A BRITISH official sits behind a heavy wooden desk somewhere in the Raj. Before him lies a neat stack of files stamped in English. Like the files, the institutions and rules used to regulate his colonial subjects are conceived thousands of miles away. Outside, social life is regulated very differently: in different languages, through custom, familial ties, shared religious obligation, and reputation. The office governs through finished forms imported from another world, while society is regulated by its own inherited moral traditions, not those that underpinned the imported forms elsewhere. Both systems function, but they do not speak the same language.

Consider how, in a traditional kin-based society, loyalty belongs to the clan rather than to institutions. Favouring one’s own in the course of handling affairs is not corruption but virtue. Loyalty to rules and procedure over kith and kin is not an act of integrity to be admired; it is betrayal. Nepotism is not a dirty word. It provokes little social shame. In fact, in Urdu and other regional languages, a precise equivalent scarcely exists. This is not accidental.

Traditionally, this moral logic was necessary and effective. It sustained order by tying authority, responsibility, and survival to family and tribe. The modern state, by contrast, asks citizens to transfer loyalty from kinship networks to abstract institutions. Where that transfer has not been completed through organic social evolution, older moral logics are carried into modern settings, exposing a fundamental incompatibility. Government offices, regulatory bodies, and political parties are designed to function on merit and impersonality. When operated according to kinship ethics, they predictably fail. Appointments are made on loyalty, decisions are personalised, and responsibility is diffused.

Over time, a further distortion emerges. Institutions themselves begin to acquire tribal characteristics. Kin-based loyalties are gradually replaced by modern professional communities. Loyalty to the collective precedes loyalty to the institution’s rules, and ultimately the state. The shared interest of members in preserving influence, preventing reform and securing a disproportionate share of state resources becomes paramount. Rules are followed when they align with collective interest, and quietly set aside when they threaten it.

Democratic forms persist, but habits remain fragile.

Within such communities, reputation is once again aggressively guarded. Perceived slights are met with a disproportionate response. Minor inconveniences are treated as existential threats. What appears from the outside as institutional defensiveness or resistance to reform is experienced internally as collective self-preservation.

The same incoherence occurs in politics. Voting is less an evaluation of policy than an affirmation of identity and affiliation. Political choice becomes an extension of social loyalty. Electoral defeat is experienced not as a routine outcome of the democratic process, but as collective injury. Democratic forms persist, but habits remain fragile.

It should be noted that older moral systems have not simply persisted; they have been partially dismantled, leaving behind impulses without the restraints that once governed them. This loss is reflected in everyday civic life, from the neglect of public space to traffic behaviour that improves only when enforcement is visible.

From Weber to contemporary critiques of the modern state, scholars have warned that institutions cannot function on legality alone. When older moral orders are dismantled and civic habits are not internalised, gover­nance survives as structure rather than substance.

The colonial state never intended to reconcile this dissonance. Its institutions were designed to administer and maintain order, not to cultivate civic legitimacy upon which the nation-state rests. Some post-colonial societies confronted this gap by sustaining the coercion that introduced these institutions in the first place. Singapore, famously referred to as ‘Disneyland with the death penalty’ compensated for the absence of organically developed civic habits with an unusually strong and persistent enforcement state. Pakistan, by contrast, could never plausibly follow that path. It is too large, too diverse, and too populous for civic behaviour to be imposed uniformly through coercion.

This is not an argument for either modernity or tradition. Both systems have costs. Pakistan’s difficulty lies elsewhere: it has never reconciled these orders into a coherent whole. We did not live the history that formed modern institutions, yet we dismantled the structures that once enforced restraint. We are, in a very real sense, living someone else’s history.

The writer is a barrister and entrepreneur.

Published in Dawn, January 6th, 2026