given half a chance they take such assets as enemy property which can be vandalised, pilfered, stolen and plundered at will. Why state property is not owned as an asset born of people’s hard work and appropriation of collective resources? To understand the phenomenon in broad outlines we need to briefly look at our socio-cultural and politico-economic history coupled with the evolution of our state if it can be called a state in modern sense of the word at all.

The concept of modern nation state is alien to overwhelming majority of people. The word you generally hear used by the people when it comes to official matters is “Sarkar or Sarkari” which means incumbent government/ regime or things concerned with government, not the state. The reason is that in the people’s mind and imagination state doesn’t exist as an entity, concrete and dynamic, separate from government in power.

The concept of state independent of regime has hardly been a historical experience due to myriad social, political and economic factors which have shaped class relations in a society based on rigid hierarchies leading to the creation of highly elitist and exclusive power structures. Such a development meant exclusion of the people from the power structures as stakeholders. Firstly, the nature of class relations was responsible for the irrelevance of people from lower ranks - who formed the bulk - in the process of decision making and secondly, as a consequence of alien ethno-racial roots of the ruling cliques people were further pushed into boondocks. The former factor is universal and the latter is specific in its nature.

From eighth to mid-19th century large swathes of the subcontinent were captured and ruled by invaders coming from Middle East, Central Asia and Europe. It’s in the nature of foreign forces to stress the exclusivity of their rule based rightly or wrongly on the sense of superiority and entitlement.

Sense of privilege is embedded in the very process of occupation whenever and wherever it takes place. And this is what exactly happened with the occupation of the subcontinent by the Arabs, Central Asians and British in a long historical development. Every occupying force created new hierarchy on top of pre-existing class and caste hierarchies unique to the region.

Elites would comprise foreign elements attracted from Arab, Iran, central Asia and Britain. The process consequently created a huge distance between the power structures and people emanating from the class and caste discrimination as well as from the ethno-racial biases. Add to this the brutally extractive and oppressive nature of the foreign and quasi-foreign rule and you get almost the contours of the large picture. In this historical scenario people at best were treated as subjects having no agency and at worst slaves with no will of their own.

People here never experienced life as free citizens capable of making their independent decisions. Being not citizens not only kept them away from the echelons of power but also made them easy quarry for rapacious elites which happily lived off the surplus produced by the people. In other words, people sweated blood in their struggle to survive while alien elites lived off the fat of the land. People for the elites were little more than enemies in disguise and elites for the people were hardly more than conspicuous plunderers. People knew that elites’ apparent glory, splendour and high lifestyle rested on what was forcibly taken from them. What was taken from them in reality further strengthened the elites sharpening their appetite to exploit the toiling people endlessly.

People reciprocated the treatment the elites meted out to them by developing visceral hatred of what the power symbols signified and stood for. People perceived the power structures as instruments of their enslavement. What power structures built in concrete shape or bought whether castles, forts, buildings monuments, roads, apparent public facilities, in other words, anything worthwhile, moveable and unmovable was conceived by the people as enemy‘s assets which needed to be possessed or destroyed if and when possible as they signified the power of oppressors and powerlessness of the oppressed. Thus there occurred an unenviable disconnect between the people and the state. The fact is that the concept of state/nation state has still to sink in the mass psyche.

In the people’s experience and imagination state is little more than a clutch of exploiters and oppressors whose sole raison d’etre lies deep in their accumulated power which is used to impoverish the masses by denying them what is legitimately theirs.

In the words of Guru Nanak “the kings are tigers and officials are dogs” which maul people for extracting their pound of flesh. It’s because of such an experience that we witness the destruction of state property whenever there are protests and agitation against the incumbent regime. Even during normal times people vandalise, destroy and steal state property as if it’s not theirs or has nothing to do with them. In a society which is not resource rich, destruction of what is available, creates a situation that arrests the development and confounds the sense of social responsibility. But this execrable historical situation has been created by whatever we have in the name of the state and those who manage it. How can people own a state if they are not considered stakeholders? Why a state should expect cooperation from the people if it is elitist instead of being inclusive and fails utterly to safeguard the interests of people by treating them as subjects, not citizens with inalienable rights. The state has to reflect and represent people and their aspirations if it wants them to shield it against destructive urges born of unequal relationship that has traditionally existed between the rulers and the ruled. The relationship between the predator and the prey has to change. What is urgently needed is the democratisation of polity in the interest of all, not a selected few. If people know that state symbolises their ideals and dreams of better and secure collective life, they will certainly protect it and its assets as theirs which in any case are a product of what is taken from them in the name of collective good. But schism or distance between state and people will not lessen unless there is a sustained conscious intervention in the evolutionary process to create space for the mass participation in the affairs of the state. Does one need to say; the sooner the better. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, June 24th, 2019