PAKISTAN: POLITICAL ECONOMY AND POST-2000 DEVELOPMENTS======2

land was allotted in smallholdings of up to 50 acres, and grantees were chosen not from the

landless rural poor, or the lowly ‘service castes’ in indigenous hierarchy, but from hereditary

landholding castes. Their proprietary rights had been acknowledged by the British in return for

land revenue payments, which were the chief source of state revenue. These were also the

same elements that were being heavily recruited into the British Indian military after 1857, with

the Punjab alone accounting for over half the total army. Sizeable areas were also allocated for

larger landholdings, thereby shoring up the landlord stratum, which served as an essential

intermediary for imperialist rule.

In institutional terms, the authority of both the military and the state bureaucracy were

significantly strengthened in the emergent hydraulic society. Significant landed resources were

reserved for grants to army pensioners and then veterans of the two world wars, as well as for

the breeding of cavalry horses. The native bureaucracy also gained stature from control over

irrigation water, land allotments, and land transfers and mutations; and was heavily embroiled in

rent seeking. The post-1947 dominance of the military and bureaucracy, and the continued

authority of the landlord element leveraging on rich peasant support, were underlined by their

consolidation during colonial rule. By contrast, business groups had also emerged with the

major increase in trade, processing and distribution of agricultural commodities; but their access

to canal irrigated land was limited to auction purchases. Since they were predominantly non-

Muslim in composition, their exit to India in 1947 further emasculated the prospects of the

business segment posing any major challenge to the traditional order. The exclusion of the rural

poor before 1947, from both electoral enfranchisement and occupancy access to landed

resources, also reflected their continued neglect in the structure of state expenditures after

decolonization.

The Pakistani state then continued for the next half century to abide by the political economy

modes established under imperialist tutelage. Arguably, as later developments were to show,

within supposed sovereignty imperialist control remained pivotal in the exercise of authority,

albeit with a shift away from Britain to a new hegemon. For one, a vital consequence of the

British success at maneuvering agricultural colonization to their own political advantage had

been an extremely weak nationalist stimulus in the region that became Pakistan. Only in the

frontier province did a political grouping, led by Ghaffar Khan and allied to the Indian National

Congress, displayed nationalist sentiments and achieved electoral success. Significantly, in

Pakistan Ghaffar Khan was humiliated, imprisoned and exiled. In Punjab and Sindh, the British