The Marriage of Feudalism and the Military in Pakistan

Maliha Safri

The last one year period has been incredibly tumultuous for Pakistani society: the late December assassination of Bhutto preceded by the October assassination attempt on her which caused the death of 120 persons, the March imprisonment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, and the subsequent political unrest as well as other incidents. The recent elections seem to have left a good taste in everyone's mouth- signaling the resumption of democracy. The party of Bhutto, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), won the most numerous block in the Parliament, and hence, even if Bhutto was not able to be elected and placed in power- then at least her widower and son are there to carry on the Party that originally claimed links to social democracy.

Right now, the People's Party, the stalwart party of the alleged 'progressives,' along with Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League (N) are firmly in charge, in opposition to Musharraf's PML(Q). The popular press has more than adequately covered what it has meant to refuse Musharraf. CNN offers us the rhetoric of elected officials: the people have spoken against authoritarian regimes, and they “support the constitution.” A former military dictator who climbed to the presidency will now be crippled in the Parliament. Hurray.

The problem is that everything is wrong with this democratic narrative about Pakistan. Two particular issues have been continuously overlooked to the severe detriment of Pakistani health, demonstrating that an allegedly democratic outcome carries a negative class bias: 1) feudalism as a distinct exploitative class process, and 2) the continuing crushing economic power of the military.

First, both the PPP and the PML(N) represent feudal landowners inside Pakistan. The PML(N) covers the Punjab, both economically powerful and a place in which feudal landowners have historically played the most important role in economics and politics. On the other hand, the PPP covers the region of Sindh, which includes one of the world's mega-cities: Karachi. After The February elections, both of these parties have formed a coalition, alongside with the Awami League and MQM (more important for Karachi's politics than any other party), and placed PPP's Gillani in power as prime minister. A brief look at Gillani's biography will be tellingly descriptive of the background of virtually EVERYONE coming to power: Gillani's family were major agricultural landowners outside Multan, connected to the production of mangos, wheat, and cotton. In other words, feudal landlords have found a powerful ally and representative in Gillani.

Of course, the Bhutto family also descends from a long line of landlords in Pakistan. A recent Time article describes the reach of the Bhutto family in Sindh, focusing on one specific family member: Mumtaz Ali Bhutto (Baker and Bhutto, 2008):

Bhutto says his tenants are free to vote for whomever they please — in fact he complains that despite all he has done for them some are still disloyal. But sharecroppers on other feudal properties speak of coercion. Ghulam Abbas, an unemployed villager in rural Dosera, Punjab province, describes a climate of fear on Election Day. 'The feudals have their own cronies on every street. They know who is favoring whom. If they lose in any polling station they can figure out through this system and take revenge.' Revenge can come in the form of false police cases, he says, or unfair prices at the mills, which are owned by the feudal lords. Bhutto agrees that these practices have happened, and do happen, but, he's quick to add, not on his lands. 'We don't need to do that here, people vote for us already....If the courts functioned, I wouldn't have to arbitrate. I only do this because nobody else is. Otherwise I would be vacationing in Majorca.

The rest of the Bhutto clan, including Benazir's branch, is supposed to be even worse than our wanna-be-in-Majorca vacationing landlord. Mumtaz Ali Bhutto has in fact accused the Benazir branch of being even more committed to feudalism than he is, and that he represented a political alternative as a 'man of the people.'

The feudal landlords own the land, the mills, the seeds and the fertilizer, and they have extensive control over the police and local judicial system. Instead of going to court, tenants and local community members must go to the landlord who adjudicates all kinds of economic, family, and legal disputes. Now, the feudal elites have secured national positions in the most recent elections that were officially sanctioned by John Kerry and other prominent Americans as passing the test of democracy. But Pakistanis understand very well (even if the American press does not), that they have exchanged a military ruler (Musharraf) for a set of feudal crooks (Asif Zardari, Nawaz Sharif, and Yousaf Raza Gillani). It is also interesting to note that a lively critique of feudalism exists inside Pakistan (except from the landlords themselves, who complain about the rising power of the 'money-makers,' i.e. the capitalists). So everything I say here is also said by Pakistanis, it is simply the case that it is not said by Americans when thinking about or describing Pakistan.

It is also the case that by not honestly confronting the exploitative specificity and nature of feudalism, any real economic development and increase in general living standards have been hampered in Pakistan. One landlord audaciously rejected any increase in spending on education because his tenants would be unlikely to perform certain tasks (such as replacing hunting dogs on his weekly hunting forays), if they became skilled laborers less dependent on him! Without considering the question of how feudal exploitation is genuinely different, or acknowledging the cultural and political hold of feudalism, prescriptions of export-oriented development seem strangely tangential to more fundamental questions about the Pakistani social formation.

While a coalition of feudal lords act (and have historically acted, as when they actively tore apart land reform programs after 1947) as a brake on Pakistani development, the military looms as the other major socioeconomic brake. Through the 70's, Pakistani military spending reached some 50-60% of the federal budget. After coming under fire by international aid agencies and lending institutions, the official percentage has decreased, but still places Pakistan as one of the world's top ten national military spenders, despite the fact of its significant poverty. Critics have pointed out that it is an artificial reduction in spending, since US aid specifically earmarked for military projects after Sept 11^th, along with spending by numerous other non-governmental organizations such as the Fauji foundation, raise total military spending significantly above the government's budgetary allocation. Consider for a moment what it means for military spending to be a multiple of total governmental spending on all other social services. Social services comes so far behind in terms of spending on military and debt servicing that even the far right might blanch when confronted with the statistics. (See Ayesha Jalal's 2007 book on Pakistan's political economy of defence for a detailed analysis of the formation of the military, its colonial legacy, etc.). In addition, spending on the military comes at the expense of other infrastructural spending on water and sewage, which are at near-disastrous levels in Karachi, and are already causing disaster in Karachi's mega-slums (Mike Davis's Planet of Slums continually returned to Karachi as an exemplar of various problems).

In conclusion, it seems clear that when economic prescriptions and development programs so naively exclude the economic power and reach of both the feudal lords and the military that their programs become at best, ineffective, and at worst, encouraging de-development. International multilateral institutions (such as the World Bank and the IMF), by not demanding real limits and transformations in military spending, and continuing to lend money that has to be paid back by the Pakistani government, are effectively allowing a crippling 30% of the government budget to be spent financing 'odious debt.'

References:

Baker, Aryn and Mirpur Bhutto. “Landowner Power in Pakistan Election.” Time. Wednesday, February 13, 2008.

Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. Verso: New York. 2006.

Jalal, Ayesha. The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan's Political Economy of Defence. Cambridge University Press, London. 2007.

 

Maliha Safri is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Drew University.