Pakistan: A Hard Country (14 page)
On the side of social and economic change, however, Bhutto acted rapidly and radical y. In 1972, al major industries and banks were nationalized. This created a hostility to the PPP on the part of the capitalist classes which has continued long after the PPP abandoned every shred of real left-wing economics, and which largely explains business support for the PPP’s opponents in the new Muslim League.
Much more importantly, nationalization was economical y disastrous.
The move led to a flood of capital flight from Pakistan and a drastic fal in private investment for which the Pakistani state did not have the resources to compensate. Private investment in manufacturing dropped from an average of Rs992 mil ion in 1960 – 65 to Rs682
mil ion in 1971 – 6, while public investment rose only from Rs57 mil ion to Rs115 mil ion. By 1974 – 7, average economic growth per year had plunged to 2.7 per cent, less than the annual growth of population. This compared to average annual growth of 6.8 per cent in 1959 – 69, under Ayub Khan. Overal , Bhutto’s populist economic strategy was therefore a disaster from which it took Pakistan an entire generation to recover.
This was partly because state control of the large-scale commercial economy proved such a lucrative source of political patronage that for a long time it was continued in several areas by succeeding administrations. Direction of the state companies was handed over as patronage to PPP supporters from inside and outside the bureaucracy, a task at which they proved both incompetent and corrupt. Nationalization contained a provision for partial workers’
control in the form of workers’ committees which were supposed to work together with management. In practice these proved largely a dead letter. Over the succeeding decades, both trade union power and worker commitment to the PPP eroded, until by 2009 they were hardly visible in most sectors.
Despite the genuine radicalism of Bhutto’s measures in these areas, they did not go far enough for the left-wing radicals within the PPP. The socialist finance minister Mubashir Hasan had wanted the nationalization of urban land, and the col ectivization of agriculture – something that would have led to counter-revolution and bloody civil war across the country. When Bhutto reformed his cabinet in October 1974, Dr Hasan and other left-wingers were excluded, and replaced by an influx of ‘feudal’ landowners who had ral ied to the PPP in the hope of patronage, especial y in the nationalized industries.
In the field of land reform, Bhutto was a good deal less radical than in the area of industry – but stil more radical than any other Pakistani administration but Ayub’s. By a law of 1972, ceilings for landownership were reduced to 150 acres of irrigated land and to 300 acres of unirrigated land, from 500 and 1,000 acres, respectively, under Ayub’s land reform; stil big farms by Pakistani standards, but nothing resembling the huge estates of Pakistan in the past, or indeed of Britain and America today.
This reform did indeed push agriculture in northern Punjab further in the direction of medium-sized commercial farming; and in Punjab and the NWFP, many of the great ‘feudal’ political families of today derive their wealth not from agricultural land, but from urban rentals; for many noble families either had patches of land around the edges of the old cities, with vil as, orchards and pleasure gardens, or were wise enough to invest agricultural profits in urban land; and ten acres covered with houses and shops is easily worth a hundred times the same acreage in the countryside.
In much of Pakistan, however, Bhutto’s land reform was to a great extent subverted. Above al , great landowners would on paper distribute parts of their land to junior relatives and retainers, rewarding them with a share of the proceeds while in practice continuing to control them. Especial y in Sindh and southern Punjab, the kinship system yet again worked as a critical element of what has wrongly been cal ed ‘feudal’ power. Final y, and inevitably, Bhutto’s reform turned a blind eye to many of the holdings of Bhutto’s own landowning supporters, and own family. My travels with Bhutto’s cousin (and governor and later chief minister of Sindh under Bhutto), Sardar Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, wil be described in Chapter 8. He is a magnificent figure, a splendid representative of his class and caste – and about as much of a radical agrarian reformer as the Earl of Northumberland c.1300 CE.
Land reform faltered stil more towards the end of Bhutto’s administration, as his power crumbled, his party split, and he became more and more dependent on sections of the old landowning elites to keep him in power – a pattern which, as already argued, echoed the experience of Ayub and prefigured that of Zia-ul-Haq and Musharraf.
Growing reliance on the landowning elites reflected Bhutto’s failure to consolidate his power through the creation of a disciplined, organized mass party and an effective seizure of the mechanisms of state coercion. Instead, repression under Bhutto took the form of sporadic terror against individual opponents and their families – something that only succeeded in infuriating the state establishment and the other political parties, without breaking their power.
Bhutto was wel aware of the need to create a disciplined cadre party. Ironical y enough, he had given precisely this advice to Ayub Khan when he was serving in his government (and Bhutto’s plans for the PPP in some ways echoed Ayub’s hopes for Basic Democracy).
But to create such a party across Pakistan it would have been necessary to pay and to motivate its local cadres in such a way as to make them a power in their own right, and independent of local social and economic power structures. That has never been possible in Pakistan, because the state is too poor and weak, and local bosses, kinship groups and religious affiliations are immensely strong.
Moreover, no party in Pakistan has been able to generate the ideological fervour required to turn its cadres into purely obedient and disciplined servants.
The only exceptions are the Jamaat Islami and the Mohajir Qaumi Movement – and for reasons that wil be explored in Chapters 6 and 8, they have only been able to do this on a local basis. Bhutto’s failure to create a disciplined party also meant that local PPP leaders used the breakdown of state authority to set up their own private armed groups and local fiefdoms, and to engage in violent turf battles with each other as wel as with the PPP’s opponents.
Lacking an effective mass party with real control over society, Bhutto was forced back on instruments of state control. He managed to a great extent to bend the bureaucracy and judiciary to his wil , though in the process causing personal hatred which contributed to his death.
The police were another matter. As successive Pakistani leaders have found – including in the struggle against the Taleban – the Pakistani police, though often savage enough on an individual basis, are an extremely unreliable force when it comes to mass repression. One reason for this is sheer laziness, exacerbated by bad pay. ‘Would you risk your life and run around in this heat for the pay we get?’ was the response of many policemen to whom I suggested a more active approach to fighting crime, and, as in the rest of South Asia, it often seemed to me that ‘Brutality Tempered by Torpor’ wouldn’t be a bad motto for the force as a whole.
More importantly, from a force under the British which was to some extent independent of society and under state control, the Pakistani police at ground level had already become a force colonized by society; that is to say, whose officers and men as often as not were working in al iance with local kinship groups, landowners and urban bosses, classes which they natural y therefore were very unwil ing to attack.
Bhutto therefore set up his own paramilitary group, the Federal Security Force (FSF), staffed by PPP loyalists drawn from the most thuggish elements of the police and military; and by doing so, he can be said to have signed his own death warrant. It is not clear whether Bhutto gave specific orders to this force concerning the savage victimization of opponents and their families, but at the very least he played the role of Henry I concerning the murder of Thomas à Becket (‘Who wil rid me of this troublesome priest?’).
On the other hand, just as the PPP was not the Soviet or Chinese Communist Party, so the FSF was not the NKVD. It was not remotely strong enough to terrorize Pakistani society as a whole into submission. It was, however, strong and vicious enough to raise hatred of Bhutto in sections of the elite to a degree not seen of any Pakistani ruler before or since. Hence in part the difference between Bhutto’s fate and that of Ayub, Musharraf and Nawaz Sharif when they were overthrown. Ayub was al owed to live on in peaceful retirement in Pakistan; Sharif was eventual y permitted to go into exile with his family fortune intact, and later returned to politics.
Zia would have al owed Bhutto to take the same path into exile; but when the deposed leader made it clear that he was determined to return to power, and when mass ral ies made it clear that he had a real chance of being reelected, both Zia himself and al the leading figures who had helped bring Bhutto down knew very wel what would happen to them, and more importantly their families, if he did in fact return to office. Bhutto’s execution removed that threat, and by its very uniqueness stands as a reminder to Pakistani leaders of Machiavel i’s lesson that in many societies men wil far more easily forget an injury to their interests and even their persons than an assault on their honour.
ZIA-UL-HAQ
It was easy for Bhutto’s executioner and successor Zia-ul-Haq to portray his administration as the antithesis of Bhutto’s, since he himself was Bhutto’s personal antithesis. Zia was Pakistan’s first ruler from the middle class, born into the family of a junior British civil servant from east Punjab. Zia himself entered the officer corps of the British Indian army in the Second World War. In 1947 his family became refugees from India, something that strongly marked his world view. In sharp contrast not only to Bhutto but to Pakistan’s other military rulers to date, he was a deeply pious Muslim.
Unlike both Bhutto and his military predecessor Ayub and successor Musharraf, Zia attempted to change Pakistan along Islamist lines. This reflected not only Zia’s own profound personal religious convictions, but also a nationalist belief (which has been shared by some more secular figures within the military and civilian establishment) that religion is the only force which can strengthen Pakistani nationalism and national identity, keep Pakistan from disintegrating, and motivate its people to give honest and dedicated service to the nation and society.
In most of his goals, however, Zia failed as completely as Bhutto and Musharraf, despite the harshly authoritarian character of much of his rule. He thereby demonstrated once more the underlying and perennial weakness of the Pakistani state, even at its most dictatorial. Pakistani political and social culture was not transformed along official Islamic lines; in fact, Zia’s Islamizing measures proved general y superficial (though intermittently very ugly, especial y as far as women were concerned) and were eventual y largely reversed by Musharraf.
Soon after Zia’s death in 1988, a woman lawyer in Lahore, Shireen Masoud, told me that, though she had loathed Zia’s regime, most of the Western coverage, reflecting in turn Pakistani liberal opinion, had greatly overestimated its impact on Pakistani society.
Zia changed a lot less than people think. After al , as far as ordinary people are concerned, this was already a very conservative society, and he didn’t make it more so. Feminists complain about the Hadood Ordinances, and rightly, but most people have always imposed such rules in their own families and vil ages. As to the elites, they have gone on living just as they always did, drinking whisky and going around unveiled.
This isn’t Iran – Zia was a very religious man himself and also not from the elites so he probably would have liked to crack down on this kind of thing, but in the end he had to keep enough of the elites happy. The one area where he real y did change things and force religion down our throats night and day was on state TV and radio – but that’s because it was the only place that he real y could control.16
No new dedicated and religiously minded elite emerged. Instead, Zia, like his predecessors and successors, found himself making deals with the same old elites. Pakistani nationalism was not strengthened, and the state did not grow stronger.
Like the military’s Inter-Services Intel igence (ISI), which was responsible for distributing arms, money and training to the Mujahidin, the Islamist parties in Pakistan also profited enormously from the money directed to helping the Afghan jihad, a good deal of which was directed via them. In other ways, however, they were dissatisfied with Zia’s rule. They had hated Bhutto, and Zia’s Islamization programme ought to have made them his natural al ies; but both the administration and the Islamists were too weak, and too different in their agendas, to be able to create a strong foundation for a new kind of Pakistani state.
General Zia declared Pakistan to be an Islamic state. He reversed Ayub’s measures limiting the role of Islam in the state, and greatly extended the formal Islamizing measures which Bhutto had adopted in a (vain) attempt to appeal to the Islamist parties. However, Zia conceived his Islamization programme as top-down, and almost entirely in terms of strengthening state power through an increase in the disciplinary aspects of Shariah law. Meanwhile, throughout the state services and society in general, honesty, morality and duty were to be strengthened through the preaching of religion. Islamic ideas of the promotion of social justice and social welfare, and of encouraging people to organize themselves to seek these goals – key to the success of Islamist politics elsewhere in the Muslim world – were almost entirely absent; inevitably so given the essential y authoritarian cast of Zia’s mind and strategy.