Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [151]
(Bapsi Sidhwa)1
PAKISTAN’S PROVINCIAL BALANCE
Unlike India, Pakistan has one province – Punjab – which with almost 56 per cent of the population can to a certain extent dominate the country. No Indian province comes anywhere near this in terms of relative weight – though if all the Hindi-speaking states worked together as a bloc they would approach Punjab’s weight in Pakistan. Punjab also provides most of the army, and without Punjabi support no military government of Pakistan would be possible.
Yet at the same time, whatever the other ethnicities may sometimes allege, Punjab is not nearly strong or united enough to create a real ‘Punjabi Raj’ over the whole country, an effective, permanent national regime based on Punjabi identity. Pakistan is in this, as in other ways, more like India than immediately appears.
India is held together as a democracy (or at least a constitutional system, since Indian administration often does not work in ways that the West thinks of as ‘democratic’) in large part precisely because it is so big and varied. Many years ago, I asked an Indian general if he and his colleagues ever thought of creating a military dictatorship, as in Pakistan. ‘We’re not that stupid,’ he replied.
Democracy in India is a damned mess, but it gives the system the flexibility it needs to survive. It means that rebels who can’t be killed can always be bought off by being elected to government, and given jobs and favours for their relatives. This country is so big and so varied and so naturally chaotic, if you tried to introduce an efficient dictatorship in India it would actually destroy India within a year.
If you emphasize the word ‘efficient’ and add the word ‘Punjabi’, then the same is true of Pakistan. No national government can simply crush the warlike, heavily armed Pathans. All have preferred instead to co-opt them through service in the army and bureaucracy, and into government through elections. The Pathan territories of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) have always been administered overwhelmingly by ethnic Pathan officials. Nor can any Punjab-based regime dream of ruling over the megalopolis of Karachi, with all its rival ethnicities, by simple dictatorial means. There too, co-option and compromise are essential. So while Pakistan’s Punjabi core makes it different from India, and more susceptible to dictatorship, it is like enough to India to make sure that its dictatorships can’t work in an effectively dictatorial manner.
So the balance between the provinces also forms part of what I have called Pakistan’s ‘negotiated state’. There is a real element of Punjabi dominance, but fear of breaking up the country on which Punjab itself depends means that this dominance always has to be veiled and qualified by compromises with the other provinces. Thus in 2009 – 10, in a considerable achievement for Pakistani democracy and the PPP government, the centre and the provinces agreed on a new national finance award rebalancing revenue allocation in favour of the poorer and more thinly populated provinces. Punjab, with some 56 per cent of the population and around 65 per cent of the revenue generation, was allocated 51.74 per cent of revenue.2
Sometimes, however, these compromises are damaging not only to Punjab’s interests but to those of Pakistan as a whole. For example, it is absolutely essential for Pakistan to develop greater, more reliable and more ecologically responsible sources of electricity. It is now more than fifty years since the idea of a great hydroelectric dam at Kalabagh on the Indus was first mooted. The site is eminently suitable as far as hydroelectricity is concerned; yet for that entire half-century the project has been stymied by opposition from the NWFP and Sindh, which fear that they would lose water to Punjabi industry. And that has continued to be the case through no fewer than three periods of military rule, the project decried by provincial nationalists as expressions of Punjabi