PAKISTAN: POLITICAL ECONOMY AND POST-2000 DEVELOPMENTS---3

aligned landlord nominees of the upper peasantry continued to dominate the provincial

legislatures right up till decolonization, leading thereby to a continuity of dependent

authoritarianism into Pakistan. By contrast, the Congress had severed this nexus with the 1936

elections in the area that became India, and it thence assumed rulership for the next half

century in a democratic Indian state that could espouse neutrality. The notion of ‘delayed

nationalism’ should therefore be noted, as it has continued to play an integral role in Pakistan’s

political economy.

Thus, the weakness of nationalist organization allowed those forces aligned against democracy

to remain dominant in the new country. This position could not, however, have been secured

without continued acquiescence to western power, a relationship that was to articulate

sequentially in the coming decades. The denial of democracy to the people was evidenced

through the failure to hold elections in the first decade, characterized by deinstitutionalized and

factionalized landlord politics. This ‘instability’ was followed by a decade of military rule, during

which the nexus between internal authoritarianism and the dependence of the civilian and

military elites on the west was further reinforced. While social sector spending remained minimal

and the real incomes of the vast majority stagnated, both power and resources tended to remain

highly concentrated. Untramelled by popular sanction, the bureaucracy could also indulge in

decision making with little accountability but increasingly blatant rent seeking. The military for its

part continued to absorb a high proportion of public expenditures.

The reason given for maintaining an army of over half a million was the threat from India, and a

controlled media plied the people with anti-Indian themes. It could be argued that Indian

depredations on the Kashmiri people, and its denial of their right of self-determination, provided

the moral basis for this rationalization. Yet, despite the huge and continued resource diversion,

the military cannot sustain a conventional war for more than a few days. Such armies in the

Third World have also been a pushover when attacked: people’s militias are a more effective

defence against foreign aggressors, as witnessed in West Asia. In whose interests then this

large military apparatus was maintained? Was it perhaps that it was the Pakistani people,

inordinately poor and deprived, that paid entirely for a resource draining military capacity against

possible Soviet-Russian expansionism? The commonly evoked theme of the United States

military ‘assistance’ to Pakistan would need to be reversed, since the resource drain has been

heavily in the other direction. Moreover, to maintain this relationship, continued

deinstitutionalization and the satiation of rent hungry intermediaries has led over time to a