ELECTIONS will soon be upon us, and the biggest, juiciest bone in the bowl is — as always — Punjab. Even a little time spent travelling through the densely populated belt of central Punjab will show it to be a battleground right now. But a battle between who?

The obvious answer is the PPP and the PML-N, with the PTI a distant third. But there is a more disaggregated, less immediately obvious answer which merits attention: propping up the big boys is a teeming, seething mass of political sharks, living embodiments of the logic at work in this powerful heartland of Pakistan, and hence what we must contend with in the struggle for both reform and revolution.

Local politics in small towns works in ways that the erudite readers of this publication might not be familiar with. In the central districts of Punjab, there are few ‘rural areas’ as such. Landholdings are relatively small, road networks are dense, mobility and cellphone coverage are high, and municipal services ordinarily associated with urban areas such as electricity provision and piped water etc. extend well into villages.

New urban spaces have emerged from what used to be small villages or addas with a few shops 10 or 15 years ago. Agricultural land adjacent to growing urban centres is fast being converted into commercial property as towns bulge outwards. The ‘unplanned revolution’ as Arif Hasan famously put it, is in full swing.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in how politics is conducted in these towns. A transformation has been taking place from relatively less competitive and more definitively routinised modes of politics to a fast-paced, multi-niched, competitive ethos. And quite ignored by most political analysts, entire new stratas and sub-stratas of entrepreneurs have emerged in response to this transformation, jostling for the crumbs as they fall from the cupcake of power being eternally consumed above.

The small-town political entrepreneur is a fascinating, Machiavellian, character. Operating wholly within dense social networks of family, biraderi and jaanpehchaan, he espouses a strong desire to get closer to the sources of political and economic power in his immediate environment. He may work a job, own a business, or be a farmer, but he spends a great deal of time and effort ingratiating himself with power, deploying his social capital so that it yields its utmost, and crucially, establishing himself as a link in the patronage chain.

What passes for news in the mainstream media doesn’t concern him much. With tired predictability, the Supreme Court’s latest action may have grabbed the headlines and provided fodder for dozens of nightly talk shows. Lyari is burning, Balochistan is at war, Jalozai camp is receiving 10,000 new people everyday, but the small-town political shark couldn’t give two hoots. He reads the local news. He’s never seen the party manifesto. He’s intelligent, and without a scrap of idealism. He’s a valuable political asset to the brothers Sharif et al. not because of his ability to inspire others or articulate positions on ‘issues’, but because of his ability to channel, coerce and manipulate support ‘from below’.

Patronage, as we know, is a reciprocal relationship. The small-time political entrepreneur delivers legitimacy in the form of popular ‘roots’, and in return he receives the unquantifiable yet extremely coveted authority to lord it over others, along with a decent job for his son and excellent networking opportunities with the local thana-katchehri mafia.

These local political sharks are the capillary roots shoring up the massive, bloated centres that operate in outer space as far as most people are concerned. There is no link between local politics in central Punjab and the drama on television talk shows. The public interest, as spun by the media, is not of interest to the public, not even to those who make a living through politics.

Most televisions in shops are tuned to films featuring gyrating women, shootouts and lots of shouting. The news is turned on when something sensational like an air crash is showing or when channels do their ‘investigative’ stories into corruption, eloping couples and fake pirs. Similarly, the conversation in gatherings of political activists usually revolves around power games involving local political players, bureaucrats, judges, businessmen and so on.

This degree of insularity is perhaps unique to an ethnically and linguistically homogenous region that has enjoyed dominant status in the post-Partition era. Politics in other provinces and even other parts of Punjab such as the Seraiki belt are a different game, played on a field determined to varying degrees by popular nationalist movements.

This opens up space for ideological politics explicitly concerned with inequalities of representation, resource distribution and the re-imagining of state-society relations. Central Punjab, however, has been sitting pretty, its elites reaping the benefits of being firmly ensconced in the citadels. They have more crumbs to distribute, and the result is the alignment of politics almost wholly along patronage lines.

It is a sobering thought. This most affluent part of Punjab is by no means free of poverty, oppression or exploitation. But the crumbs are tasty and Xeno’s paradox tells us they are infinitely divisible — doesn’t matter if you can barely taste them, at least they’re better than nothing at all.

The real battle, that of transforming individual and collective consciousness and rendering it more inclusive, expanded and empathetic, needs more hands. None of the big boys are interested. This task has historically been the preserve of the left, and there it remains. One hopes that Machiavellian sharks and assorted piranhas too can eventually be persuaded to join those who seek an end to the politics of narrow self-interest.

The writer is a student of political sociology.

ashaamirali@hotmail.com