POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PAKISTAN

Uncontested Engagements
S Akbar Zaidi

n the Preface to a new book (to be

published next month) which examines Pakistans political economy
afresh, having lamented the state of social
science discourse in Pakistan, I write,
I have more hope and expectation from a
growing set of younger academics who proceed for, or have just completed, their doctoral dissertations. This younger generation
of social scientist, one hopes, will add its
contribution to many of the debates which
take place regarding social change and transformation in Pakistan, as did an older generation three decades ago (Zaidi 2014a: vii).

This forum on Pakistans political

economy, which brings in a much younger
generation of academics who speak with
and to each other, as well as across generations, allows for a greater understanding
of issues that are complicated, perplexing,
ambiguous, unresolved, and evolving.
One of the main problems in working
on Pakistans political economy over the
past three decades has been the absence
of decent scholarship, which investigates
and challenges ideas and norms that
have become conventional wisdom in
explaining state and society in Pakistan.
The dominant school of social science
research is still caught up in a simplistic
and silly civilian versus military conceptualisation, with the meta-narrative of
the state dominating, and with something called security studies. Only after three decades or so has there once
again been a shift towards the local, the
fragment, and towards investigating the
actually existing Pakistan in various disciplines, as well as across disciplines.
The interest of Pakistani students and
scholars in anthropology, history, sociology, feminist studies, and cultural studies, broadly defined, has been a welcome
development, moving away from the older
dominant discipline of economics, and
allowing for interdisciplinary analyses.
Having celebrated these new developments, I must also confess to a state of
great disappointment. The collection of
papers in this forum does not engage
critically enough with the article that
56

has led to the forum. I feel that there is

too much agreement with what Zaidi
(2014b) argues, while there ought to have
been far more challenging disagreement;
there is too much of what Akhter (p 49)
calls a sympathetic critique. One can do
a far more rigorous auto-critique of the
original article than has (not) been attempted in these pages by these scholars.
Nevertheless, I hope that these interventions will open the space for others to also
correct many of the problems which seem
fairly obvious to me in Zaidi (2014b).
The other disappointment is that
while all the contributors are younger
scholars, they are all male. Scholarship
in Pakistan continues to be overly dominated by male academics and scholars,
despite the important interventions made
by an increasing number of women
scholars, who have gained considerable
notoriety as well as fame. A gendered
reading of Pakistans political economy, of
Pakistans masculinist state, and of many
of the issues raised in Zaidi (2014b) and
in this forum is desperately needed to
correct the direction of the debate.
Since there is little substantive disagreement with Zaidi (2014b), I will
respond to a few ideas and criticisms
which emerge from this forum, and then
address a problem which Zaidi (2014b)
and most academics in Pakistan, including those in the forum, have not been
able to adequately address that of class
in the Pakistani context. The four main
points from the forum that I briefly address are the question of political
settlement, institutions, counter-hegemony, and the local, the fragment, the
from below, and its relationship to the
steel frame of above and the dialectics of
the fragment with the whole.
Political Settlement
Fahd Ali is not completely wrong in
pointing out my ambiguity in the use of
the notion of political settlement, and
that my use of the concept might be
very limited in its scope (p 51), but I
june 28, 2014

am not sure of the extent to which this

really is a serious omission, as he
claims. While he uses the concept as
developed by Mushtaq Khan, the term
has evolved greatly to mean a number of
notions, including political contestation
between the elite as Fahd Ali points out,
but many more as well (cf Moore 2012). I
certainly do not mean that this is an
agreement which the political elite
agrees to, for example on how to tackle
militancy; however, my use of the term is
not dissimilar to Khans, or to Adrian
Leftwich (2010), where I attempt to explore the changing distribution of power
and its articulation amongst elites. While
Ali insists that my use of the concept of
political settlement is limited in scope,
this does not mean that it is illegitimate.
Zaidi (2014b) brings in many notions
to argue the case, which Ali denies me by
stating that this certainly does not mean
that Pakistans political economy is now
governed under a new political settlement. My argument is that it is,
indeed, very much so, and the other contributors in the forum all reach the same
conclusion, but differently. My argument
that the state has been fractured, that
there are multiple contenders and pretenders to dominate the state, that there
has been a growth in informalisation
affecting class formations, about the
weight of Saudi and American capital and
influence, and so on, all allow me to make
the argument that Ali feels is incorrect.
Institutions and Power
Alis second point is weaker, and deals
with how he feels I do not understand
the distinction between institutions and
organisations, and how this has a bearing on my conceptualising of state, class
or society. I do not, as he suggests, treat
institutions simply as organisations,
because I do look at the far broader conceptual notion and imprint of institutions
rather than just the limited one of organisations. Moreover, he makes the mistake
of equating political power with economic
power when he refers to the military. In
his short piece, he says, (surprisingly,
twice) that Pakistans military has
emerged as an even stronger player in
Pakistans political economy by expanding its business empire. As we know,

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POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PAKISTAN

economic and political power need not

necessarily be located in the same entity
(organisation? institution? individual?),
for there are numerous examples in the
Pakistani context where one can be without the other. Even the military, in
Indonesia, for example, retains economic
and business power and interests, having
lost political power. In Pakistan, Islamist
militants have increasingly acquired
political power, but it is not clear what
economic power they have.
This leads me to the third point, that
of my use of the term counter-hegemony,
which actually argues against the notion
of counter-hegemony which Akhtar (2012)
optimistically hopes for. I, too, only wish
that the real counter-hegemonists in
Pakistan against a militarised state,
Islamised and misogynist intolerant
society, and against robber barons and
crony capitalists were its working people
mentioned by Akhtar, but we are a long
way from creating an organised political
movement based on the working class and
working people which would make that
alternative a possibility. On the other hand,
as Akhtar here argues, while the religious
right, particularly its armed and militant
form, is part and parcel of the militarised state and benefits deeply from it, I
argue that it is also a major contender to
overthrow the state, and is certainly in a
better position to do so than us progressives or the politics of the oppressed.
Amongst the groups which challenge the
state, Islamic militants probably stand out.

be overlapping, and that both differ in

different circumstances and situations.
While one can argue that there is a
disconnect or disjuncture between the two,
Akhtar (p 50) is incorrect in asserting that
there is no necessary reason to believe
that the increasing incoherence of the
steel frame from above changes the configuration of power from below. Despite
the freeing of the fragment from the whole,
the local from the macro, it is difficult to
accept that changing alignments and
shifts in the political settlement do not
affect the configuration of power from
below. Even elections, particularly local
body elections, allow such possibilities,
as we have seen in Pakistan since 1979,
and so do militancy and misgovernance.
However, I certainly do agree with Akhtar
that local imperatives also emerge in
delineating political choices and praxis.
What all these interventions lack,
including Zaidi (2014a and 2014b) a
point which was raised in Zaidi (2014b)
is a foregrounding of class analysis at the
heart of Pakistans political economy. In
some ways, while we have moved a long
distance forward since Hamza Alavis
1972 article, we are ironically all making
some of the mistakes we have criticised
him for. Given the very thin base of
social science in Pakistan, and given just
a handful of scholars interested in social
change, the state, class, transition, and
power, there is no critical mass of scholarship which allows one to build on the work

Much of the discussion in Zaidi (2014) is

about the dialectics between the fragment and the whole, where I argue that,
unlike in the past, when there was a far
greater bond between the two, the fragmentation of the state and the hegemonic
power of the military, and the informalisation of everything have led to that
relationship being broken, allowing for a
major disconnect between the two. My
sense is that none of the participants of the
forum disagree very much with this view,
with Javed and, particularly, Suhail only
underscoring this point. Suhail questions
the idea of the state and of society, arguing that in localised spaces, there is
ambiguity between the two, that they may
EPW

june 28, 2014

S Akbar Zaidi (sakbarzaidi@gmail.com) is a

Karachi-based political economist currently
teaching at Columbia University, New York.

References
Akhtar, Aasim S (2012): 21st Century Socialism in
Pakistan?, Economic & Political Weekly, 47(45).
Alavi, Hamza (1972): The State in Post-Colonial
Societies: Pakistan and Bangladesh, New Left
Review, 74: 59-81.
Leftwich, Adrian (2010): Beyond Institutions:
Rethinking the Role of Leader, Elites and Coalitions in the Institutional Formation of Developmental States and Strategies, Forum for Development Studies, 37(1): 93-111.
Moore, Mick (2012): What on Earth Is a Political
Settlement?, 19 September, available at http:
//www.governanceanddevelopment.com/2012/
09/what-on-earth-is-political-settlement.html
Zaidi, S Akbar (2014a): Issues in Pakistans Economy:
A Political Economy Perspective (Karachi:
Oxford University Press).
(2014b): Rethinking Pakistans Political Economy:
Class, State, Power and Transition, Economic
& Political Weekly, 49(5).

SAMEEKSHA TRUST BOOKS

The Fragment and the Whole

Economic & Political Weekly

of class analysis. There is little empirical

research on social classes, little understanding of the dynamics of class analysis,
and so on. Unlike, say, India, where there
have been hundreds of scholars working
on numerous social aspects for many
decades, especially on class, Pakistan is
very poor in intellectual resources, particularly radical ones and of the Left. No
matter how much we develop ideas
expressed in these pages and elsewhere,
unless we locate class at the centre of
Pakistans political economy, incorporating many of the ideas raised here, our
understanding and our project will remain
incomplete. Sadly, so will our praxis.

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