The Dark Side of Political Society: Patronage

and the Reproduction of Social Inequality

NICOLAS MARTIN
Development optimists in South Asia have argued that electoral politics and the reduced
role of villages as centres of economic activity have largely put an end to exploitation by
dominant castes. Although the political arrangements that have emerged out of these
changes fall short of the idealized standards of civil society, various commentators have
argued that they nevertheless benet subordinate classes. Partha Chatterjee even argues
that the ad hoc and extra-legal nature of these political arrangements which he terms
political society actually serve popular enfranchisement better than the law-bound
activities of civil society, which he sees as captive to capital. On the basis of village
ethnography from the Pakistani Punjab, I argue that political society is in fact integral to
processes that dispossess people of their rights and to the reproduction of elite power. The
paper illustrates how it is not the cold rationality of the state and the rule of law that
disenfranchise subordinate classes, but their absence.
Keywords: Pakistan, patronage, inequality, democracy, dominance
INTRODUCTION
Look, we get elected because we are ba asr log [effective people] in our area. People
vote for me because they perceive me as someone who can help them. And what help
do they seek from me? Somebodys brother has committed a murder and he comes to
me and I protect him from the authorities. Somebodys son is a matric fail and I get
him a job as a teacher or a government servant. Somebodys nephew had been caught
thieving and I protect him. This sort of thing. That is my power. This is what they
perceive as power.You know, somebody has not paid up their loan and I try to have the
payment delayed, etc. That means that I get elected because I am doing all the wrong
things . . . My skill is that laws dont mean anything to me, and that I can cut right
across them and help people whether they are in the right or in the wrong. If some-
bodys son is rst class, hes not coming to me to get him a job. If somebody has merit
they very rarely come to me occasionally they come to me. But its the real wrong-
doers who come to me. (Anonymous politician, quoted in Wilder 1999, 204)
Dr Nicolas Martin, University College London, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW, UK. E-mail:
n.e.martin@lse.ac.uk
I would rst of all like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council as well as the European Research
Council for funding me during the period when I wrote this article. It would not have been possible to
complete this paper without the generous support of a number of people. I am particularly indebted to my
supervisors, Professor Parry and Professor Mundy, for their patient guidance and careful reading of my work. I
would also like to thank Professor Deborah James, Dr Alpa Shah, Dr Tom Bolyston and Dr Anasatasia Piliavski
for reading drafts of this paper. I would also like to thank the people who heard me present it at different
seminars including the seminar on agrarian change at SOAS and who gave me their comments and
feedback. Finally, I would like to thank Dr Hassan Javid for taking the time to discuss and debate Punjabi rural
politics with me, and also the anonymous reviewers.
bs_bs_banner
Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 14 No. 3, July 2014, pp. 419434.
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd doi: 10.1111/joac.12039
Partha Chatterjee has argued that in India and throughout most of the post-colonial world,
ordinary people extend their freedoms using means that are not available to them in civil
society (Chatterjee 2004, 67). For him, the sphere of civil society where the public gathers
to hold its governments to account and to press for legislative demands is bourgeois, and
excludes the majority of the population. Additionally, he believes that the rule of law
through which civil society operates protects the interests of the propertied classes and tends
to further the interests of corporate capital. Thus episodes of primitive accumulation, such as
the enclosure movement in nineteenth-century Britain, or its contemporary equivalent in
places such as central India, where the state is handing over the land of indigenous commu-
nities to mining companies, have and still do take place under cover of the rule of law.
1
While Chatterjee believes that civil society and the rule of law curtail popular freedoms
by serving corporate interests, he believes that it is through the means of political society,
on the margins and even outside the law, that popular freedoms are being expanded
throughout the post-colonial world. In political society, politicians circumvent and even
break the law in order to appease popular pressures. In Chatterjees view, this process makes
rigid and unresponsive post-colonial states more responsive to ordinary peoples needs.
Chatterjee uses the example of slum dwellers who manage to avoid eviction thanks to
patrons who create legal and bureaucratic exceptions that allow them to stay where they
are. Although these ad hoc arrangements are neither secure nor permanent, Chatterjee
believes that they at least prevent the slum dwellers from being evicted as they would if
bourgeois state law were implemented.
In this paper, I argue that elites participate in political society as much as the poor do and
that they are in fact its main beneciaries. Elites are therefore far less civil than Chatterjee
suggests, and they are often the ones fostering practices that undermine the rule of law and
bureaucratic rationality. While it is true that as illustrated in the quote at the beginning of
this paper subalterns in Pakistan, as in India, often demand that politicians bend the rules
for them, it is political elites looking for short-term political gains who encourage such
demands. In other words, political elites are far less civil than Chatterjees model implies.
Moreover, as Corbridge et al. (2013) argue, just as Chatterjees model overestimates the
civility of elites, it underestimates the civility of subalterns who can often be involved in
political movements emphasizing institution building and legislation as illustrated by the
case of the grassroots anti-corruption Mazdur Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) in Rajasthan. I
suggest that these rights-based movements and solid democratic institutions deserve more
credit for the expansion of civil and social rights in India than does political society.
This paper shows how the patronclient ties that characterize what Partha Chatterjee
(2004, 2011) celebrates as political society actually undermine citizenship and democracy by
effectively privatizing access to and control over the state. Focusing on a village in the Punjabi
district of Sargodha in Pakistan, it shows how such de facto privatization leads to the reproduc-
tion of traditional clan (biraderi) and class-based patterns of dominance and how, in the
process, it prevents the expansion of citizenship rights to the rural poor in Pakistan. These
ndings coincide with those of authors such as Pattenden (2011) and Jeffrey (2001) who,
respectively, show how elites in rural Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh reproduce their power by
colonizing the state and by appropriating its resources. Moreover, these ndings are directly
opposed to those of development optimists working in the Indian context, such as Oliver
Mendelsohn (1993), according to whom political and economic development has diminished
1
Many of these land acquisitions are facilitated by Indias colonial laws of eminent domain, which allow the
state to make compulsory purchases of land in the name of the public good.
420 Nicolas Martin
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
the power of landed elites to such an extent that it no longer makes sense to talk about
dominant castes (see Srinivas 1987).
From the worms eye view of the ethnographer, the paper illustrates how instead of
political society putting a break on the dispossession of subaltern classes, as Chatterjee argues,
it contributes to it. The paper illustrates how government without a stable framework of
rights, laws and bureaucratic procedures can serve elite interests just as much if not more
than bourgeois rule of law and bureaucratic procedure. As Matthew Nelson (2011) convinc-
ingly shows in his recent book, it is not state law in Pakistan that deprives women and
sharecroppers of the right to own land, but the fact that it is systematically subverted by the
logic of local politics in which politicians provide patronage to their kin and clients. Similarly,
this paper shows how it is not state law that is to blame for the exploitation and oppression of
the rural poor, but the fact that members of powerful landowning clans (biraderis) can use
their inuence to circumvent and ignore laws and bureaucratic procedures that, if enforced,
would benet the poor. However, unlike Nelson (2011) and Lieven (2011), I argue that the
Pakistani state is ineffective not primarily because of the logic of clan-based local politics, but
because certain classes possess disproportionate social, political and economic power and can
therefore subvert policy implementation, the rule of law and bureaucratic procedure.
It is because landlords can credibly threaten house tenants with eviction despite these
having legal occupancy rights that they are able to extract both free labour and votes from
them. Moreover, it is because landlords use their inuence to out bureaucratic procedure for
their own private benet, and for that of their supporters, that they deprive the majority of
the rural population of access to state resources. As this paper will illustrate, it is because of
the patronage of well-connected landlords that absentee and badly performing doctors and
teachers never get red and that villagers are deprived of adequate schooling. Moreover, it is
thanks to the patronage of landlordpoliticians that criminals, ranging from petty thieves to
heroin trafckers, possess immunity from police prosecution and that the property and physi-
cal security of villagers are often at risk. In other words, I show how patronage benets the
few who are well connected at the expense of the rest of the population. Moreover, although
it is sometimes true that members of subordinate classes obtain patronage, they do so at the
expense of their political unity, because instead of uniting to challenge their subordination
they seek to individually align themselves with powerful patrons. The result is that subordinate
classes remain weak and fragmented, and that their members are easily exploited. Thus,
contrary to authors such as Lieven (2011) and Lyon (2004) who like Chatterjee claim
that patronage makes state resources more accessible to the common man, I argue that its
main effects are: (a) to bolster elite class power by redirecting state resources towards it and by
undermining the political unity of subordinate classes; and (b) to undermine public service
delivery and therefore the economic and physical security, freedom, health and educational
standards of the population. Thus I argue that the dark side of political society signicantly
overshadows its bright side.
2
CHANGING PATTERNS OF DOMINANCE
The dominant Gondal clan (biraderi) of Jats in the village of Bek Sagrana belonged to the
category of middle to large landholders that gained political prominence in the 1960s and
2
Thus the paper also contributes to the literature examining the link between corruption, capitalism and
criminality (see Arlacchi 1983, 1986; Gambetta 1993; Handelman 1994; Kang 2001; Volkov 2002; Varese 2005;
Herzfeld 2009).
Patronage and the Reproduction of Social Inequality 421
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1970s, following the Green Revolution and the advent of popular politics during the Bhutto
era.
3
Although their compact clan structure a result of endogamy (see Alavi 1972a) their
numerical preponderance in the area, their landownership and their role as mediators between
villagers and the state had made them the dominant clan around Bek Sagrana since colonial
times, their political inuence had not extended far beyond the village until the 1970s. Prior
to this it was the aristocratic (ashra) Makhdooms who had controlled the provincial and
national assembly seats in the area. The latters political inuence had largely derived from the
fact that they owned over a thousand acres and that consequently they controlled the liveli-
hoods of a large number of people. However, changes in the rural economy including the
decline of village crafts and agricultural mechanization loosened this control. According to
the villagers of Bek Sagrana, they were unable and even unwilling to reassert their control
because they had grown soft as a result of leading excessively indolent and luxurious lives.
However, although these claims might have contained an element of truth, it was equally true
that unlike the Gondals, they could afford to move out of the local political scene. The fact
that some of them had obtained university degrees from prestigious universities in the United
Kingdom and in the United States meant that they could pursue lucrative careers in banks
and multinational corporations and therefore avoid the cut-throat world of contemporary
Pakistani politics. Others from this class obtained high-ranking posts in the bureaucracy and
then frequently moved into international organizations such as the United Nations, the World
Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Although by no means all aristocratic landlords in
Pakistan have opted out of rural politics, anecdotal evidence suggests that many followed a
similar path to the Makhdooms. In the area of Bek Sagrana, the effect of their exit was to
open the door to the forceful and numerous members of the Gondal clan.
In Bek Sagrana proper, the Gondals made up 13 out of 123 households and constituted
74 per cent of the landowning population; in nearby settlement clusters surrounding the
farmhouses of the wealthiest Gondals, the land distribution was even more skewed, with
Gondals constituting over 95 per cent of the landowning population. In the village, only
two Gondal households owned no land and worked as overseers (munshis) for wealthier
Gondals. The average size of landholding among the remaining 11 Gondals in the village
was of 25 acres (about 10 hectares), with the poorest Gondals owning 3 acres and the
wealthiest 100 acres. In settlements beyond the village, the wealthiest Gondal in the area as
a whole owned over 400 acres and the second wealthiest owned 300 acres: both moved out
of the village into newly built spacious compounds in the 1980s. In the case of two of the
wealthiest Gondals, these considerable landholdings, and a variety of urban businesses and
properties, had for the most part been acquired subsequent to their entry into provincial
and national-level politics.
Largely as a result of their successful capture of state power, by 2004 all except the two
poorest landowning Gondals in the village spent most of their time in Sargodha, the district
capital, where their children were being educated and where they had government jobs
and/or ran businesses. The very wealthiest among them lived and educated their children in
Lahore.
4
Most Gondals returned to the village on a weekly or fortnightly basis, and only
spent extended periods of time in the village during the citrus and wheat harvests, as well as
3
See (Zaidi 2005, 5174). Hamza Alavi (1973) classies farmers with between zero and 5 acres as small farmers,
those with between 5 acres and 25 acres as medium farmers and those with over 25 acres as large farmers.
4
Only the poorest Gondals in the village two siblings who owned 3 acres each lived permanently in the
village but sent their children to live with their youngest brother, who lived in rented accommodation in
Sargodha.
422 Nicolas Martin
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
during elections. The citrus orchards which covered most of the canal-irrigated land in the
village and were introduced to the area in the 1970s and 1980s were attractive to the
Gondals because they were protable and because they did not require sharecroppers or much
supervisory work on their part. The Gondals were able to make this shift to citrus because
their lands were well irrigated thanks to their proximity to a major irrigation canal.
5
Some
Gondals still kept sharecroppers even though both tractorization and citrus orchards had
drastically reduced the demand for them but the trend was increasingly to lease out land
not under citrus for cash. In 2005, an acre of citrus gave an income of between Rs. 50,000
and Rs. 60,000 (500600), meaning that a landlord with 25 acres could have a yearly
income of roughly Rs. 1.5 million (15,000) untaxed from citrus alone. Although wheat
provided some additional income, it was mainly grown for domestic consumption as well as
to pay the wages of farm and domestic servants, and for the services of village menials and
artisans (kammis).
A number of Gondals supplemented their agricultural incomes with government jobs in
the departments of health, education and agriculture, as well as by setting up small shops in
town or by buying small commercial properties to let. In many cases, the Gondals had
obtained their government jobs thanks to the political patronage of Gondal politicians. Many
of them also supplemented their incomes by working as contractors (thekedars) building
government infrastructure when the leading Gondals of the village where in power and could
provide them with contracts. Some of the more disreputable Gondals signicantly supple-
mented their incomes by trafcking stolen buffalos, cars and even narcotics with the protec-
tion of Gondal and allied politicians. Most recently, young Gondals in their late twenties were,
in addition to obtaining government jobs, also getting jobs in banks and corporations and,
since 2008, migrating to Europe.
The rest of the 110 households in Bek Sagrana, which included other landowning clans
whose members were smallholders and sharecroppers
6
as well as landless village artisans
(kammis) were socially subordinate to the Gondals, even though their members livelihoods
were no longer solely dependent upon them. Their subordination to the Gondals was now
less direct since it was increasingly based on intermittent wage labour, and because the
Gondals were no longer present in the village to keep control over them. The relationship
between them and the Gondals was now a primarily short-term, contractual relation, increas-
ingly devoid of broader mutual social obligations. In Bremans (1974) terms, there had been a
shift from patronage to exploitation. Gondal power was now largely due to their successful
capture of the state. The Gondals were thus representative of the South Asian rural elites who,
according to Herring (1984), invested in supra-local politics following the Green Revolution
in order to maintain their dominance and to bolster labour-repressive social organizations of
production no longer sustained by their control over peoples livelihoods.
Kammis constituted 35 per cent of the village population, but this proportion was much
higher in clusters of houses surrounding Gondal farmsteads known as deras where all
houses other than those of the landlords were kammi households.
7
They traditionally rendered
their services to groups of Gondal landlords in exchange for a xed percentage of the wheat
5
In order to produce plentiful fruit, most of the Gondals in Bek Sagrana took more than their allotted share of
irrigation water, thereby depriving people downstream of their share. Those at the tail end of irrigation canals, in
nearby villages, complained that they couldnt grow citrus because the Gondals had stolen all of their water.
6
In the area of Bek Sagrana, the Lurkas and the Sagranas were the main landowning (zamindar) clans involved
in sharecropping for the Gondals and constituted 15 per cent (19 out of 123) of the village population.
7
On the dera where I lived, 16 out of 18 households were kammi households.
Patronage and the Reproduction of Social Inequality 423
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harvest, and for access to fodder and rewood from their lands. These arrangements were
known as seypi and resembled the traditional jajmani relations described in Wisers classical
text (Wiser 1958 [1936]).
8
In the past, all kammis who lived in the village worked for the
Gondals and for each other.
9
This is because village manufactures had not been replaced by
mass-produced ones and also because work that required commuting was virtually inexistent
since the nearest town, Sargodha, was 30 kilometres away and buses werent readily available
until well into the 1970s. But it is also because under customary law codied under British
rule kammis were bound to provide their services to the village proprietary body. If kammis
didnt want to do so and had no debts towards the Gondals, they had to leave the village; in
other words, their duties towards the Gondals were based on residence rather than personal
liability.
Arif Hassan has argued that economic change freed the kammis from servitude and because
the kammis had marketable skills they improved their social and economic standing (2009
[2002], xvi). He argues that among the signicant changes that freed kammis was the growth
of market (mandi) towns resulting from the growing demand for agricultural inputs and
machinery during the Green Revolution. These towns provided kammis with opportunities of
escape from exploitative feudal power structures. Kammis with enough capital and skills were
able to set up businesses there, often using their traditional skills. Moreover, they were able to
provide their children with better educations than in the villages, and were therefore able to
embark on a process of upward social mobility. Migration to larger cities also played a
signicant role in liberating kammis from traditional power structures. Muhammad Azam
Chaudhary (1999) shows how the kammis of Misalpur, near the textile-producing city of
Faisalabad, left their traditional occupations to work in textile factories, to set up their own
power-looms and even got educated and started working in ofces.
However, in Bek Sagrana only some kammis, namely carpenters and blacksmiths, had
turned their traditional skills into successful businesses, but remained in the village, and among
them only one carpenter household was planning to move permanently to a nearby mandi
town in order to be free of the exactions of the local Gondal landlords. Most were now wage
hunters and gatherers (Breman 1996) who moved from job to job, principally in agriculture
and construction but also as carriers, security guards and cleaners. Some of them also contin-
ued to supplement their incomes with seypi arrangements. Mussallis the largest group of
kammis, with 15 households in the village Mirasis, Machis and Pirhains, all of whom didnt
have particularly marketable skills, derived most of their income from wage labour and some
8
For a description of these arrangements in an East Punjabi village, see Kessinger (1974).
9
Kammis included carpenters (Tarkhan), potters (Kumhar), blacksmiths (Lohar), cobblers (Mochi), bakers
(Machi), weavers (Julaha), barbers (Nai/Hajaam), bards (Mirasi), drummers (Pirhain) and sweepers (Mussalli),
among others. Barbers, for example, visited their patrons households once or twice a week to shave the men
and to cut their hair. They were also in charge of delivering invitations to weddings and funerals and of
performing circumcisions. The principal role of Mussallis had been to visit their patrons households when the
cattle had been taken out to the well in order to sweep the cattle shed, the courtyard and the street in front of
the house, but they also had other duties, which included preparing the mud to place on the roofs of traditional
dwellings, covering the chaff and straw collected during the wheat harvest with mud, making the rope that
others wove into string cots (charpais) and preparing cooking res during weddings and funerals. Tarkhans
principal jobs had been to make string cots, t door frames and make certain agricultural implements, but also to
dig graves at funerals. Similarly, all other kammis had a principal occupation and a variety of other roles to play in
the traditional village economy. Kammis also occasionally had to provide the Gondals with free labour (begar).
Finally, in addition to performing these tasks for the Gondals, kammis exchanged their services with each other.
Thus, for example, a Mussalli might help a Lohar to mend his roof in exchange for repairs to his sickles (used
for harvesting wheat and fodder).
424 Nicolas Martin
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
of them supplemented it with seypi arrangements.
10
These kammis formed the overwhelming
bulk of labourers during the citrus and wheat harvests, and were the ones most likely to work
as domestic and farm servants for the Gondals and to become indebted to them although
other kammis and former sharecroppers sometimes did so too. The main causes of indebted-
ness were wedding and medical expenses, which they were unable to cover due to the fact
that poorly paid and intermittent wage labour made it difcult for them to accumulate
savings. Indebted labourers with able-bodied siblings to help them could repay their debts
within a couple of years, or even months, but those without siblings were often condemned
to exploitative and abusive work conditions for their entire lives (see Martin 2009).
Moreover, even in cases where village kammis had prospered, they hadnt shed their servile
ties towards the Gondals. Because the Gondals had successfully captured state power, even
relatively prosperous kammis continued to depend on them for access to basic state services.
Their willingness to use force through armed toughs (goondas) meant that the threat of
physical violence and the threat of eviction from their homes was enough to keep most
people subservient, and to make them provide free labour services to the Gondals.
11
Thus, for
example, some carpenters who had a thriving furniture business that had allowed them to buy
several buffalos and a motorcycle were still compelled to x the doors and the electrical
wiring in the house of the local Gondal landlord for free. They planned to set up their
business in the nearby market town in order to escape these duties. Moreover, as will be
shown below, residence ties still allowed the Gondals to compel them to vote according to
their dictates. In the next section, I explore some of the reasons why the erosion of economic
interdependence between landlords and their artisans and tenants didnt translate into political
emancipation through the electoral process.
POPULAR POLITICS AND LANDLORD DOMINANCE
Chowdri Nawaz Ali Gondal, the eldest of ve siblings, owned 70 acres of prime canal
irrigated land at the time when he was the rst Gondal to become involved in parliamentary
politics. He had been the second Gondal after his father to obtain further education and to
qualify as a lawyer. Law had been an ideal entry route into politics in a situation in which
clients most commonly approached their leaders to help them with land disputes and other
cases involving the local police station (thana) and the local courts with their associated
lawyers ofces (kacheri) (see Nelson 2011). Having acquired a reputation for being effective,
forceful and astute in his handling of cases, Chowdri Nawaz Ali was eventually noticed by
local PPP leaders.
When I rst met him in 2004, Chowdri Nawaz Ali claimed to still be a socialist, even
though it had been nearly three decades since he had abandoned the PPP for Nawaz Sharifs
conservative, pro-business party. When I asked him how a big feudal landlord like himself
could be a socialist, he corrected me, telling me that he was a member of the middle class
(darmian tabka), not a feudal. He argued that although there were still plenty of feudal
politicians who owned hundreds, if not thousands, of acres of land, obtaining political ofce
10
Their seypi arrangements no longer included the duty to sweep peoples houses; when they did such work, it
was in their capacity as privately employed servants for the Gondals. Villagers were aware of the fact that
Mussallis had once performed sweeping tasks under seypi, but vaguely pointed out that this was the case some
time before partition in 1947.
11
This was the case despite Bhuttos homestead reforms, which granted people ownership over their village
houses. For accounts of the effectiveness of the homestead reforms, see Rouse (1983) and Gazdar and Bux
Mallah (2011).
Patronage and the Reproduction of Social Inequality 425
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no longer simply depended on status and landownership; to obtain it, politicians had to do
peoples work (logon ka kaam) by delivering patronage, jobs and infrastructure.
However, despite Chowdri Nawaz Alis claims, it would be misleading to assume that the
rise of popular politics meant that political and economic development had made the Paki-
stani state more responsive to pressures from below. The Gondals largely failed to redistribute
the spoils of power appropriated through corruption to the poorest members of society, and
what little was redistributed didnt compensate for the loss of access to essential state services.
The main beneciaries of patronage were the Gondals themselves and other Jat landlords who
supported them politically by providing them with their votes and those of their dependants.
The fact that, following Zia-ul-Haqs military takeover, the Gondals joined the new ruling
coalition despite its socially and economically conservative ideology demonstrated that their
commitment to socialism was little more than lip service. Over the years that followed, this
shift in political allegiance proved highly benecial to the political and economic fortunes of
leading Gondals. From 1985 onwards, both Chowdri Nawaz Ali and his younger brother
Chowdri Mazhar Ali were to benet greatly from the unprecedented levels of patronage that
characterized Nawaz Sharifs several terms in power both as Punjab Chief Minister and as
Prime Minister.
12
That they personally benetted is most dramatically illustrated by the fact
that by 1999 Chowdri Mazhar Ali owned almost 400 acres of land and several Pakistan State
Oil (PSO) petrol stations throughout Sargodha district, whereas when he began his political
career in 1985 he had owned no more than 70 acres of land. Similarly, Chowdri Abdullah
Gondal the son of the lambardar Ahmed Rasool Gondal, who shared a paternal great-great-
grandfather with Chowdri Mazhar Ali dramatically increased the amount of land he owned
from around 20 to also over 400 acres. He did so by making money in the sand business, after
obtaining a licence for its extraction from Chowdri Mazhar Ali, through heroin trafcking
and by grabbing land from the once politically inuential Makhdooms as well as from poor
peasants.
During his three terms in ofce, Mazhar Ali Gondal obtained a variety of lucrative
contracts and a steady ow of development funds for his factional constituency and for his
biraderi. For example, during his latest term in ofce, from 1997 to 1999, Chowdri Mazhar Ali
obtained contracts for the construction of stretches of the motorway from Lahore to Islam-
abad that was being engineered by the South Korean Daewoo Company. He appears to have
not only personally taken advantage of these contracts, but to have granted contracts to his
relatives, including his younger brother, who became extensively involved in the project, and
other supporters. His younger brother was even somehow able to place one of his domestic
servants on to the payroll of Daewoo without the servant ever having to actually work for the
company. According to the servant in question, this arrangement basically allowed his master
to have a servant for free.
13
Chowdri Mazhar Alis younger brother, his nephews and cousins
and other allied Jats were also granted several local road construction projects. The state of
many of these roads only a few years after completion suggests that the contractors in charge
of their construction spent far below what they had invoiced. The metal road running
alongside the canal near Bek Sagrana had only been built 7 years earlier, but in 2004 it was
12
Wilder (1999) reports that during his time in power, Nawaz Sharif was able to ll thousands of government
jobs with his supporters: . . . he appointed hundreds of loyalist police ofcers, particularly into the lucrative
positions of Assistant Sub-Inspectors and Station Head Ofcers. This was especially signicant as the police play
a central political role in Pakistan because of their ability to selectively apply laws in order to harass opponents
or to turn a blind eye to the misdeeds of political allies (Wilder 1999, 139).
13
The servant even told me that because the Daewoo salary was quite high: his master kept part of it for
himself.
426 Nicolas Martin
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
already badly affected by potholes and large parts of it had collapsed into the canal. Addition-
ally, Chowdri Mazhar Ali was granted several franchises to build Pakistan State Oil petrol
stations along the main roads leading into Sargodha.
During Chowdri Mazhar Alis time in ofce, the village of Bek Sagrana also received a
large number of development projects that Gondals obtained contracts to build. The village
gained a post ofce, a water tower, a basic health unit, a new school and a community centre.
Of these, neither the water tower nor the post ofce were ever used and the basic health unit
wasnt operational. The water tower was part of a scheme originally destined to connect
households to a water-supply system in areas where there were problems with water scarcity
and salinity. Bek Sagrana suffered from neither of those problems, and most people freely
obtained fresh water by the means of a hand pump (nalka) located in the courtyard of their
house. No one in the village opted to get connected to the new water system because they
saw no reason to opt for a system in which they would have to pay monthly water bills. The
post ofce was never operational and was used as the house of one of Mazhar Alis
ex-employees.
The basic health unit, like many others I visited throughout the district, wasnt operational.
It included a hospital building with two operating rooms for minor operations such as
appendicitis and childbirth, and a medical dispensary. It also had housing for hospital staff and
a large two-storied residence for the doctor. The doctor, a wealthy Gondal chowdri who had
managed to get a position in the basic health unit of his own village thanks to the patronage
of Chowdri Mazhar Ali, never attended to his duties there and only occasionally went to
enter false entries into the attendance register.
14
The residence of the basic health unit was
occupied by his maternal cousin, who was also Chowdri Mazhar Alis nephew. A few of the
rooms meant for hospital staff were occupied by the formers servants, one of whom used
another of the rooms to keep broiler chickens, which he sold in the village. The clerk in
charge of the medical dispensary allegedly made money selling off the basic health units
medical supplies. The result of this was that villagers continued to rely almost exclusively on
local healers (hakeems) and on others with highly dubious qualications as practitioners of
allopathic medicine.
15
In cases of serious illness, poor villagers were often compelled to obtain
loans from the Gondals in order to get medical treatment in expensive private clinics in town.
In general, only servants who had very close ties with the Gondals as a result of years of ser-
vice were ever likely to obtain free medical treatment thanks to the patronage of their masters.
Although it is true that poor voters might occasionally obtain medical treatment, cash
during elections, the intercession of a Gondal to resolve a court case or even a government
job, such brokerage didnt compensate for their loss of access to public resources through
corruption. In other words, what the preceding paragraphs illustrate is that the appropriation
of the spoils of power by politicians didnt, as Lieven (2011) and Lyon (2004) claim, make
state resources more accessible to people. Instead of access to health care, communal spaces, a
decent infrastructure and educational system and justice, poor villagers just got a cash payment
in exchange for their vote; money that rarely lasted them for more than a week. Access to
public resources that should have been freely accessible to everyone became dependent upon
the charity and goodwill of local power-brokers. The lucky ones, on the bright side of
political society, might obtain low-ranking government jobs but did so in ways that, as will be
14
Chowdri Nawaz Ali was married to the doctors maternal aunt.
15
This sort of thing was very common in the public health sector. Most Basic Health Units that I visited in
rural areas werent fully operational and doctors meant to work in them only came to collect their pay once a
month.
Patronage and the Reproduction of Social Inequality 427
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
shown below, undermined public service delivery and that were therefore detrimental to most
of the population.
Although, as will be shown below, some landless villagers did obtain government jobs
thanks to the Gondals, the overall evidence indicates that in fact the Gondals sought to
prevent villagers from being empowered through jobs and through improved access to educa-
tion and other public resources. Villagers repeatedly told me that the Gondals didnt want
them to get good jobs and improve their lot in life because they would no longer be able to
get young men to act as gunmen for them; whenever the Gondals had land disputes, or when
they contested elections and needed to ght their rivals, they demanded that their tenants and
labourers pick up arms to ght for them. They also repeatedly told me that whenever the
Gondals noticed ordinary villagers wearing nice clothes, or talking on a new mobile phone,
they became annoyed because they felt that they were losing their slaves (ghulaam) and
responded by making fun of them and humiliating them.
The Gondals claimed that kammis nowadays wanted to be like kings (badshah) and that they
no longer wanted to do respectable hard work. Instead, they wanted to lounge about wearing
ashy clothes and make money the easy way by running shops or by stealing and bootleg-
ging. Although the Gondals didnt actively obstruct the spread of education as Southern
Punjabi landlords were alleged to do, they didnt encourage it either.
16
The only member of
the sweeper caste (Mussalli) to have completed high school also told me that the Gondals
couldnt bear the fact that he was educated after one of them had mockingly asked him if he
was a big man (bara admi) now that he spoke English with me, a foreigner. Conrming their
distaste for popular education, several Gondals told me that education only served to implant
unrealistic job expectations in peoples minds and made it more difcult for them to obtain
labourers. They complained that nowadays the only way for them to lure labourers was by
providing them with small consumption loans, and in some cases larger loans to cover
wedding or medical expenses (see Martin 2009). Moreover, they didnt think that members of
menial clans (kammis) were likely to reap a great deal of benet from education anyway,
because they were inherently incapable of using their reason and of doing hard work.
As a result, the Gondals didnt show much interest in fostering secular education and
focused instead on the inculcation of morality through Islamic education. This was not only
meant to help the moral uplift of the poor but also to grant the Gondals spiritual merit
(savaab). Thus instead of sending their child servants, working to repay debts incurred by their
parents to cover wedding or medical expenses, they gave them some basic home schooling
and taught them how to read the Holy Quran. They also built mosques and paid preachers
to teach village children about Islam, but made little effort to help improve the quality of
education being delivered in the village primary school. One schoolteacher who was from the
village told me that because the Gondals increasingly educated their children in town, they no
longer had any incentive to make sure that the village school provided students with a reason-
able education. Previous generations of Gondals had done much of their primary schooling in
the village, and as a result their parents had ensured that teachers turned up to do their job
and that they taught properly when they were around, but this was no longer the case.
The result was high levels of absenteeism, which teachers got away with by placing false
entries into their attendance registers. Moreover, even when they were around teachers spent
signicant amounts of time chatting to each other, drinking tea and performing their prayers
in the village mosque. They often disrupted childrens studies by sending them on errands to
16
A wealthy landlord and hereditary saint (pir) from the Southern Punjabi district once boasted that he didnt
let schools operate in his region because they created unrealistically high expectations among labourers.
428 Nicolas Martin
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buy cigarettes and biscuits for them. When the schoolteacher from the village asked some
Gondal landlords to personally impose nes on absentee teachers, there was an initial show of
goodwill, but nothing came of it because Gondal power-brokers were more interested in
keeping teachers happy than in improving educational standards. Teachers tended to belong
to the landed, rural middle class, and unlike poorer villagers, their votes couldnt simply be
coerced or purchased with a little bit of cash during elections; they expected patronage to
retain their jobs, to prevent being transferred to undesirable locations, to obtain promotions
and sometimes even to avoid having to do their job. Thus, in one instance, Chowdri Mazhar
Ali helped an absentee Gondal schoolteacher who often didnt turn up because he ran his
own private school in a nearby village avoid disciplinary action being taken against him.
Once again, therefore, political society benetted the elite at the expense of the poor major-
ity, which was deprived of an essential state service. For all these reasons, the literacy rate in
Bek Sagrana at the time of the 1998 census was a paltry 18.5 per cent.
The Gondals were also largely averse to helping the few kammis with the requisite educa-
tional qualications to obtain low-ranking jobs as clerks or guards (chowkidars). Chowdri
Mazhar Ali, who was thought to be more forward thinking than other Gondals, had sought
and managed to obtain low-ranking government jobs as chowkidars for four smallholders and
three kammis during his time as a Member of the Provincial Assembly, but had faced resistance
from his relatives, who worried that that this would deprive them of labourers. In one widely
discussed case, Chowdri Mazhar Ali obtained a class four job in the ministry of agriculture for
a blacksmith (Lohar), but because his nephew wanted the Lohar to continue working as a
labour supervisor in his brick kiln, he was asked to withdraw the offer.
Moreover, in half of the cases in which Chowdri Mazhar Ali had obtained government
jobs for poorer villagers, he had done so to obtain free servants for himself and his close kin;
the villagers in question were on the payroll of the state but worked for Gondals landlords
as domestic servants, labourers and overseers. Thus one Rajput smallholder and a kammi
breadmaker (machi) were on the payroll of the ministry of agriculture but actually worked as
overseers on Chowdri Mazhar Alis estate. The two smallholders and one kammi who were
employed as chowkidars on the premises of the Basic Health Unit (BHU) spent a great deal of
their time serving one of Chowdri Mazhar Alis nephews, who used the bungalow meant for
the doctor employed at the BHU as a weekend retreat.
17
Finally, a landless member of the
Lurka biraderi had been on the Korean company Daewoos payroll for several years while
actually working as a driver and farm servant for Chowdri Mazhar Alis younger brother,
Chowdri Arif.
It is also true that the Gondals frequently provided people with patronage in the form of
access to both formal and informal channels of dispute resolution. However, like the forms of
patronage discussed above, this tended to benet the well-connected. Moreover, just as
patronage undermined public service delivery, so patronage encouraged the growth of crime
and undermined law and order, and meant that neither people nor their possessions were ever
safe. Gondal politicians frequently interceded in the court system and with the police on
behalf of criminals who worked for them as toughs. Because they protected buffalo thieves,
people had to sleep next to their livestock at night. Likewise, because they protected heroin
trafckers, the village became a converging point for heroin addicts, who stole anything that
crossed their path. Thus, throughout my stay, I heard of peoples bicycles, clothes and agricul-
tural implements being stolen by heroin addicts.
17
The bungalow was a sort of bachelor pad where he invited friends to drink. He once even used it to bring
over some dancing girls from Sargodha.
Patronage and the Reproduction of Social Inequality 429
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
In addition to encouraging criminality, the exercise of patronage in the area of dispute
resolution undermined impartiality in the delivery of justice in both formal and informal
dispute resolution forums (see Chaudhary 1999) and meant that people with the right
connections could get away with a wide range of illicit and socially unacceptable forms of
behaviour. In one instance, for example, a Lurka who was widely known to beat his wife
when he was drunk managed to escape prosecution because he had good relations with the
head of one of the village factions. His brother in law spent a great deal of time and money
in order to le a police report (a First Information Report) against him, but he was eventu-
ally forced to withdraw it when he was threatened with eviction by landlords allied with
Chowdri Abdullah, on whose land he had built his house. Like many other villagers, he
complained that the Gondals were only concerned with consolidating their power and had
absolutely no interest in justice (insaaf). As a consequence, villagers spent a great deal of time
trying to ingratiate themselves with the landlords, and some even went to the extent of
snitching on each other to gain their favour. Thus whenever a theft took place there was
never a shortage of villagers willing to convey information either true or fabricated to the
Gondals about who performed it. This gave rise to widespread mistrust and suspicion of the
village poor towards each other, and to claims that Bek Sagrana was a bad place because it
was full of snitches (chugl khor). From the moment of my arrival in the eld, I was repeatedly
told that villagers couldnt be trusted and that they were for the most part rotten (kharaab)
and fraudulent (do nambar).
Clearly, the dark side of patronage was greater than its bright side. Some of the poor did
benet from the patronage of the Gondals, but such patronage often undermined public
service delivery, law and order and the very notion of justice. Since people with government
jobs were actually working as private servants for the Gondals, they at best only partially
fullled their duties as government servants and therefore undermined public service delivery.
Moreover, the promise of patronage meant that, as Alavi (1971, 1972a) and Mohmand (2008)
have shown, the landless sought to attach themselves to powerful patrons rather than to
organize themselves politically in order to defend their interests. This meant that there was
very little associational activity not centred around the Gondals.
WHY ELECTIONS DIDNT IMPROVE POLITICAL ACCOUNTABILITY
It must also be emphasized that at the time of eldwork, the majority of villagers didnt
consider their vote to be an effective bargaining tool with which to obtain brokerage from
Gondal politicians. The reason was that, even if we leave aside electoral rigging by authoritar-
ian governments (see Waseem 2006, 24), severe political and economic inequalities and the
absence of political parties that genuinely represented popular interests meant that elections in
the rural Pakistani Punjab could hardly be described as competitive and as occasions when
poor voters could hold politicians to account and press their demands.
To begin with, poor voters right to political representation was curtailed by the fact that
there were no candidates to represent their interests, since the only people who could contest
elections were those who had money, political inuence and muscle power. This was partly
because political parties relied on the private fortunes of their candidates to nance their
electoral campaigns. When I asked kammis why none of them considered contesting elections
for the seat of Union Council Nazim during the local elections of 2005, they thought my
question ridiculous in spite of the fact that these elections were ostensibly meant to
empower the poor, and that General Musharraf had declared that they would cause an
unprecedented transfer of power from the elites to the vast majority (ICG 2004, 5). To them,
430 Nicolas Martin
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
it was obvious that in order to contest elections you needed inuence to broker access to
state resources, money to fund expensive election campaigns in which votes were purchased
with cash and with minor infrastructure projects, and muscle power to ght rivals.
18
Kammis
possessed none of these and there was no coherently structured, well-funded political party
that might support them in a bid to contest elections.
19
Poor peoples ability to obtain political representation was even more directly curtailed by
the fact that landlords instructed them on how to vote and that these instructions were
backed by threat of eviction, unemployment and even physical harassment. Customary prac-
tices whereby kammis and villagers owed their services and political allegiance to the domi-
nant Gondal biraderi remained in place despite Bhuttos attempts at homestead reform in the
1970s. When a kammi settled in the village or in a dera near it, he generally did so on the
understanding that he would have to provide the local landlord with labour and votes. Thus,
during the 2005 local council elections, Gondal landlords gathered all of their kammis and
instructed them on how to vote. The threat of eviction meant that they complied, in part
because they knew that the Gondals had ways of nding out how they voted. They used spies
to nd out peoples voting intentions as well as to look over peoples shoulders as they cast
their ballots inside the polling station. The fact that eviction was a real threat was clearly
demonstrated following the 2005 local council elections when a Mussalli family was evicted
for failing to vote according to the instructions of the Gondal landlord on whose land they
built their house. Similarly, some smallholders who used a government wedding hall as a
petrol station were also evicted when they were found to have voted against the dictates of
the landlord on whose land the wedding hall had been built.
Finally, the types of activity that made the electoral process ineffective included various
forms of pre-poll and poll-day rigging. Candidates used their inuence and muscle power to
hassle voters, opponents and even polling ofcers. Moreover, they used their connections to
obtain polling ofcers and policemen ready to overlook irregularities such as multiple voting,
and violations of the secrecy of the ballot box. Although a great deal of the rigging that is
reported to have taken place during the Union Council Elections of 2005 was instigated by
the central government to benet pro-government candidates, powerful opposition candidates
were also able to rig elections by using their inuence, connections and muscle power to
intimidate rivals, voters and government ofcers. Chowdri Mazhar Ali Gondal who
remained loyal to Nawaz Sharifs opposition Pakistan Muslim League Noon (PML-N) and
was jailed for it following General Musharrafs military coup in 1999 used his elder
brothers connections in the judiciary to obtain a polling ofcer for his village who was
willing to overlook multiple voting by his Gondal supporters. Where he was unable to obtain
favourable polling ofcers, his heavily armed supporters managed to intimidate presiding
ofcers and to make them overlook irregularities in the polling process.
20
In order to prevent
this from happening, Musharrafs government is reported to have tried to ensure that polling
18
During 2005, I was told that an election campaign for a provincial assembly seat cost around Rs. 600,000
and that a campaign for the seat of Union Council Nazim the lowest seat in the electoral hierarchy cost
around Rs. 80,000. Among other things, the money was used to purchase votes, build minor infrastructure
projects, buy fuel for the large motorcades of campaigners and for billboards, posters and leaets.
19
Political parties tended to rely on the private fortunes of candidates for them to contest elections.
20
In Bek Sagrana, the police ofcer in charge of keeping order in the two polling stations clearly didnt want
to antagonize either Chowdri Mazhar Alis nor Chowdri Abdullahs factions and their armed supporters, so he
spent most of his time eating and drinking in the shade of a tent. After the 2008 elections for provincial
assembly seats, I also heard of a case in a neighbouring village in which government ofcers were so scared of
the heavily armed supporters of a candidate for the Pakistan Peoples Party that they allowed his supporters to
intimidate voters and to cast multiple ballots.
Patronage and the Reproduction of Social Inequality 431
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
stations were positioned in territory controlled by pro-government politicians, or at least in
places where pro-government and opposition supporters were equally represented so that
neither side could capture the polling station (see ICG 2005).
CONCLUSIONS
This paper has illustrated how, in the context of Pakistan, the ad hoc clientelistic exchanges
that characterize political society reinforce existing power structures and therefore undermine
rather than expand popular freedoms; their dark side can therefore be far more signicant
than Chatterjee seems to concede. Instead of protecting the masses from dispossession, as
Chatterjee claims, the material presented here indicates that the clientelistic transactions of
political society can in fact be integral to processes of dispossession as various authors
examining the link between criminality, corruption and capitalism have argued (see Arlacchi
1983, 1986; Gambetta 1993; Handelman 1994; Kang 2001; Volkov 2002; Varese 2005;
Herzfeld 2009). Thus while Chatterjee is partly right to see clientelism as a response to
popular demands, he fails to acknowledge the ways in which it exploits the electorate in
order to reproduce elite power. He also fails to acknowledge that it undermines public service
delivery. Moreover, by endorsing political society as the principal means through which
popular freedoms are extended, he undermines the crucial contribution to democratization of
grassroots and rights movements emphasizing institution building and legislation. The latter
have played a particularly salient role in the Indian democratic process.
In Chatterjees defence, it might be objected that while such political exploitation may
persist in feudal and authoritarian Pakistan, it has been vastly reduced in democratic India,
where politicians have been forced to become more accountable through consistently and
frequently held elections. Illustrating this latter point, Wilkinson (2011) shows how from the
1960s onwards, splits within Congress and the emergence of new parties representing busi-
ness, landlords, farmers, regional linguistic groups and communists resulted in the intensica-
tion of political competition. As politicians scrambled for votes in this increasingly competitive
environment, they were forced to increase the supply of clientelistic resources to their con-
stituents. At village level, the result of such competition, sometimes combined with rising
living standards, was that political parties increasingly provided voters with goods such as clean
drinking water, housing plots, credit and subsistence wages. Such achievements may arguably
provide good reasons to celebrate political society.
Nevertheless, I would argue that Indian democracy has deepened despite the ad hoc and
extra-legal nature of political society rather than thanks to it. If some of Indias subalterns
have benetted from democracy, it is mainly because elections occur regularly, democratic
institutions are strong, people are free to protest and civil rights are guaranteed. The media is
lively and social movements are tolerated by the state (Corbridge et al. 2013, 157). Moreover,
it is arguably also because directive principles contained in the Indian constitution including
the right to work, to education and to health care have been upgraded to fundamental
rights by supreme court judgments (Bircheld and Corsi 2010, 713). What has in fact
impeded democratization by undermining the effectiveness of public institutions is the ad hoc
nature of political society embodied in the expansive network of patronage founded on caste
and class inequalities (Corbridge et al. 2013, 157). As shown in this paper, such patronage
networks headed by powerful political brokers diverted state resources away from the
general public along particularistic lines and made peoples legal entitlements contingent upon
political loyalty. Patronage networks also divided subaltern classes by co-opting certain seg-
ments within them and therefore prevented the emergence of strong opposition to the
432 Nicolas Martin
2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
dominant classes. Moreover, the presence of powerful political brokers limited peoples oppor-
tunities for meaningful political participation; because of their political dominance, the poor
had fewer opportunities to complain about government services or become involved in
politics even at the local level.
In the case of Pakistan, it is arguably the alliance between successive military regimes and
the landed class that has perpetuated the arbitrary rule of political society and prevented the
emergence of the type of rights-based movement that has aided democratization across the
border in India. General Zia-ul-Haq, for example, played an important role in forestalling
the emergence of popular movements that could have challenged landed power (see Waseem
1994; Jalal 1995). Moreover, as Javid Hassan (2011) has shown, landed power in Pakistan has
largely remained intact because military and authoritarian have repeatedly made alliances with
factions within the landed political class.
21
Ultimately, in Pakistan the arbitrary rule of political
society can be viewed as the result of this unholy alliance rather than as sign of deepening
democratization. It is this unholy alliance that has perpetuated the inequalities that make the
political class unaccountable and perpetuate arbitrary clientelistic politics. Likewise, wherever
democracy is weak in the rest of the world, it is likely to be because a combination of
authoritarianism and social inequality generates the arbitrary rule of political society.
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