Passages to thwarted nationalism

Let us take up the proposition first of ‘thwarted nationalism’. From the outset, the term nationalism here should be taken to represent primarily the nationalist movement against British colonial rule, and only secondarily the efforts to forge a nationalist identity in post-independence Pakistan. The two are indeed interconnected. However, it is by no means the purpose here to unfold a master narrative of nationalism. Although such a narrative could certainly endeavour to serve a coalescing function, it might also contain various unpleasant elements of exclusion, belligerence, and chauvinism. The recent history of the European peninsula is replete with human disasters resulting from fratricidal national rivalries, as is global history with the unbelievable genocidal impacts on overseas populations of European people imbued with an obsessive national-racial consciousness. Nevertheless, the reasons for the relative success or failure of the nationalist enterprise need to be discussed, and here an effort is made to relate these outcomes to the nature of the nationalist movement that led to the transfer of power in British India, and to the creation of the state of Pakistan.

One part of the article, then, deals essentially with pre-colonial and colonial mainsprings, while the other addresses Pakistani outcomes, concerning post-1947 processes but with an ongoing effort to relate these to historical antecedents. On both counts developments in the largest province, Punjab, along with the other provinces that constituted Pakistan, must be considered. In many ways the experiences of these different areas have varied, and a number of Pakistan's problems in achieving cohesiveness have stemmed from either centralizing or Punjab-centric tendencies in public policy and national strategies. This integrative approach has left a clear perception of exclusion in the provinces of Balochistan, Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa (formerly North-West Frontier Province), Sindh, and the Gilgit-Baltistan territory, as well as earlier and most conspicuously East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).

Let us trace these antecedents back to the late Mughal empire, which from the later years of Aurangzeb's reign started becoming economically unsustainable.Footnote ⁵ A few generations of ‘Mughal peace’ had significantly enlarged the number of recipients of state patronage and largesse, to the extent of infighting among competing factions. Such schisms found expression in the conflicts between rulers and sons, and in the even more ubiquitous struggles for succession at or even before the demise of each ruler. State expenditures had also become increasingly uncontrollable, and indeed unsupportable, through the profligate maintenance of the over-glorified royal household, the upper state officials and growing horde of lesser functionaries, and the extensive military establishment.Footnote ⁶ The rural elite, pervasive in the countryside, also imposed its lifestyle footprints and extracted its share of rents. Add to these levies the expenditures entailed on the construction and maintenance of ever more grandiose monuments and luxury facilities, almost exclusively reserved for royalty and ruling elites in life and death.

These demands could only be sustained through increasingly onerous external and internal resource extraction by the Mughal state. The former was attempted through Aurangzeb's depredations on the Muslim kingdoms of the Deccan, leading to the volcanic outbreak of Maratha nationalism. Internally, the fiscal burden for the extravagant enterprise of empire fell on the productive classes, essentially the landholding peasant lineages and the rural artisanal and service underclass, but also more specialized craftsmen in an urban sector that had experienced significant expansion under Mughal rule.

With time, the extraction of the agrarian surplus required increasing coercion, with the many layers of parasitic rent receivers using state mechanisms and social authority to exact ever more arduous fiscal demands on artisans and peasants. In Punjab these elements began to resist, and then retaliate, in increasingly sanguinary fashion. Conversion to Sikhism, and the new role of the final gurus as anti-Mughal guerrilla leaders, gave greater cohesion to the peasant war bands, while surging recalcitrance was equally evident among Hindu and Muslim peasant groups. The rebellion of Banda Bairagi in the Gurdaspur area served as an early example of popular disaffection and resistance. As the eighteenth century progressed, the ability of the regional elite to contain popular revolt continued to decline, until it was pulverized, by mid-century, by the eclipse of Mughal power itself, hastened further by the body blows of foreign invasions by Nadir Shah and Ahmed Shah Abdali.Footnote ⁷ The impact of these invasions was felt primarily in Punjab, and served to accentuate the disjuncture between Mughal power and the nature of successor polities.

By contrast, more eastern parts of the Mughal empire experienced much greater continuities. Essentially, the ex-governors or subedars of these tracts successfully took over as regional kings, with the pre-existing agrarian elites under them essentially retaining their incumbencies. These successor states included Awadh, Bengal, Hyderabad, and the Mysore domains of Hyder Ali and his celebrated son Tipu Sultan. It was the rulers of these ‘kingdoms’ that the emergent British power attempted to displace, often with sanguinary guile. Additionally, competition for rent and revenue with the upper agrarian incumbents in these regions caused further dissensions, most notably in the outbreak of armed conflict in 1857–58.Footnote ⁸ One can posit that the residual resentments from these fractious relations rolled into the Indian nationalist movement, with its eventual success in the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, if the thesis of the economic efflorescence of these regional kingdoms is accurate, then British rule could hardly have been viewed by both the rural and urban elites and the masses as delivering any substantial material dividends, and this too would have facilitated the cause of nationalism.Footnote ⁹

Historical sequences proved to be quite different in the mid-Indus region. In the second half of the eighteenth century, after rolling back the Abdali intrusions, the peasant rebels grew powerful enough to assert autonomous authority. They either physically annihilated the old elite or relegated it to insignificance. The social upheaval of prolonged peasant insurrection did throw up elements of a new elite from among the war band, or misl, leadership, and the British would later recognize these misls as feudatories and even as princely states.Footnote ¹⁰ The Phulkian states of eastern Punjab, Kapurthala, and Bahawalpur, as well as many Sardari fiefdoms, were all carved out by the peasant war band leaders of the eighteenth century.Footnote ¹¹ The most successful of these, of course, were the ascendant Bhangi and Sukerchakia misls, consolidated under Ranjit Singh as the kingdom of Lahore. However, upper-peasant autonomy remained a pivotal feature of political power and social behaviour in this region, factors duly recognized by the British in their revenue settlements as well as in their military and politico-economic strategies.

These pre-colonial transitions, amounting to little short of a social revolution, in turn had their impacts on political economy under imperialism and beyond. Appeasing, and in many cases creating, the rural magnate element was one factor in British strategy. The shoring up of a newly arisen upper agrarian hierarchy was accompanied by an even more pervasive policy of accommodating the landowning peasantry, the ‘dominant’ element of village society and a critical stakeholder in the rural economy.Footnote ¹² These alliances between the rural hierarchy and colonial rule had far-reaching military, economic, and political dimensions.

The military context was established with the decision to fight on the British rather than the Indian side in the armed struggle of 1857–58. It was further consolidated through the post-‘Mutiny’ process of demobilization of the old Bengal army, and recruitment into the British Indian Army principally from Punjab and the Frontier. Further manifestations were the turning of this region into a logistical base for military exigencies in the north-west (comprising perhaps the most sensitive frontier of the British empire), the extensive involvement of this new army in policing Britain's colonies, and the numerically significant human contribution in both world wars.Footnote ¹³ This intimate relationship was further embedded in agrarian economy by the extensive appropriation of canal-irrigated land for military purposes in western (and later Pakistani) Punjab. This land settlement process, stretching onwards from the late nineteenth century, entailed large numbers of grants to military pensioners and then to world war veterans, and the use of extensive tracts for the breeding of animals of military significance, such as young stock for the cavalry and mules and camels for logistics. Even among the civilian population, the eligibility for peasant land grants was confined to the landowning peasant lineages, from which exclusively military recruitment also occurred.Footnote ¹⁴

Economically, the alliance with the dominant segment of Punjab peasantry was consolidated through the nexus of revenue payments and property rights, and then through agricultural colonization. Land revenue, and later abiana or water rates drawn from canal-irrigated land, were the most important sources of income for the colonial state. These receipts again were drawn from the landholding peasantry that not only controlled agricultural operations at the village level, but was also the very element predominantly involved in Punjab's military services to imperialism. In return, the British recognized and formalized into the land record system, the rights to landownership of this class. Further, the British adopted protective measures to cushion this segment against the inroads of the market economy, and more specifically from the threat of expropriation by moneylenders stemming from indebtedness and mortgage foreclosure. Examples were the remarkable Punjab Alienation of Lands Act of 1901, and subsequent laws on mortgage protection.Footnote ¹⁵

The colonial strategy of protecting traditional society and incumbent landowning groups, in preference to rising agricultural capitalist elements that might have expedited qualitative change in the agrarian economy, contrasted dramatically with Britain's own experience with its agricultural and industrial revolutions. The longer-term obstacles that this social conservatism created for this region's development prospects cast their influence well beyond the eclipse of British rule itself.

This strategic alliance was dramatically cemented, as well as considerably extended, with the extension of canal irrigation to new lands, known collectively as the ‘Punjab canal colonies’, and situated in western (and later Pakistani) Punjab. The great majority of grants allotted on this commercially valuable canal-irrigated zone were in the form of smaller holdings of up to 50 acres, known as Abadkar or Peasant grants.Footnote ¹⁶ Again, the exclusion from eligibility to these grants of the rural masses, belonging to the ‘service castes’ and landless labouring groups, clearly highlighted the parameters of colonial political economy. The British realized that political gain lay in not disturbing the vertical arrangements of village society, even in the face of widespread economic expansion. Accordingly, the great majority of landholdings were confined to the landowning peasant castes, from which, incidentally, the British also drew military recruitment, and on whom they also relied for the bulk of land revenue payment.Footnote ¹⁷

Meanwhile, Punjab's larger landholders also benefited from ample opportunities for obtaining land grants in the new canal-irrigated tracts. Various types of land grants were allotted, known on different canal systems as Capitalist (interestingly, called Rais in the vernacular) Yeoman (Sufedposh), Horse-breeding Yeoman, and Landed Gentry grants, as well as some substantial stud farms and land purchases at auctions. Also, through the Court of Wards the British were able to save large estates from insolvency and liquidation, and in many cases extended their holdings through granting and purchasing of land in the canal colonies. Especially during the depression of the 1930s, colonial administrators successfully negotiated down the claims of creditors, enabling these estates to survive through these difficult years.Footnote ¹⁸ The political and economic reinforcement of the landed elite provided the basis for its robust continuity beyond 1947 in Pakistan, in dramatic contrast to the land reforms that befell its Indian counterpart soon after independence.Footnote ¹⁹

The emergence and development of this hydraulic society, spawning extensive economic growth but also entrenching social rigidities, has been analysed in much greater detail elsewhere.Footnote ²⁰ This article attempts to show how agricultural colonization and the ensuing economic growth, based on the construction of an extensive canal irrigation network, certainly appeared to make Punjab a ‘favoured child’ of British rule in India.Footnote ²¹ However, this process also positioned the social structure adversely for qualitative economic change, by strengthening the upper agrarian element and tying it institutionally with military-bureaucratic power. The challenge to this traditional structure, in a successful thrust towards industrialization, could have come from the business-bourgeois segment, itself emerging rapidly from the exponential rise in agri-trade and agro-processing. Such a challenge was to be decisively checked by the wholesale exit to India of this premium, but predominantly non-Muslim, human resource at partition, owing to the communalized pathway to Pakistan.Footnote ²² The subsequent vacuum in entrepreneurial and professional skills served to intensify imbalances in Pakistan's post-1947 political economy, since it created a more polarized society by significantly weakening the middle class.

When canal irrigation was extended to Sindh, there were extensive land allocations to Punjabi agriculturists, both as civilians and as military-related allotments.Footnote ²³ Significantly, the entire Punjab land settlement process had been entirely reserved solely for Punjabis, an indicator of the consequences of low levels of military recruitment from Sindh. The Sindhi peasantry, still dominated by large landlords and pir, or ‘holy’ families, had failed to replicate the eighteenth century social revolutions of further north, and now suffered different treatment. Sindhi resentment of outsiders, a stimulus for nationalist sentiment, stemmed also from the major rise in entrepreneurial and professional activities, which as in Punjab came to be dominated by Hindus.Footnote ²⁴ The major locus for this was the port city of Karachi, the chief outlet for the agrarian surpluses from the canal-irrigated zone. Karachi also emerged as the major staging post for the north-western defence theatre, thereby integrating the entire Indus basin into a ‘garrison economy’.

It was as a consequence of these momentous strategic and economic developments in the Indus basin that the political dimension began to unfold. This also came to involve the dynamics behind the notion of ‘thwarted nationalism’. The collaborative alliances between the upper rural order and colonial rule in the areas of military contributions, revenue arrangements, and land proprietorship, achieved magnified intensity with agricultural colonization in western Punjab and later in Sindh. With time, and clearly by the 1930s, the agrarian sector in other parts of the British Indian empire began to experience strains and then crises.Footnote ²⁵ Apart from the prolonged global depression, these tensions stemmed from a combination of revenue demands, from land fragmentation, from adverse terms of trade with merchants, agro-processors, and landed elites, and from the very backwardness of agriculture itself.

The Indus region, however, appeared to avoid, or at least delay, such tensions, because of the availability of new land and expansion in irrigated agriculture. Even during the extended economic depression of the 1930s, the nationalist movement was unable to gain influence in the ‘hydraulic’ provinces of Punjab and Sindh. During the same period in other parts of British India, the Indian National Congress was able to make extended inroads against the British-inclined upper rural intermediaries, by winning over the enfranchised landholding peasantry. This transition was dramatically revealed by the results of the 1937 elections, where the Congress wrested control of all the Hindu-majority provinces, ousting the large-landlord support base of the British.Footnote ²⁶

By contrast, in the Pakistan area the nominees of the British retained their hold on the provincial legislatures. In the vital Punjab province, the main Muslim nationalist organization, the Muslim League, remained virtually unrepresented, so complete was the triumph of the pro-British Punjab National Unionist Party. The sorry fate suffered by Mr Jinnah in his efforts to seek support from this Muslim-majority province, so important for his credentials to represent the Muslims at the all-India level, clearly highlighted the power balance in this region. The peculiar religious demographics of Punjab induced the British to regard the Muslim League not only as a threat to the inter-communal political alliance they had forged through the Unionist caucus, but eventually as a threat to the unity of Punjab itself.

To a large extent, the woes of Punjab's partition in the mid-twentieth century were an outcome of the large and incongruous size of British Punjab. It comprised territories from at least three Mughal provinces: Sirhind, Lahore, and Multan. The eastern part, currently Haryana in India, was largely Hindu; the central part, now Indian Punjab, had a concentration of Sikhs; and western Punjab, now in Pakistan, was predominantly Muslim, but with quite distinct forms of the Punjabi language between the northern and southern parts. A fourth part, comprising the old Kangra hill states and now the state of Himachal Pradesh in India, was ecologically and to some extent ethnically distinct from the rest of Punjab. Given such complexities, the Muslim League claim to the entire Punjab in 1947 was bound to be problematic, and in the end it incurred the violent retaliations and widespread killings at partition.Footnote ²⁷

A decade earlier, it was the efforts of the British to keep the League at bay that fatally retarded the development of nationalism. In their efforts to forestall the spread of communal politics in Punjab, they wished to redirect Jinnah towards a continuing accommodation with the rural elite, rather than a broader mobilization of the Muslim masses, as advocated by the poet Muhammad Iqbal.Footnote ²⁸ The warnings of Iqbal to Jinnah went unheeded on the implications of entering into an accommodation with the Unionists, through the Sikander-Jinnah Pact that behind the scenes the British had constructed. Sikander Hayat, Punjab's Unionist Premier and British nominee, was then able to successfully exclude the League from Punjab in the critical half decade after 1937. The old Punjab Muslim League, with the dying and disenchanted Muhammad Iqbal as its President, was actually deregistered in 1938. The office holders of the new Punjab Muslim League came solidly from Unionist ranks: in effect the League ceased to exist in Punjab. This highly detrimental positioning for Muslim nationalism only changed with the fortuitous (if that is an appropriate term) and almost concurrent demise of the top Unionist leadership. Within a couple of years after 1940, almost the entire plank of elder Unionist leaders suffered mortality, including Sikander Hayat himself. Verily an act of god, as later adherents of the all-encompassing role of religion might well declaim.Footnote ²⁹

It was then that the British took the fateful decision, induced no doubt by the imperatives of military recruitment for the world war, to repose the Punjab premiership on Khizr Hayat Tiwana. The British had balanced the northern and southern landlord factions of western Punjab's Muslim politics by opting for compromise candidates of no great means: men like Fazle Hussain and Sikander Hayat. In now selecting Khizr the British hand was presumably forced by the exigencies of war recruitment, which in western Punjab occurred predominantly from the northern rather than southern part. The excluded faction, the sons of Daultana, Mamdot, and Sikander, then invited Jinnah to intervene in Punjab.Footnote ³⁰ The subsequent ‘gains’ of the Muslim League constituted the uncoiling of Muslim factional politics among landed Unionists, more than it did the expression of a nationalist struggle. The convoluted politics of Punjab in the decade before partition reveals the very thin thread of causality, let alone any element of inevitability, in the path to Pakistan.Footnote ³¹

In its other parts, as well, the future nation was ill prepared for sovereignty, at least in terms of the institutional development of nationalist politics. In Sindh, without the communal complexities of Punjab, the League remained the party of choice of the Muslim rural elite, as it did elsewhere in south Asia. In alliance with the mendicant authority of shrine-keepers, or pirs, who were also nurtured as an instrument of social and political control by the British, the landlords’ League crowded out the prospects of a political formation that would represent the interests of a wider Sindhi social base. The emergent urban bourgeoisie in Sindhi cities, especially Karachi, had no real participation in decision-making or representation in provincial politics, from which it was anyway detached by being heavily non-Muslim.Footnote ³² Political conservatism was to remain the hallmark of Sindh politics into the twenty-first century, with the landlord–pir nexus retaining its social and political authority. It not only successfully negotiated but maintained effective control of the populist platform of the Pakistan Peoples Party throughout the decades since 1970. Any alliances with urban classes remained problematical since they were also regarded as ‘outsiders’, being mostly migrants from India or up-country. This urban–rural divide has meant at best an uneasy peace over a fractured province.

The development of nationalist political organizations in Balochistan also remained miniscule, with the British aligned sardars relying on tribal cohesion and traditional values to retain their authority. Only in the Frontier province did an organizational expression of nationalist politics manage to challenge the landed League patricians, through the Khudai Khidmatgars under Abdul Ghaffar Khan. Significantly, having mobilized the smaller landowners, Khan sought an alliance with the Congress and remained in opposition to the League.Footnote ³³ Indeed, in an early reflection of the centralizing forces that were to plague Pakistan in the coming decades, his provincial government was abolished soon after independence and a League nominee was installed. Ghaffar Khan continued to be shunned by the Pakistani establishment and spent most years of his life after 1947 either incarcerated or in exile.

The retardation of nationalism had political and economic consequences that imposed prolonged continuities from the colonial past on to Pakistani state and society. In India, the Indian National Congress delivered on its alliance with the upper peasantry and enacted land reforms, under the Zamindari Abolition Act of 1950. With the upper agrarian elite removed as a serious contender to power, the Congress also served the interests of the other elements of its strategic alliance, the urban intelligentsia and Indian business. Social development for the former and economic development for the latter could now proceed, with the ‘feudal’ constraint clearly diluted. Moreover, by building an extensive political organization from the grassroots village to the apex federal levels, and then by retaining power through the electoral process for almost half a century, the Congress was able to stabilize Indian political and public institutions. Importantly, and in contrast to its Pakistani neighbour and many other developing nations, the Congress was able to ward off authoritarian challenges to power from the military-administrative apparatus, as well as retain a wholesome degree of neutrality in global politics. Not that these measures significantly helped the Indian masses, who remained even more deprived and wretchedly poor under democracy than their Pakistani counterparts under dictatorship: graphic illustration that there is no single magic bullet in the contorted routes that societies take in the pursuit of ‘development’.Footnote ³⁴

Thus, Pakistan clearly witnessed strong continuities into the independent era from the power structures entrenched during colonialism. The authority of the civil bureaucracy had been significantly reinforced by the emergence of hydraulic society. In no other part of south Asia did public functionaries control to such an extent the water source, land transfers, and mutations involved in the extensive allotment processes, and arbitrary choice over the social composition of land grantees. Such pervasive fiat over human settlement activity also enlarged the scope for misdemeanour and rent-seeking. Audit reports of district offices in western Punjab in the 1930s reveal both endemic rent-seeking and extensive miscarriage of official procedures, essentially by the subordinate, native bureaucracy.Footnote ³⁵ British officials were generally not personally corrupt. They pursued the higher vision of embedding a thousand-year Raj, not unlike another country's expectations of a Reich of equal longevity. For those who might have believed that sovereignty would bring relief from institutional distortions, bureaucratic corruption became the whirlwind that they were to reap in draconian measure.

The stature, authority, and resource consumption of the military was also firmly entrenched in the Indus basin during British rule. The widespread conversion of valuable canal-irrigated land for both animal and ex-soldier usage extended the intrusion of the military deep into agrarian society.Footnote ³⁶ With Pakistan, this process of entrenchment was to serve as a base for and a precursor to the actual assumption of power, at the cost of political institutions and democratic rights. Continued Western tutelage was also to lead to the military remaining, through a co-opted leadership amenable to external influence, the armoured vehicle of vassalage in a supposedly sovereign nation.

Furthermore, the upper agrarian hierarchy came through the constrained nationalist struggle unscathed, and with continuing unfettered access to the nodes of power. In alliance with the military and civil bureaucracy, it could then successfully continue to fend off genuine efforts at democracy, institutional change, and land reform, which could have served as the routes to the political and economic empowerment of the people. Hence the forces responsible for the retardation of nationalism not only continued unshaken into Pakistan, but constituted for its people a resilient axis against democratic participation, economic equity, and even civil and human rights.Footnote ³⁷

Anarcho-vassalage and embedded backwardness

We now move to the notion of ‘anarcho-vassalage’, which is the term used here to portray the post-1947 phase under Pakistan. This period is better chronicled, though efforts to relate these trends to pre-1947 developments remain sparse. The fledgling Muslim League failed to replicate the political incumbency and stability achieved in India by the Congress party. The variance in organizational capacity between the two meant that while the Congress held on to power in India for almost half a century, the League rapidly dissolved into factions amid a protracted inability even to hold general elections. After the political confusions of the first decade, during which civilian politicians had already succumbed to military-bureaucratic ascendancy, a military dictatorship in the second decade under Ayub Khan further entrenched authoritarian control over power and resources. Not only were civilian politicians marginalized, especially those not willing to collaborate with a military dictator, but the development of political organizations, and thereby democratic institutionalization, was further emasculated.Footnote ³⁸ This mirrored the organizational eclipse of the Muslim League in the decade before partition in Punjab, and a repeat of the authoritarian attitude to political development in this region.Footnote ³⁹

Growing centralization was also a significant facet of the authoritarian route. The most glaring contradiction lay with the unwillingness to accord equal participation to East Pakistan, even though it had a majority of the population. Efforts to impose Urdu as the national language provoked Bengali resistance, while budgetary under-allocations and sparse military spending were further irritants. Such policy distortions led eventually to the break-up of Pakistan itself and the creation of Bangladesh. However, this was not before the refusal of power interests in the Western wing, following the elections of 1970, to allow the National Assembly to meet. This ended the prospect of a compromise on the Awami League's decentralization-oriented Six Point proposal, which indeed resembled the 1946 Cabinet Mission Plan that the Muslim League had accepted but the Congress Party had rejected, in favour of more powers to the Centre. Eventually, Pakistan broke up because of the refusal to accept the possibility of a government led by the Awami League, with its 160 elected members, as opposed to merely 80 seats won by the Peoples Party.Footnote ⁴⁰

The Pakistani ‘ruling elite’ clearly endeavoured to deprive the people of their democratic rights. Coming through intact, as we have seen, from its formative phase under colonial patronage, and indeed having divested the bourgeois challenge by arranging for its forced exit to India on communal grounds, the military–bureaucratic–landlord axis was still faced with a major challenge. There was a clear price, and risk, in denying democracy to the people, and in trying to avoid the related resource dilution implied in the democratic dispensation. The price was paid, and presumably the risk averted, by reverting back for sustenance to the colonial hegemon. Of course, by this time the fratricidal conflicts of the European peninsula had left Britain in no position to revive its imperial enterprise, and the mantle of grasping global influence in the second half of the twentieth century fell to the United States. It was to this source that Pakistan's elite, highly insecure but with prescient self-interest, turned for succour, laying the roots for a deepening and increasingly hazardous relationship that was to bedevil the country's affairs in the next half century.Footnote ⁴¹ There emerged a clear nexus between internal strategies of resource and power concentration on the one hand, and on the other the growing assertiveness of external powers in warping national strategies to serve their own global and regional interests.

Centralizing forces also created major disruption in the western part of the country. Its four provinces were merged into ‘One Unit’ in 1956 with the capital in Lahore, and were reinstated only after the fall of Ayub Khan in 1969. Real power to the provinces is still in contestation half a century later, though the 18th Amendment, passed in 2010, did create a framework for devolution. Moreover, the retention of the same number of provinces since 1947 indicates further rigidity and dysfunctionality. In India the number of states has more than doubled since 1947, indicating greater responsiveness in governance. Pakistan's failure to reform has perpetuated various structural contradictions across the country, such as the Baloch–Pakhtun demographic divide in Balochistan, the Urdu-speaking and Sindhi divide in Sindh with the population of Karachi alone now exceeding 20 million, the non-Pushto speaking areas of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and the overblown size of Punjab, with over 100 million inhabitants. Further relapses have been the prolonged delay in settling the status of Gilgit-Baltistan, perhaps because of the ongoing Kashmir dispute; but more glaringly that of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, infamous for their militant sanctuaries.

The lack of internal institutional reform worked in tangent with ongoing vassalage. There was no clearer manifestation of this virtual subordination than in the extent and role of the Pakistani military. It was perfectly legitimate to maintain a viable defensive capability, especially in response to ongoing antagonism from India and to its palpable oppression in Kashmir. However, it is unlikely that the real motivation for sustaining such a large military apparatus was hostility with that country. The expenditure of almost half the national budget on the military, at the prohibitive opportunity cost of the social and physical infrastructure's continued emaciation, could hardly be ascribed to the national interest. More likely, these long-standing resource diversions were at the behest of the West for maintaining, contiguous to western Asia's oil reserves, a credible deterrence against any expansionism southwards by the Soviet Union. That these heavy expenditures were met entirely by the Pakistani population recalled the onerous ethos of the British Indian army, which was maintained from domestic revenues for the subjugation of its own people. The ubiquitous refrain regarding United States ‘military aid’ to Pakistan referred simply to the drug injected to retain the addiction of the body. Such control was secured through the co-option of the upper officer corps through ‘training’ in the US, guided promotions and, especially with the frequency of military rule, the promise of considerable personal aggrandizement.Footnote ⁴²

The externally defensive and internally aggressive posture for the military, maintained for the first three decades, was then extended to the mode responsible for many of Pakistan's ills in the subsequent decades. An altogether more virulent role was now demanded of the Pakistani military, with unforeseen consequences for the stability of the country's own political and socio-economic fabric. The opening of the ‘Afghan front’ clearly served Western interests, but was fraught with dangers for Pakistan's own national equanimity. The destabilization of Afghanistan's neutrality, the drawing in of the Soviet Union—along with its military defeat and ultimate collapse—and the subsequent civil war, Taliban control, and Western invasion, are now a part of world history.

This sequence of developments was perhaps not in Pakistan's own perceived defence interests. These remained heavily Indo-centric, and thereby continued to create tensions with the West's geo-strategic objectives.Footnote ⁴³ Yet the alignment with the West stood little chance of being reversed under the resilient bonds of vassalage. The military coups of both 1977 and 1999 were each followed a couple of years later by the outbreak of major military conflict in Afghanistan. It would be intriguing to speculate that this must rank as the mother of all coincidences. The perpetrators of both these military coups came from ‘non-traditional’ military backgrounds, a Jullundur Arain (Zia-ul-Haq) and an Urdu-speaking Muhajir (Pervez Musharraf), and both were promoted to army chief by superseding more senior generals. Could this perhaps test to the limit our capacity for accepting the realm of accident over design? Even the military coup of 1958, ushering in the Ayub Khan dictatorship, was not entirely unconnected with the sanguinary war about to be waged by the United States in south-east Asia. Securing the naval base facilities at Chittagong through a military client, in case the war in Vietnam assumed regional proportions, was not beyond the calculus of American neo-imperialism.Footnote ⁴⁴

The post-1980 impacts of intervention in Afghanistan were far-reaching. The religious fundamentalist ‘jihadis’, bred at American instigation for anti-Soviet operations, were a militant and violent extension of the religious political organizations that the US had hitherto patronized to counter socialist and progressive influence. Even the most prominent among these, the Jamaat-i-Islami, suffered successive and pervasive rejection by the electorate, proof that such extremism failed throughout to be a popular phenomenon.Footnote ⁴⁵ Nevertheless, the strident and ubiquitous calls by clerics for a theocratic society managed to create considerable confusion in the enterprise of modernization. They had leveraged off the secular elite's own lack of hesitation in employing Islamic symbolism to seek a convoluted legitimacy in the face of the denial of democracy.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet concerted Islamization as state policy began only with the Afghan campaign under Zia-ul-Haq. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto had muddied the waters by prohibiting alcohol and, more onerously, declaring the Ahmadiyya community as non-Muslims. However, these were defensive attempts at mollifying the religious segment prior to the elections of 1977. Pakistan's political classes have remained steadfastly secular, though not above opportunistic compromise with Islamism.

The religious right was then boosted by the sustained drive by the Zia-ul-Haq military dictatorship to turn Pakistan into an ‘Islamic society’, clearly to provide a stimulus for the ‘jihad’ in Afghanistan. The free rein accorded to atavistic religious ideologues to appropriate the national discourse seriously damaged the country's prospects of modernization, in addition to entrenching prejudice and particularism and warping educational development.Footnote ⁴⁷ The damaging infiltration of higher education institutions by fundamentalists led to the longer-term intimidation and marginalization of more progressive and liberal faculty and students. Even more overtly, shariah courts under Zia meted out such punishments as hangings and public flogging: measures directed at suppressing political dissent and inculcating public fear. Further detrimental impacts of the Afghan conflict were the influx of over three million refugees, with its consequent socio-economic strains, and the rapid proliferation of drugs, arms, and extremist militants within the country.

Deinstitutionalization under military dictatorship, and the need to mollify bureaucratic, political, and business intermediaries with ample rent-seeking opportunities, further symbolized the nexus between onerous vassalage and a rising anarchy imposed from above. A number of concessions and compromises were entailed under Zia-ul-Haq, in order to maintain the allegiance of self-interested intermediary segments. Accountability and transparency were further vitiated to accommodate both bureaucratic and business rent seeking. Revenue generation and, especially, progressive taxation were kept inadequate and inefficient, fiscal deficits increased but without redistributive priorities, the dispensation of justice was largely withheld unless accompanied by judicial bribery, and the enhanced foreign assistance and loans were mostly filtered away into private coffers. The people were confronted increasingly with the unedifying aspect of major corruption among higher military officers. There was little or no progress in the privatization of assets and industries nationalized under Bhutto in the 1970s, allowing bureaucratic and military rentiers continued dominance over an extensive and lucrative public-sector domain.Footnote ⁴⁸

As Zia sought civilian support through nominations to assemblies and then ‘non-party’ elections, opportunistic entrants helped to further deinstitutionalize politics, extend patronage networks, and extract their own share of resource absorption. All these private vices were intended to be placated through the public virtues proclaimed through Islamic rhetoric.Footnote ⁴⁹ To break the Peoples Party's hold on Sindh, ethnic politics were introduced to the urban areas with the rise of the Muhajir (later Muttahida) Quami Movement (MQM), which has since retained such a divisive hold on Karachi, Pakistan's commercial hub. The MQM's descent into racketeering and murder has seriously damaged Karachi's vibrancy and harmed the country's investment climate.Footnote ⁵⁰ Hence it could be argued that the longer-term disruptions embedded under Zia might have been avoided, had a democratic government in Pakistan refused, in the national interest, to participate in such partisan collaboration in superpower conflicts.

Yet all such dysfunctional tropes cannot be laid simply at the door of vassalage. Rather, they must be ascribed to vassalage's coexistence, and indeed symbiosis, with the internal compulsions of a rogue elite. These contradictions came to the fore with even greater alacrity during the decade of civilian politics that bridged the dictatorships of Zia-ul-Haq and Pervez Musharraf. The period witnessed four administrations: two each of the Peoples Party under Benazir Bhutto and the Muslim League under Nawaz Sharif. Bhutto had been allowed, with American approval, to return in 1986, two years before the now-dispensable Zia met his end in a plane crash. Sharif was sponsored by the military itself, as part of the civilian gloss on military authority. In government, neither of these two was able to complete their five-year electoral terms. The first three set-ups were dismissed on charges of corruption and mismanagement by post-dictatorship Presidents carrying arbitrary powers.Footnote ⁵¹ The fourth finally succumbed to a military coup, for which in hindsight there appeared to be no overriding justification, except perhaps to open the next chapter of war in Afghanistan.

The decade of the 1990s witnessed the consequences of personalized politics even within a democratic dispensation. Both the Peoples Party and Muslim League lacked internal democracy, their autocratic top leadership demanded complete obedience from their followers. Politics was predicated on patronage from the top, and ultimately from dynastic party leadership, rather than power flowing through from below. Little initiative was left to the elected legislatures, with crony accomplices and bureaucratic factions appropriating decision-making. Rent seeking thrived, dominating development expenditures, government projects and the credit mechanism. The nationalized banking sector and the development finance institutions were drained and rendered virtually illiquid through sick loans, made through political leverage or palpable business malfeasance. Weak social service delivery, inept public management, the failure of the public education system to cater to modern skills requirements, and the lack of proper provision of justice and security, were some of the symptoms of this functional anarchy.Footnote ⁵²

Economic conditions during the 1990s also deteriorated, further intensifying structural backwardness. With superpower conflict in abeyance, foreign assistance to Pakistan was minimized. Despite its invaluable role in delivering a Soviet collapse and a bloodless independence for east Europe and central Asia (with the price, of course, of a million dead in Afghanistan), Pakistan's international image began to be maligned. Indian allegations regarding alleged assistance to the freedom movement in Kashmir verged on demonization, and this negative portrayal adversely affected investment confidence. The country even came under international sanctions for responding in like measure to India's nuclear tests in May 1998. The emergence of the fundamentalist Taliban government in Afghanistan, purportedly with the assistance of Pakistan's military intelligence apparatus, further equated this region with extremism and instability. Foreign investment rates fell off, affirming that Pakistan was to be called into the world system for military and security services, but shunned for wealth and value creation.

These factors compounded the recessionary direction of the economy. The growth rate languished around four per cent during the 1990s, for once below that of India. Weak economic diversification led to continued heavy reliance for export earnings on cotton and leather goods, but mostly in lower value-added segments. An emerging knitwear industry did experience buoyant growth for some years, but then went into endemic decline owing to lack of international competitiveness, caused by high production costs and entrepreneurial-managerial inefficiencies. High foreign debt levels led to donor agencies, like the World Bank, insisting on removal of subsidies and move to user charges in utilities. These measures moved the cost structure upwards, thereby further eroding the competitiveness of both the industrial and agricultural production base.Footnote ⁵³

Development and business initiatives invariably morphed into scams, as virtually criminalized rent cliques close to power nodes diverted projects into corruption sumps. Examples were the social action programme, private power and telecommunications expansion, the cooperative societies scandal, the yellow cab scheme, the motorway project, and not least the privatization process.Footnote ⁵⁴ Continuing fiscal deficits and resource gaps, along with stagnant exports and revenue shortfalls, necessitated further domestic and international debt. Successive moratoriums were required from international creditors, owing to difficulties with repayment schedules on foreign debt, and sinking foreign currency reserves. The country stood at the brink of sovereign default just prior to the 9/11 attacks in New York, after which fortunes appeared to turn as insecurity and conflict returned to the region.

Major political change in Pakistan appeared to follow a decidedly decennial sequence, and the next phase, the Pervez Musharraf military dictatorship, was no exception. Moreover, if each period of military rule was succeeded by the country facing a severe crisis—the break up with Bangladesh after Ayub and the political instabilities following Zia—then Musharraf's legacy vindicated this pattern with, if anything, extreme prejudice. During this period, October 1999 to February 2008, war returned to this region, with the Anglo-American and NATO invasion and occupation of Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. With the Musharraf regime dutifully falling into line with Western objectives, Pakistan's vassal status and role were carried to new extremes.Footnote ⁵⁵ That this was a position more degraded than that of a mercenary was exemplified by the striking failure to adequately compensate Pakistan for its multiple contributions. It was indeed accompanied by derision at the country not having ‘done enough’ to meet the imperatives of the invading axis.

Inevitably, as national resistance to the invaders grew in Afghanistan, Pakistan was blamed for allowing ‘safe havens’ for ‘terrorists’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Not only did this create the threat of regionalization of the war and its spread to Pakistani territory, with potentially grave consequences for national integrity, but the prospect of having the Pakistani military kill its own people, to serve superpower objectives, could hardly be relished. The continued threats from the West to balkanize Pakistan, and the expanded activities of Indian intelligence agencies operating from safe havens in Afghanistan, reinforced the sense of siege. Moreover, the growth of armed militancy within Pakistan, a spill-over from the Afghan war, and the particularistic and extremist nature of its protagonists, further added to the insecurity, if not marginalization, of the already beleaguered moderate and progressive elements.Footnote ⁵⁷

Compounding the growing prospects of the spread of war to Pakistan was the emerging political crisis spawned by Musharraf, in his efforts to circumvent democracy and accountability. By 2007, he needed to have himself re-elected for a further five years, as well as arrange for the electoral success of his ‘king's party’ of opportunistic politicians that he had cobbled together as the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid). His uncertainty whether the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Chaudhry, would abide election rigging led to the latter's dismissal in March 2007. Chaudhry had also shown resilience in challenging the ruling establishment over a number of issues, including land scams by generals in the emerging port city of Gwadar, a scandalous proposal advocated by Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz to sell off for a pittance the Pakistan Steel Mills premises with its extensive land area, and the whereabouts of thousands of missing persons who had been arbitrarily murdered by the state or delivered to the United States for its terror war. Chaudhry was reinstated by the Supreme Court in July, leading to Musharraf sacking the entire judiciary in November and plunging the country further into crisis. Musharraf's ‘National Reconciliation Order’, on the other hand, enabled Benazir Bhutto to return to Pakistan by removing all corruption charges against her and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari. It would now become even more difficult to pursue allegations against this couple like the $65 million Swiss bank account and ownership of the ‘Surrey palace’, as well as Nawaz Sharif's property holdings in London. After this major concession, true accountability would become ever more unattainable in Pakistan.

The ‘National Reconciliation Order’ was presumably part of an American-inspired arrangement to have a successor to Musharraf on hand. This stratagem constituted a repeat of Benazir Bhutto's return to Pakistan in 1986, as a possible successor to Zia-ul-Haq. However, her changing approach on the terror war and the restoration of the Chief Justice probably proved to be her death warrant. Despite the shock and tragedy of her assassination in December 2007, the elections in February 2008, in which the Musharraf grouping was routed, clearly represented the popular will to stabilize the country. Nevertheless, the dictator's subsequent resignation and the assumption of Asif Zardari as the country's President, also completed the cycle of vassal replacement and renewal. With his highly questionable reputation, and lack of populist complications, Zardari could prove susceptible to Western diktat, though with a people much more aware that such a relationship increasingly posed an existential threat to the nation itself.

The Pakistani economy continued to suffer from embedded features of backwardness during the Musharraf period.Footnote ⁵⁸ It did experience an upswing from its previous malaise after 9/11, with the return of Western attention to the region. The military dictator's capitulation to all the American demands for playing an intimate support role for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan clearly had dangerous geo-political implications for the country. Involvement in the new Afghan war further tested the military's more embedded orientation against India, which had been reasserted through the Kargil war of 1999.Footnote ⁵⁹ However, the changed situation did lead to enhanced capital flows into Pakistan, especially from insecurity over increased surveillance of money laundering and of financial support for ‘terrorism’ networks. Renewal of some bilateral and multilateral economic assistance also fuelled the coffers of rent receivers and, by raising demand levels, created the impression of apparent growth. With the rise of Chinese manufactured imports, along with Indian goods smuggled in through porous borders, Pakistani manufacturing capacity and competitiveness began to decline. Foreign direct investment remained constrained, with no sizeable contribution to manufacturing. Foreign companies did focus on the cellular segment in telecommunications, a sector in which for half a century the predominant majority had been denied access through the land-based system. Increments in demand also came from rapid population growth and increased urbanization. Though the economy clearly expanded, there was a failure to maintain infrastructural development, especially the continuing inability to construct the Kalabagh Dam on the Indus river, vital for retaining energy and irrigation viability.Footnote ⁶⁰

Moreover, much of the growth proved to be illusory. With greater bank liquidity, the government drastically reduced interest rates to as low as five per cent, from levels traditionally around four times higher. The appointment of finance minister, ubiquitously a prerogative of Washington since the Ayub dictatorship, had fallen on a Citibank official with skills in public relations. Later he was elevated to prime minister and, without a broader input in policy decisions, the country fell prey to economic mismanagement. Business could have utilized cheaper credit for strengthening and deepening of industrial resources, but this remained the exception. This facility was misused for speculative purposes in the hope of windfall profits from escalating real estate and share market values. Indeed, the emergent super rich of the Musharraf era, in contrast to the industrialists of the 1960s, were a few property speculators favoured by Musharraf's generals, and some insider traders in the stock exchange who reconfigured themselves as ‘investment bankers’.Footnote ⁶¹

As interest rates went back up, market reversals left investors with dwindling values and high debt. The drastic reduction in interest rates had spurred growth, but had also led to a resilient inflationary cycle fed by spiralling demand and a weak supply base. Enhanced imports, especially in the luxury segment with trade liberalization, and then with the steep rise in oil prices, finally unhinged the balance of payments, leading to a critical erosion of foreign exchange reserves. Structural inadequacies in energy supply began to impact industrial production. The failure to pursue a proactive energy policy was to lead to an endemic energy shortage, with severe growth impacts in the post-Musharraf period. Pakistan was already suffering an economic crisis before the onset of the international recession in 2008.Footnote ⁶² These problems coincided with the political tensions bequeathed by Musharraf, and along with the spread of the Afghan war to Pakistan and the threat of ‘Talibanization’, they seriously threatened the country's stability.

The past couple of decades have witnessed a further deepening of functional anarchy. Two civilian, elected governments have succeeded the Musharraf dictatorship, itself a positive development, though they have shown little resolve in addressing the pressing need for institutional reform, which is badly overdue across the public management sphere.Footnote ⁶³ The toll of corruption scams has continued to mount, with little recourse to redemption.Footnote ⁶⁴ The state has even abdicated its basic obligation of enumeration: the sequence of decennial censuses has been badly broken, with the last one held in 1998, and probably the last credible census as far back as 1961. There is now no verifiable certitude of actual population levels or of the population growth rate. Consequently, any rearrangement of electoral constituencies to reflect demographic realities, especially the significant urbanization trends, remains deferred. This relapse enables non-representative elements to retain prominence and continue to manipulate the ‘democratic’ system. The major extant political parties all seek to benefit from these anomalies.

Moreover, the state has defaulted on another fundamental role, that of assuring adequate revenue generation. With a significant failure to extend direct taxes to intermediary groups, most notoriously larger agrarian producers, as well as to the huge informal sector, the tax to GDP ratio has remained under ten per cent. The large expansion in indirect taxes in recent years has shifted the fiscal burden on to lower income groups, again straining the country's moral economy. With serious revenue shortfalls, the resultant continual fiscal deficits have created a structural dependence on foreign assistance, with its consequent loss of sovereign decision-making. Along with an ever-rising level of domestic borrowings, the debt to GDP ratios have now breached constitutional limits. The threadbare funds allocated to the social sector suffer further depletion from the layered misdemeanours of public functionaries, leaving the people with some of the worst welfare indicators on the globe.Footnote ⁶⁵

Counter-revolutions: the victory of the past over the future?

Linkages between distinct historical processes in this region, as well as an underlying dynamic behind economic backwardness, can perhaps be explained through the notion of ‘counter-revolutions’. If the conflicts and convulsions in Europe in the path to modernity provide a mirror, then economic transformations and their social and cultural ramifications are not without contestations between the old world and the new. Nor is it a foregone conclusion that the latter would necessarily emerge dominant, at least in the earlier phases of these tensions. In regions where the birth spasms of modernity are relatively weak, or where embedded cultures and systems remain too resilient, real transitions can continue to be postponed, even indefinitely. This does not mean that quantitative and incremental change fails to occur, but qualitative change remains more problematical.

Therefore, even significant economic growth can take place, though without ‘development’, and this is a continuing theme suggested here for understanding historical ‘change’ in the Indus region. Effective reactions to the rise of capitalism, and to its disruptive and yet reinvigorating impacts on society, could explain a number of sequential trends in this area. ‘Capitalism’ is used here to denote the rise of a new age and the destructuring of the resilience of old and archaic formations, and not in any way adducing any moral and economic superiority, or even moral and economic acceptability, to that term.

Can we posit, then, that there is a unifying theme underlying the seemingly disparate developments that have been examined here? The peasant rebellions of the early eighteenth century were clearly a response to continued and excessive revenue and rent extraction by the Mughal establishment and intermediaries. Yet this resistance could also have marked a reaction to the deepening of the market economy and to greater penetration of the agricultural and artisanal sectors by commercial elements. Mughal rule witnessed higher levels of urbanization, growth in the secondary sector, greater demands on agrarian producers for more specialized crops and livestock products, larger volumes of commodity trade, and the rise of merchants of significant means, with mercantile networks going across south Asia and into central and west Asia.

Clearly the reduced circumstances of post-Mughal Lahore, previously larger than any European city, and those of several medium-sized towns in the Indus region that had grown during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, indicates a reversal of urban cultural and economic vigour.Footnote ⁶⁶ After the Mughal eclipse, Punjab's urban economy also failed to replicate the buoyancy achieved in cities of the regional successor states. In the latter, post-Mughal transitions were less traumatic, with the subedars and their progeny becoming independent ruling dynasties, and agrarian hierarchies remaining largely intact. The successful peasant revolts of the eighteenth century in Punjab could thus be viewed as a kind of counter-revolution against the commercial intrusions into the agrarian economy carried out by proto-capitalist merchant groups. The latter sought greater commodity production to meet the rising levels of consumer demand from urban centres and social segments exercising expanding market power. By intensifying credit networks to both agrarian and non-agrarian producers already pressured by rent and revenue demands from the state and elites, these market functionaries may have tipped the productive base into resistance, and eventually rebellion. The outcome was both political upheaval and major economic retraction. The disruption of commerce during the Sikh interregnum was indeed reflected in the rise of trading communities in upper Sindh for rerouting long-distance trade and bypassing the troubled Punjab region.Footnote ⁶⁷

During the period of British colonial rule, the potentialities for capitalist development and institutional modernization would appear to have become more pronounced. South Asia was more directly in contact with regions and states where such transformations were occurring, especially Britain. The British did introduce to its Indian empire at least the semblance of a modern bureaucracy, institutionalized procedures and systems for public management, a legal and judicial structure, and a commitment by the state to uphold property rights. Infrastructure development included railways and roads connecting the major towns, emergent port cities—most notably Bombay and Calcutta—and in the Indus basin most prominently the canal irrigation network and agricultural colonization. Energy generation and telecommunications development remained more inadequate, but were nevertheless introduced. After the initial period of plunder and resource transfer, the British settled in for achieving longer-term goals in south Asia, with the state thereby committed to maintaining peace and stability. Penetration of western business enterprise also exposed this region to modern commerce, while indigenous mercantile groups continued to thrive, and in certain cases diversified into manufacturing. Western-type educational institutions, both at school and university levels, began to generate a flow of professionals familiar with modern systems of thought and practice.

However, as we know, the British aim was anything but the economic transformation of south Asia. They induced economic change where it was commercially profitable for them, but otherwise exploited south Asia for supplies of under-priced raw materials and cheap labour, as a captive market for their own industrial products, and as a pivot in maintaining global strategic objectives aided by a large military force funded through indigenous revenues. The British were averse to industrialization in this region, for fear that this would compete with their own manufactured goods. They failed to create an infrastructure for an industrial economy, in the way that Japan accomplished in its east Asian colonies. They preferred alliances with traditional agrarian intermediaries, who as a class were averse to social change and economic modernization, fearing that this would pass the initiative to an emerging bourgeois-capitalist ethos. The British also endeavoured to keep local entrepreneurs away from the high ground dominated by metropolitan business interests. They only grudgingly allowed the entry of native business into large-scale manufacturing, and that too heavily concentrated in cotton textiles. They denied south Asia the opportunity to be a ‘late starter’ in industrialization, thereby perhaps sharing the advantages enjoyed by Germany, Japan, and the United States. They were instead responsible for relegating it to a ‘very late starter’, a position that carried severe disabilities in depleting the dead weight of structural backwardness.

It was in the Indus basin that the retarding impacts of British rule were perhaps most prominent. Such an outcome would appear anomalous, given that this was also the area of the most significant economic growth in south Asia. However, this was also a garrison economy, vital for military logistics in case of conflict with the Russian empire in the Afghan theatre and central Asia. The colonial state endeavoured to avoid social transformations or political emancipation emanating from agrarian growth. It followed a conservative and paternalistic policy designed to strengthen not only rural magnates, but also the upper peasantry, the means for which were at hand with the canal colonies.Footnote ⁶⁸ Moreover, the Land Alienation Act of 1901 and the legislative measures against mortgage foreclosures, as well as a host of administrative interventions such as the Court of Wards mechanism, were designed to protect the social fabric of agrarian incumbents and intercede on their behalf when seemingly threatened by business groups. This approach placed significant constraints on the impact of market forces and the emergence of agricultural capitalism, and contradicted the very processes from which Britain itself benefited during its own agricultural revolution.

Nevertheless, a commercial class had emerged rapidly in the Indus basin after 1900, through the quantum increase in agricultural production and the rise of an extensive network of market towns. As the prolongation of the 1930s depression began to corrode the agricultural economy, the British tended to blame the ‘exploitative’ Bania, or Hindu creditor.Footnote ⁶⁹ This in turn led on to the linkage between communalism and economic nationalism, since the emergent business and professional segments were predominantly non-Muslim. Consequently partition, ostensibly on communal grounds, was accompanied by the forcing out of the capitalist and much of the professional classes, and their exit to India. Thus, not only had colonial rule adopted a long-term counter-revolutionary stance against the rise of market forces, but, at its termination, communal fervour became a vehicle for the emasculation of capitalism itself. The creation of Pakistan could be seen as a culmination of these counter-revolutionary forces, through their coalescence with communal nationalism. Extant business enterprise was swept away, creating a severe imbalance in political economy in favour of traditional and embedded elites, and in turn threatening the adoption of strategies that could successfully build institutions fundamental to modern economies.Footnote ⁷⁰

After 1947, under Pakistan, further adverse responses to capitalism remained a significant factor in shaping political economy. The failure of effective land reforms left the interests of the larger landowners intact. The denial of democracy meant that wider social segments were excluded from political participation. Various stratagems were employed to prolong landlord and upper-peasant hegemony, such as restricted franchises, non-party elections, caste-based candidatures, and nominated assemblies, if not the artifice of martial law itself. Thus there was no significant dilution of the old order, nor necessarily a transition within it to more modernistic modes.Footnote ⁷¹ While the entrepreneurial dynamic remained relatively marginalized in the exercise of political authority, it did begin to reassert itself through expanding economic activity.Footnote ⁷²

The rapid rise, by the late 1960s, of an industrial capitalist class to fill the vacuum of a non-existent manufacturing base at decolonization, marked Pakistan out as a ‘growth model’ for the developing world. However, Pakistan was unable to maintain a sustained growth sequence, leveraging off a private-sector-based industrialization strategy. That indeed was the difference between Pakistan and South Korea, where an admittedly authoritarian industrializing regime proved to have far greater resilience, until it actually delivered a modern, industrial society. Pakistan, by contrast, witnessed the anti-business reversals of the 1970s under the Peoples Party, with extensive nationalization first of big business industrial operations, followed by the banking and financial sectors, and then even of intermediate level agro-processing plants. Moreover, much of the trade in agricultural commodities was brought into the public sector through the creation of trading corporations intended to marginalize private trade. Bhutto did endeavour to cushion these vast state-owned industrial and trading enterprises from direct control by the bureaucracy. He created of a Board of Industrial Management, which he intended to be run by technocrats, and also undertook civil service reforms. Significantly, one of Zia-ul-Haq's earliest measures was to abolish the BIM, and bring the SOEs under state ministries, thereby effectively handing over these valuable assets to the civil bureaucracy and upper military personnel.Footnote ⁷³

Bhutto had nationalized not the textile units, through which most big business houses first emerged, but the more sophisticated and complex industrial processes into which these entrepreneurs had displayed the readiness to rapidly diversify. It could be said that he intended to kill their future without tampering with their past. He thereby caused lasting damage to the emergence of a new economic order that could have spurred modernity. His anti-market strategies amounted to little less than a counter-revolutionary roll back of the forces that might have impelled change as opposed to stasis. Of course, these decisive reversals were not without their rationale. The ‘robber barons’ had accumulated wealth very rapidly, often through rent relations with bureaucrats, and through a host of subsidies and protective measures.Footnote ⁷⁴ Heavily invested in import substitution, they resisted competition and more vibrant forms of foreign investment. They had also made their wager with military rule, rather than support the building of democratic institutions. Nevertheless, it was clear that pre-capitalist structures and mentalities were much too embedded to give way or be broken up by resurgent business: indeed the reverse took place.

The strength of the counter-revolutionary surge of the 1970s did draw some potency from elite conflict, but far more so from a more general adverse reaction to the market forces that were gaining intensity under the Ayub regime.Footnote ⁷⁵ Bhutto undermined the elite politicians who supported Ayub by mobilizing not only urban workers, small business, and intelligentsia, but also, and especially in Punjab, the upper peasantry. As part of the accelerated industrialization drive, industrial labour was not allowed unions and suffered from stagnant real wages. It could hardly be enamoured of newly arisen but overbearing industrial capitalism. Small and medium business, too, was alienated by the disproportionate concessions and subsidies stacked in favour of big business. But it was the agrarian response that proved the most telling. The ‘green revolution’ of the 1960s had squeezed smaller farmers, who could ill afford the credit terms that would enable them to pay for inputs in order to optimize production. A whole host of such investments were required, from high yielding seeds to chemical and mechanical inputs. Expanding use of tractors enabled tenant expropriation and a rapid switch to agricultural capitalism. With the benefits of the ‘green revolution’ clearly passing to larger landholders, and market margins increasingly resting with traders, Punjab witnessed a swing in rural support against the elite segments represented in Ayub's Muslim League. In Sindh, Bhutto sought the support of the entrenched larger landholders, who retained a leadership role in his party despite its populist message, and who were highly perturbed at the rise of Karachi's big business magnates. The watershed elections of 1970 created a transition almost as dramatic as the one achieved by the Congress in 1937. They paved the way for the substantive shift against market forces crafted by Bhutto's Peoples Party, and effectively reversed the private sector led growth sequence of the previous decade.

During the next regime, that of Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s, decision-making and resource allocation remained hostage to the civil-military hierarchy and to co-opted members of the traditional elite. Business remained at bay, and when investment picked up, from 1985, it went predominantly into the staple industry: cotton textiles. Pakistan missed out entirely on the emergent consumer electronics and computer and software trades, in which the global economy was providing expansive opportunities. Again, if in the 1990s the representation of Nawaz Sharif as an adherent of business interests is accepted, then there too the consequences were sobering. Sharif spent a decade in exile, twice as long as his tenures as prime minister, while the triad of military, bureaucracy, and rogue magnates continued unfettered. After the expropriation of the 1970s, business groups remained investment-shy, and a number of business families never gambled on Pakistan's political economy again. A misbegotten class of ‘entrepreneurs’ emerged, conniving with public functionaries and private intermediaries to benefit from a range of contrivances, such as defaulting bank loans and creative bankruptcies, which were clearly inimical to the building of institutions integral to a modern capitalist system. Since 2008, both post-Musharraf civilian governments, under Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif, have shown intensified levels of corruption and money outflows. While domestic investment has flagged, foreign currency holdings of Pakistanis outside the country are said to exceed USD 70 billion, while Pakistanis are among the top three investors in property in the United Arab Emirates.Footnote ⁷⁶

To bolster the triumphal march of the past, non-economic factors that reinforced the counter-revolutionary ethos also remained deeply embedded. Tenacious religious and cultural atavism persisted and indeed appeared to be strengthening. These archaic mentalities and socio-cultural values perhaps posed an even greater challenge than economic and physical factors to the enterprise of ‘development’. The considerable rise of religious extremism not only created dangerous polarization, but remained aggressively hostile and irreconcilable to change and modernity. Its more violent expressions indeed created a state of civil war within the country. The unchecked increase in madrassahs, and the failure of the state to control radicalization, as well as the inability to constrain hate-mongering by extremist clerics, all signified the incapacity to cope with these threats.

Even more deeply atavistic was the continuing power of an unending network of shrines of various proportions and sectarian derivations. These engulfed the people in an aura of irrational superstition and demeaning grave worship, reminiscent of the pantheistic puja from which these converts were supposed to have been redeemed by Islam. Controlled by ‘holy’ castes, and condoned by such euphemisms as ‘sufism’, they represented extreme backwardness and a pre-industrial psyche that required metamorphosis rather than nurturing. The incumbent elite's strenuous reinforcement of these values and practices hardly recalled the reformative religious movements that served as precursors to Europe's own transformations. Moreover, the disarray in public management, with rampant corruption and failure to deliver basic administrative functions, began to seriously call into question the legitimacy of the ‘state’, pushing the people further into hapless superstition and mental escapism.Footnote ⁷⁷

In concluding our analyses of some, though clearly not all, of the various facets of the lineages of retardation, we can perhaps reflect on the parameters for achieving real change, and the obstacles that such a mission faces. How do local, national, regional, and global dimensions affect Pakistan and how are they to be related to, or be understood through, developments in the past?Footnote ⁷⁸ It is our contention that these processes can be analysed in terms of the profound ramifications of the triangular relationship between thwarted nationalism, anarcho-vassalage, and economic counter-revolutions. Their combination has further reinforced strongly embedded elements of retardation that the Pakistani people must struggle to overcome.

From the above it should not be construed that the Pakistani economy is in terminal crisis, or that the political processes are not vibrant. The country shares such problems with many other developing nations, and it has internal strengths that have enabled it to survive and indeed achieve relative performance that is not unimpressive. Despite the great positive attention on India, Pakistan has performed better than that country in most social and economic indicators on a per capita basis. For most of the period since independence, it has enjoyed higher growth rates and per capita exports than India. It has the largest contiguous irrigation system in the world, and is among the top ten global producers in a number of agricultural commodities, with over twenty million hectares of cultivated area. The significant rise in the size of the market over the years sustains an enormous informal sector, the dynamo that actually keeps the country running. A rapidly emerging middle class, more robust relative to India, exercises significant market demand. Recent deepening of economic collaboration with China might bring an infusion of the foreign investment flows that the West, despite seeking major military and human commitments from Pakistan, has not deigned to provide.

Clearly, improved internal mechanisms can greatly enhance the prospects of Pakistan obtaining deliverance from the forces of backwardness that have weighed so heavily upon it. It has the potential of attaining in time the status of a middle-income country, along with the institutional endowments that can consolidate such positioning. A resolution of its problematical contradictions, in order to achieve a roll back of the physical, institutional, and mental architecture of retardation, would require a collective effort no less fundamental than a genuine struggle for national independence. Many will know and feel that such a struggle, over and beyond the nominal independence of 1947, has been deferred for over half a century by the embedded structures of authority, subjugation, and extraction.