Daily Times

S Akhbar Zaidi writes in his 2014 paper, “Rethinking Political Economy in Pakistan,” that Hamza Alavi, being the precocious theorist on Pakistani statehood, left some significant areas under which all the underlying forces of state rest. Simply put, Hamza Alavi’s notion is based on the nexus of power that exists in Pakistan between the military, landlords, and metropolitan capital. Building on this, Alavi concluded that the colonial legacy has made Pakistan an overdeveloped state presiding over an undeveloped or underdeveloped society. Alavi’s concept of state was a structuralist concept that was fraught with shortcomings.

Alavi mentioned a tripartite of three propertied classes—landlords, industrialists, and metropolitan or foreign capital—that has kept what can be called Pakistan’s political settlement. Alavi’s theory of the Pakistani state is no more illustrative in understanding the contemporary political settlement of Pakistan. His prime emphasis was on the military-bureaucratic oligarchy and their nexus to rule Pakistan from above, completely ignoring the class element in this nexus.

Akhbar Zaidi draws on Aasim Sajjad Akhthar’s research on the state-society complex in Pakistan. Asim writes that indubitably Alavi offered us much insight into colonial legacy and the state that they left behind. However, the gaping hole in his theoretical treatise is the lack of attention paid to the politics of the subordinate classes. Agreeing with Akhthar, Zaidi writes that the complete absence of class dynamics while formulating the theory of superstructure is questionable. Akhtar brings a new idea of “politics of commonsense,” which is predicated upon the notion that the state controls society through a mixture of dominance and consent. With this politics of common sense, people unanimously accept the norm of power articulated in Pakistan, and this hinders or brings to a halt the possibility of popular politics and resistance. Akhtar writes: “The existing configuration of power is reproduced as a function of both dominance and consent.” Zaidi writes Alavi’s approach was from above, while Akhthar’s approach is from below. Akhthar, by bringing in the subordinate classes as well as groups resisting the nature of the state, adds value to this debate of state theorization.

The class factor is always ignored in ethnic politics.

Akhtar writes about the post-Bhutto conjuncture and maintains that a politics of common sense informs Pakistani society. He means by “politics of common sense” silence from the people of Pakistan over the exploitation and expropriation of the state. People ascribe to the patronage-based rules enacted by the military bureaucracy. This patronage-based system takes energy from people to confront, oppose, or resist it.

Moreover, Akhthar further adds that to counter this hegemonic system, the subordinate classes will have to adopt and ascribe to a politics of resistance to displace the politics of common sense. Zaidi further provides markers by looking at classes, institutions, and structures. He adds that in Pakistani intellectual society, there is a dearth of scholarship on class and its relevance to society. In Pakistani institutions, feudal and the military is more debated than classes.

He also laments that Pakistan has been premised on notions of Islam. Pakistan is always analysed and studied through a single category, which is Islam as if no other identity or sense of existence existed for it to be picked, contends Zaidi. He says it is the Islam of 9/11 that is at the centre of the debate vis-à-vis Pakistan. This spectrum is important, but there are some other facets as well, i.e., geography, money, tribal loyalties, classes, and social formation, which need to be incorporated into the Pakistan debate.

The same goes for ethnic politics, as the class factor is always ignored in ethnic politics.

Who holds power in Pakistan? This question meets with an abrupt answer, which is military. But Zaidi challenges this and writes that the military in Pakistan is no longer all-powerful, as it used to be in the 1960s. Ever since 2007, this has changed with the lawyers’ movement. In 2007, when President Musharraf dismissed the chief justice of the Supreme Court, there was a massive clamour from lawyers for the reinstatement of the chief justice. Zaid says this was the first time a civilian institution challenged the military’s hegemony.

Similarly, as Ziadi notes, the three flagship pillars of the state—the parliament, the judiciary, and the media—became very ardent in their approach to asserting themselves in the face of the military’s might. He mentions also the Asghar Khan case, in which a retired air marshal of the Pakistan Air Force filed a petition against the involvement of the military and ISI in the elections of 1990. It is also important to mention that Musharaf was in jail from May to November of 2013. On the formalization of the economy, Zaidi writes that it is not just the economy that is grossly informalized, but the state’s main instrument that determines who wields power, the ability to do violence, has been parcelled out, informalized, and localised. He adds that power rests with local squads, goons, militias, and groups that broadly can be called the Taliban. This does not stop here since essential services such as education, health, and security are privatised and lie beyond the purview of the state to dispense these services to its citizens.

As Zaidi writes, no force should act as a counter-hegemonic force. He says while there is opposition to the state, this opposition is led by the middle class and not by the working class, which is the real force to resist the hegemony of the state. The presence of working-class resistance was felt in Pakistan until the 1970s, but onwards there is a blinding absence of this force.

The writer is a student, based in Turbat. He Tweets at @shahabakram6 and can be reached at shahabakram0852@gmail.com