By Rafia Zakaria
Wednesday, 01 Sep, 2010


On Aug 28, the New York Times published an article entitled ‘Upstarts chip away at power of Pakistani elite’. The piece profiled Jamshed Dasti, a parliamentarian from Muzaffargarh district in southern Punjab, who has managed to rise in politics despite the fact that he is not a member of the area’s feudal elite.

Painting Dasti as representative of an emerging reality, the article suggested that growing trends of urbanisation have led to a decrease in feudal elites in parliament, whose share of power shrank from 42 per cent in 1970 to 25 per cent in 2008.

The hopeful tone is welcome, particularly after reportage for nearly five weeks about the flood crisis. News outlets are expectedly in search of some feel-good stories that can put an optimistic spin on an otherwise markedly grim catastrophe. And in the Pakistani context, what better reprieve than the suggestion that the ubiquitous feudal elites, in whose vice-like grasp Pakistan has languished for decades, are now a disappearing breed?

The overture comes at a time when some notable feudals have been posturing unabashedly on the pages of various international newspapers and television stations. For those Pakistanis forced to watch as the international media gullibly consumes ‘expert’ opinions given by various large landowners whose estates enslave many of the poor in whose name they are begging the international community for aid, the news of their incipient decline is welcome indeed.

However, prior to organising a gala celebrating the end of feudal politics in Pakistan, it is worth examining some of the hopeful generalisations and assumptions contained in the NYT article. The first is the assertion that the expansion of urbanisation and the availability of jobs in construction and industry have precipitated a decline of the politics of feudalism. Urbanisation may indeed be a growing phenomenon in Pakistan, but whether this has led to the decline of feudal politics is debatable.

A case in point is of course that of Karachi. Years ago, when the MQM emerged on the political scene with its cadre of middle-class leaders that avowedly eschewed the politics of property-based fiefdoms, many would have put much stock in the assertion. The possibility of an emerging urban meritocracy not tied to family connections and complex interchanges of favours seemed almost within grasp. However, the MQM experiment, while promising in its theoretic disavowal of pedigree-based politics, has in practice been perceived as tied to land politics as the feudal politics of yore.

If not concerned with holding on to land, the project of amassing increasingly large urban land holdings through proliferating urban mafias has stymied the promise of purely merit-based politics.

Furthermore, the failure of the group to expand its appeal beyond its initial ethnic construction has suggested that while merit-based politics may be appealing on paper, they do not translate into victories at the ballot box when unsupported by the traditional legacies of family loyalty to a feudal benefactor.

The announcement of the approaching demise of feudal politics then sounds premature, a more likely thesis being the transformation of feudal politics into new-fangled forms that may be quite as unjust but harder to incriminate.

One example of this is the transformation of what used to simply be the feudal elite into the ‘military and industrialist feudal elite’. Simply put, feudal families have expended much effort on expanding ties with emergent industrialist and military families. Generals’ daughters are marrying feudal sons and their offspring are setting up corporate farms that supply raw materials to their own industries.

More pointedly, as has now been revealed in several publications including Ayesha Siddiqa’s book Military Inc, the practice of giving land grants to generals in the Pakistani military has allowed many to put together awe-inspiring estates spanning thousands of acres. These practices again show a reliance on the politics of land as a means of taking over and controlling political power, be it through the military or the ballot box.

The hope represented by the rise of a person like Jamshed Dasti is a valued commodity in these troubled times. His populism is attractive and his imperfections are public as seen in lack of college education. The very visibility of his flaws casts him as a working man’s hero, quite different from the suave feudal adept at conversing with naïve westerners before going back to whipping serfs on his farm.

However, if the factors mentioned above are considered resolutely, Dasti represents not an emerging norm but a valued anomaly. The problem of feudalism in Pakistan is not merely the existence of large landholdings that determine territorial control but also the structural arrangement of politics. The practice of amassing land, be it by urban political groups or the military, suggests that this style of signalling power is as entrenched in structural concerns as it is in the actual sin of large swathes of land being owned by a few.

Add to this the sly hypocrisy of a feudal class, that has aligned itself with competing powers such as industrialists and military generals and you have a concentrated and complex elite that has become a master of co-opting any competing interest.

These are dismal truths, ones that are particularly hard to digest at a time when the plight of peasants and their extreme poverty are in such constant focus. The need for hope is great, but the potential for overturning a system that is so deeply rooted seems limited. Men such as Dasti might have made it this far but their political future is uncertain at best. Unless the experience of cumulative crises — the floods, increasing inflation, unending terrorism etc — is enough to rally the poorest against the meagre assurances that the feudal system provides, the view that the reign of feudalism may be drawing to a close is naïve, even though understandable.

The writer is a US-based attorney teaching constitutional history and political philosophy.


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