Lacking even the meagre comfort of an after-dinner cognac to calm their nerves, the assembled billionaires listened silently as their guest’s rage washed over the gathering. The Islamic punishment for a mere thief, the Karachi Chamber of Commerce was told in 1986, was the amputation of his hands. The tax-evader, though, was committing a crime against the State, and his “arm must be cut off.” The menace was real: The Groucho-moustached General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq had, after all, hanged a prime minister.
There was one thing the military ruler neglected to share with his audience: Like the vast majority of lawmakers and elites in Pakistan, General Zia had never troubled himself filing a tax return.
Earlier this week, a court suspended former Prime Minister Imran Khan’s conviction for misappropriating expensive State gifts while in office. Long legal struggles remain in multiple corruption cases, but Imran is just one of a long, disquieting list: Benazir Bhutto, her husband Asif Ali Zardari, Nawaz Sharif and Yusuf Raza Gilani all faced prosecution for embezzling millions.
The sociologist Charles Tilly famously observed many decades ago that the nation-state itself was “our largest example of organised crime”: The establishment of cooperative ties among political and business elites, he noted, often involved corruption and coercion. The success of the United States, United Kingdom, South Korea, Taiwan and China involved outright criminality, historian Renate Bridenthal has shown.
For Pakistan, though, this process of elite consolidation has ended with the fracturing of its polity and the choking of its economy. This did not happen because its politicians were greedier than those elsewhere in the world. The answers lie, instead, in the distorting influence of the military and the impunity the Generals have long enjoyed.
Institutionalising loot
From the outset, pillage was a key tool of nation-building, as Pakistan’s elites sought to mobilise the resources they needed to establish power in a new, fragmented country. Local notables in Punjab scrambled to seize lands left behind by Hindus and Sikhs by forging paperwork and claiming to be Partition refugees. Karachi’s Special Police Establishment, a federal anti-corruption force set up in 1948, discovered civil servants had misappropriated some 50 significant properties left behind by refugees.
The historians William Gould, Taylor Sherman and Sarah Ansari have argued that the crisis had, in fact, begun on the cusp of Independence, when wartime food shortages created a black market. The Imperial government responded with mandatory food procurement, which engendered powerful black markets.
Field Marshal Muhammad Ayub Khan’s military regime, which seized power in 1958, succeeded in ironing out the more egregious cases of Partition-related fraud and cracked down on corruption in the bureaucracy. The larger problems of enhancing tax revenues, and widening the social base of economic activity, however, eluded him.
Little institutional capacity existed, for one, to address white-collar crime, historian Ilhan Niaz has recorded. From 1948 to 1966, just 102 officers of Pakistan’s federal government were convicted for corruption-related offences—numbers too small to act as a deterrent.
The military, moreover, soon found itself confronting an even more difficult kind of institutional corruption. According to historian Ayesha Jalal, estimates suggested that agricultural land in Punjab and Sindh was concentrated in the hands of just a few large landlords. Eighty feudal families dominated the country’s resources, retarding its transition to a genuinely modern economy.
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A Land Reform Commission formed by the military regime underlined the need to “eradicate the feudalistic elements.” The commission, though, also called for “minimum necessary disturbance of the social edifice.” Ayub’s government operated what was known as Basic Democracy, using local notables and elites to buttress its legitimacy. The military wasn’t looking to rock the boat.
Large numbers of military commanders, political scientist Khalid B. Sayeed noted at the time, themselves came from prominent landholding families. The Generals were also embedded in private businesses. Although land-ceiling laws were announced, permitting a maximum holding of 500 acres of irrigated land, elites were prepared—they simply bypassed the laws by parcelling out holdings among kin.
Empire-era policies also encouraged the concentration of economic power in the hands of the military. Ever since the 1857 rebellion, colonial authorities had used land grants to win the loyalty of landed elites and the military. This practice continued in independent Pakistan. The social scientist Raymond More recorded in 1967 that “over 300,000 acres of land have been made available in the Sind [Sindh], plus rich acreage along the Indian frontier.”
For Major-Generals and above, there was an allotment of 240 acres, while Brigadiers and Colonels were entitled to 150 acres. Lieutenant-Colonels received 124 acres, Majors and Lieutenants 100 acres, and Junior Commissioned Officers 64 acres.
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Socialism, Islamism, corruption
The charismatic Zulfikar Ali Bhutto came to power in 1971, promising to eradicate feudalism. Like his predecessor, Zulfikar attempted to reform landholding. In some areas, though, armed militia of landlords physically evicted tenants from lands newly granted to them by the State. The most thorough redistribution of land, economist Ronald Herring recorded, took place in Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province and not prosperous Punjab and Sindh.
Zulfikar’s efforts to nationalise the country’s key industries and banks, though, ended in disaster. The production of key resources like cotton collapsed. Lending from public-sector banks was made for political considerations, and elite borrowers often neglected to repay their debts. Zulfikar, moreover, had no interest in institutional reform of the bureaucracy and police.
The pious, religious-leaning middle class became increasingly alienated from the People’s Party of Pakistan government—opening the way for the military coup that toppled Zukfikar’s rule.
Zia was representative, among other things, of the growing power of Calvinistic elements in society. The great landed families of Punjab, like the Noons and Tiwanis, had acquired the polish and pretensions that came from long associations with imperial power. The Arain small cultivators, from whom Zia hailed, had prospered.
“Afternoon tea parties, partridge shoots, or polo are not associated with Arains,” the anthropologist Akbar Ahmed dourly observed in 1986, with Zia still in power. “Nor does he waste his energies on dancing girls, or drunken evenings listening to poetry, or numerous marriages, a pastime of landed gentry.”
Like his predecessors, though, Zia showed no interest in institutional reform. The General instead used patronage to incentivise clients and collaborators. Former PM Nawaz’s Ittefaq Group expanded dramatically during this period, political scientist Ayesha Siddiqa has observed. Zia reversed Zulfikar’s nationalisation programme but expanded the military’s direct involvement in the economy.
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Feudalism in fatigues
Zia’s legacies would include military-owned conglomerates that produced cement, bred horses, and ran educational institutions. For all practical purposes, a new feudal elite emerged—wearing combat fatigues. General Ayub and his military chief, General Muhammad Musa, received 247 acres in agricultural lands. General Pervez Musharraf received eight commercial and residential properties. Former army chief Qamar Javed Bajwa was granted several real-estate assets, too.
Entrenched in office with the support of the military, political leaders had little interest in challenging the privileges of the military. The military, in turn, often used corruption allegations to cut politicians to size, but did nothing to bring about institutional reform. From 1961 to 1980, research economist Muneeb Sikander noted, Pakistan’s economy far outstripped India’s.
The real problem underlying Pakistan’s corruption crisis is that the military has distorted its politics, creating and managing clients instead of allowing an open, competitive political system to emerge. That, in turn, has ensured little accountability in the system with no incentives for change.
Like the prosecutions of so many leaders before him, the assault on Imran will almost certainly portend little for Pakistan. There is no way out of the mire in which the country is bogged down, until new political forces emerge that can drain the swamps.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)