Abstract
Historically speaking, the feudal lords lost their politico-economic ascendancy in Europe and North America to an ambitious, highly literate, and urban-based middle class, forerunner of modern Western civilisation. In predominantly agrarian societies elsewhere, especially in colonies like the South Asian sub-continent, the emergence of a bourgeoisie was a slow and largely state-dependent process.1 The colonial state harboured suspicions towards the professional elites and therefore coopted the landed elites2 and attempted to ensure their preservation as regional potentates. South Asia essentially remained segmentary due to a marriage of convenience among the tripolar forces of the land-holding tribal, feudal and imperial hierarchies. The consolidation of ruralisation under the Raj reflected the very imbalance in the demographic realities of the sub-continent where threequarters of its population lived in villages depending on agriculture. Industrialisation and the resultant urbanisation had been relatively recent developments in British India. Cross-border migration in 1947, ambitious plans for rapid industrialisation, mechanised agriculture leading to the green revolution of the 1960s, migration to the UK and, in the 1970s, to the oil-rich Gulf states, were all decisive factors in the development of South Asian mobility. Job opportunities and better civic facilities attracted peasant and tribal communities to the cities and, especially in the 1980s, new socio-political forces and tensions were unleashed.3
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Notes
Historians remain divided on the evolution of capitalist economies in early modern South Asia. For a long time, urbanisation and the growth of bourgeois nomenclature were attributed to Western influences until in the 1980s new research produced convincing alternative explanations. The growth of small towns in the sub-continent was highlighted as a region-specific development. The eurocentric view was challenged by an emphasis on indigenous evolution without exaggerating the development. For an interesting dialogue on related issues raised by Immanuel Wallerstein, David Washbrook and Chris Bailey, see Sugata Bose (ed.), South Asia and World Capitalism, Delhi, 1990.
For details, see Thomas R. Metcalf, Land, Landlords, and the British Raj: Northern India in the Nineteenth Century, Berkeley, 1979.
‘The feudals have always survived the game because, largely due to their own deliberate suppression of education, no leading politician has ever emerged from the lower or even middle classes. While politics remains the preserve of the rich, living insulated lives from the country’s myriad problems and educated in an alien context, it is hard to see how the needs of ordinary people can be truly represented. Ironically, in his social background, General Zia was perhaps the most representative if least legitimate of all Pakistan’s rulers. The only election to have been fought (and won) on economic slogans was that of 1970, and the man calling “roti, kapra aur makan” was a wealthy zamindar* (Christina Lamb, Waiting for Allah. Pakistan’s Struggle for Democracy, London, 1991, p. 291).
The ruling dynasties of Pakistan have been simply land-based. It is not uncommon to meet former graduates of prominent Western universities belonging to aristocratic families unabashedly bragging about their land possessions. An Oxford-educated Benazir Bhutto went to great lengths to describe the ancestral land-holdings in her autobiography: ‘Before the first land reforms in 1958, the Bhuttos were among the largest employers of agricultural workers in the province. Our lands like those of other landowners in Sindh were measured in square miles, not acres. As children we loved to hear the story of the amazement of Charles Napier, the British conqueror of Sindh in 1843. “Whose lands are these?” he reportedly asked his driver as he toured the province. “Bhutto’s lands”, came the inevitable response. ”Wake me up when we are off Bhutto’s lands”, he ordered. He was surprised when some time later he woke up on his own. “Who owns this land?” he asked. “Bhutto,” the driver repeated. Napier became famous for his dispatch in Latin to the British military command after he conquered the province: “Peccavi -I have sinned.” As children we thought it a confession, not a pun’ (Benazir Bhutto, Daughter of the East, London, 1988, p. 26).
There are frequent commentaries in the Pakistani vernacular press on such cross-regional alliances. More recently, many Pakistani and foreign analysts have begun studying matrimonial linkages among the ‘provincial’ landed elites. For example, see Craig Baxter, ‘Union or Partition: Some Aspects of Politics in the Punjab, 1936–1945’, in Lawrence Ziring, et al. (eds), Pakistan: The Long View, Durham, 1977;
and, Wakeel Anjum, Siyasat Kay Firoan (literally, ‘The Pharoahs of Polities’), Lahore, 1993.
‘When the tiny world of the upper classes has such a large hand in running the country, genealogy becomes politics. A foreigner I know who is interested principally in government has taken up family trees as a sideline. He showed me his masterpiece — Pakistan on a single sheet of paper in the 1960s. Ayub Khan, the president, is at the centre … From Ayub Khan, it is two steps to the Haroons, the country’s most prominent newspaper-owning family, one of whom is a minister of Zia’s; one step away is General Yacoub Khan, Zia’s brilliant foreign minister and a member of one of the old Indian princely families. Starting again from Ayub, it is two steps to the Qureshis, and they are directly, linked to the families of Abida Hussein and Fakr Imam: that bit of web ties up three of the most important political forces in Punjab’ (Emma Duncan, Breaking The Curfew. A Political Journey Through Pakistan, London, 1989, p. 52).
For example, Ayub Khan married his sons into industrial families of the NWFP and his daughter wedded the son of the Wali of Swat, whose daughter was married off to a senior bureaucrat. The bureaucrat, despite his non- Pushtun origins, eventually married off his own daughter to the son of a Punjabi landlord — a one-time minister. Feudal dynasties like the Hayats would venture into non-feudal yet industrial or services’ magnates such as the Durranis. Brigadier (retd) Assad Durrani accumulated wealth and held important positions after his military retirement. One of his daughters, while still married, flirted with Ghulam Mustafa Khar and eventually married him. Khar, a landlord from Muzzaffargarh, Southwestern Punjab, eventually left her for younger women. In her autobiography, where she narrates the excesses of her former husband, she also notes various opinions about her father working for the CIA in the early 1970s. Brigadier Durrani was then heading the state-owned Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) and allowed American intelligence agents to use its aircraft for espionage over China. For details, see Tehmina Durrani, My Feudal Lord, Lahore, 1991.
There are a number of case-studies to illustrate the point. A constituency of the Attock district in Punjab has been hereditary for the Pir of Makhad, Lai Shah, a loyal British subject. His disciples, thanks to illiteracy and superstition, guaranteed his election to the Punjab Legislative Assembly. After his death, his playboy son and heir, Safi ud-Din, cashed in on his father’s constituency exploiting his ‘spiritual’ constituencies. Throughout his career in the various assemblies, he is known to have uttered no single word except for ‘yes’ to support any given government of the time. On the eve of elections, he would simply call the local notables and ‘touts’ to his native Makhad, shower them with money and jeeps, and ask them to tell his murids who to vote for. Most of the voters would never see the candidate and there was no need to do so. On some occasions, the rural illiterate folk would be seen kissing the jeeps of the Pir out of reverence. The Pir lived in cities pursuing his favourite pastimes and there was no scarcity of official patronage. Pakistan’s tribalism served both the suitors and the supporters. The story of the Pir of Pagara, the most powerful pir in Pakistan is not very different. See Sarah F. D. Ansari, Sufi Saints and State Power. The Pirs of Sind, 1843–1947, Cambridge, 1992;
and H. T. Lambrick, The Terrorist, London, 1972.
With a few exceptions, these feudalists are alleged to have double standards. Their agents and local intermediaries intimidate the peasants and artisans. During the course of the present study, many instances of repression, kidnap and forcible ejection from property were reported in various rural constituencies of Mansoor Hayat Tamman. In Sindh, Southwestern Punjab and tribal-rural areas of the NWFP and Balochistan the conditions of sharecroppers and tenants are extremely sub-human. For instance, the monthslong feuds between the Bugtis and Raisanis in Balochistan had already cost scores of lives in 1994–95. In addition to old-time tribal rivalries, their chieftains have been disputing over electoral contests and results. ‘In the labyrinthine world of Balochistan’s tribal politics, it is sometimes hard to tell the reasons behind a particular incident of bloodletting … at the back of it all is a ruthless race for power and the ego of countless chieftains, big and small, trying to hold on to their domains in an increasingly fragmenting social order’ (Massoud Ansari, The Politics of Vendetta’, The Herald September 1994, p. 52).
For details see, M. Rafique Afzal, Party Politics in Pakistan, 1947–1958, vol. I, Islamabad, 1986 (reprint);
also Khalid B. Sayeed, ‘Collapse of Parliamentary Democracy in Pakistan’, The Middle East Journal, 13 (4), 1959, p. 393.
Feroz Khan Noon, From Memory, Lahore, 1966,
as quoted in Asaf Hussain, Elite Politics in an Ideological State. The Case of Pakistan, Folkestone, Kent, 1979, p. 53.
Report of the Government Hari Enquiry Committee, p. 7. Some peasants might be self-sufficient by virtue of a land-holding or other means of income. But, in general, ‘villages in Pakistan are not really subject to the law of the land’. See H. H. Kizilbash, ‘Local Government: Democracy at the Capital and Autocracy in the Villages’, Pakistan Economic and Social Review, XI (1), Spring 1973, pp. 104–24.
For more studies on rural communities, see, Z. Eglar, A Punjabi Village in Pakistan, New York, 1960;
and Saghir Ahmed, Class and Power in a Punjab Village, New York, 1977.
Herbert Feldman, Revolution in Pakistan, London, 1967, p. 59.
Khalid B. Sayeed, ‘Pakistan’s Constitutional Autocracy’, Pacific Affairs, XXVI (4) Winter 1963–64, p. 365.
Quoted in Tariq Ali, Pakistan: Military Rule or People’s Power, London, 1970, pp. 95–6.
M.G. Weinbaum, ‘The March 1977 Elections in Pakistan: Where Everyone Lost’, Asian Survey, XXII (7), July 1977, p. 604.
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© 1997 Iftikhar H. Malik
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Malik, I.H. (1997). Feudalists in Politics: Trans-Regional Elitist Alliance. In: State and Civil Society in Pakistan. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376298_5
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