Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [121]
As a result, governments simply cannot keep most of their promises, either to the masses or to the political elites. As time goes on, more and more of the political elites find themselves disappointed, and unable in turn to pass on favours to their followers and voters – which means the likelihood of not being re-elected. What is more, even giving a serious favour to a political family is not enough. In parts of the countryside, local politics is structured round competition between particular landowning families, branches of the same family, or family-based factions. That means that the state favour not only has to be large, but has to be visibly larger than that given to the local rivals. No contract or ambassadorship will compensate for seeing your enemies become ministers, with all that means in terms of ability to help local friends and allies.
Meanwhile, at the level of parliament, Pakistan’s deep ethnic, regional and religious divisions mean that no party ever succeeds in gaining an absolute majority, even if it is army-backed; and even if it could, it wouldn’t mean much, because for most politicians party loyalty means little compared to personal advantage and clan loyalty. So governments find that their parliamentary majorities are built on shifting sand.
Sooner or later, the ‘outs’ have come together and found that they outnumber the ‘ins’; and also find that the state’s failure to improve the lot of the population means growing discontent on the streets, or at least a public mood of disillusionment which inclines more and more people to support whoever is in opposition. As Abida Husain, a great Punjabi landowner-politician, said to me candidly: ‘You know, a normal Pakistani with a normal human heart can’t be really pro-government no matter what the government is, because governments always look indifferent to the hardships of the people.’3 This permanent mood of simmering mass irritation with government is catalysed by specific events or developments – economic crises, especially gross instances of corruption or autocracy, foreign policy humiliations or all of them together.
As politics has become disorderly and government unmanageable, the army and senior bureaucracy have engineered the downfall of a civilian government and replaced it either with a new civilian government or with their own rule; or, after the military themselves have been in power for a few years, they have managed a transition from their own rule back to civilian rule; and the whole cycle of patronage has begun again. Developments since the 1990s, and both main parties’ fear of renewed military rule, may have modified this pattern to some extent, but I very much doubt that they have fundamentally changed it.
It would be quite wrong to see these features of Pakistan as reflecting simply the absence of ‘modern’ values of democracy and the law. Rather, they also stem from the continued presence of traditions of overriding loyalty to family, clan and religion (often in a local form, which is contrary to the precepts of orthodox Islam as well as the Pakistani legal code) and to the rules of behavior that these loyalties enjoin. Similarly, ‘corruption’ in Pakistan, as in so much of the world, is not the kind of viral infection instinctively portrayed by much of Western analysis.
In so far as it is entwined with patronage and family allegiance, corruption is an integral part of the system as a whole. In fact, to reform Pakistan radically along the lines of how Western states supposedly work would require most of the population to send itself to gaol. Corruption cannot therefore be ‘cured’. Rather, as in South Korea and other societies, it may over time be possible to change it organically into less destructive forms of patronage. To quote a local proverb,