IT has been more than 16 years since Pakistan was last formally ruled by a military dictator, more than long enough for a meaningful ‘democratic transition’. Until 2018, many commentators argued that democratic rule and institutions were being strengthened as successive elected regimes undertook peaceful transfers of power. Since then, two ‘hybrid’ regimes have ripped up any pretence of democratic rule, but to truly make sense of what has transpired since 2018, it is necessary to reconsider the claim that a substantive process of democratisation was underway between 2008-2018.
Indeed, an interrogation of our tortured tryst with democracy need not be limited to the post-2008 period. I would argue that the domination of unelected state apparatuses in Pakistan — the security establishment most of all — is in part because the imperative of democratisation remains limited to the formal sphere of politics while excluding fundamental matters of resource distribution and property relations. In other words, without acknowledgment of the need for economic democracy, the establishment-centric system cannot be fundamentally overhauled. All mainstream contenders for power have neither been willing nor able to take steps to address economic structures of power and have thereby facilitated the steady militarisation of state and society.
What does it mean to talk of economic democracy? In the first instance, we must name the individuals, classes, and institutions who control economic resources and the wider system of property ownership that sustains class and other forms of societal apartheid.
Most notably, we still grapple with the colonial legacy of a highly inegalitarian structure of land ownership in the rural areas. Inequality has grown over the past two decades as, increasingly, the historical relationship between peasant-farmers and the land has been severed. Close to half of all arable land in the country is owned by big landed classes and castes that barely constitute one per cent of the rural population while 30 million people in the villages are now landless.
The chattering classes avoid naming the new landlords.
It is common for urbane and relatively rich Pakistanis to lament ‘landlordism’ as the bane of Pakistan’s existence, and especially the ‘poor’ peasantry whose lives are dictated by their ‘feudal lords’. But these chattering classes avoid naming the new landlords to have emerged in recent decades, including sections of the establishment, which has accumulated huge amounts of land through allotments, as well as property moguls who have swallowed up farmland as cities expand.
To truly democratise its political institutions, Pakistan must undertake substantive redistribution by taking land from the rich and powerful — ‘feudal lords’, the establishment, as well as the new urban land mafias — and giving it to the urban and rural poor. Land grabs are now just the tip of the iceberg; the expropriation of water, forests, minerals, and so much is now at the heart of the ‘development’ model employed by successive regimes since 2008. No talk of democracy can be considered meaningful by those political forces that are either implicated in these resource grabs and the dispossession of working masses or remain silent about them.
A similar story can be extended to an emaciated industrial sector which is dominated by profiteers. The industrial bourgeoisie has largely made its fortune in low-valued agro-processing sectors like textiles, rice, ghee, and sugar. There can be no meaningful pro-democratic politics without stopping the hidden subsidies that this bourgeoisie, including establishment-run companies, enjoys. This is the prerequisite to developing a forward-looking and ecologically conscious industrial sector that is able to create jobs and meet the livelihood needs of a huge, young population.
At a higher scale, Pakistan’s ‘democratic’ institutions are subservient to global financiers. The IMF and its sister institutions are the most prominent of all, the ‘civilian’ arm of a US-led imperialist order which has also directly facilitated the militarisation of Pakistani state and society via various hot and cold wars in our region. The Gulf kingdoms and China are second-order financiers that exert varying degrees of political influence. This dependency makes a mockery of the notion that this is a sovereign country. How is it possible to expect substantive democratisation of the state whilst the ruling class is happy for Pakistan to remain a banana republic?
Needless to say, there is no quick fix that leads to economic democracy. But if we do not acknowledge this imperative, we will forever be pinning our hopes on self-proclaimed democrats that do not fundamentally want to break with the economic logics of the existing political order.
The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
Published in Dawn, February 28th, 2025
