Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [169]
Concerning the clock-tower, I experienced a small example of how constant mass migration from the countryside continually undermines the development of a civic identity and urban culture in most of Pakistan’s cities. My driver, a recent migrant to Faisalabad from a village (but a village only 10 miles away), could not find the tower in the dead centre of town, even when I showed him a postcard of it.
The industrialists heaped curses on the administration of President Zardari for incompetent purchasing decisions and favouring agriculture over industry; but they also had harsh words for the previous Musharraf administration and especially his Prime Minister (previously Finance Minister, from 1999 to 2004), Shaukat Aziz.
In the words of Azem Khurshid, a mill owner:
In terms of our recent leaders, Musharraf was the best of the worst. He appointed some good people and got us out of debt. But he and Shaukat Aziz were obsessed with empty growth figures and with how many cellphones and fridges people were buying. Beyond Gwadar and the motorway, they did nothing for the infrastructure of the country, including electricity generation, on which industry depends – and we are paying the price for it today. We are suffering from all those years of the Washington Consensus which our leaders followed blindly. Now the West is revising its approaches but it will probably take years to filter through here, and we have already lost years which we should have spent building up our real economy ...
And then Musharraf made his compromise with the feudal politicians, and that of course meant favouring agriculture at the expense of industry, and the PPP government is dominated by feudal landowners. Even the Sharifs, though they are industrialists themselves, have to favour the feudals because they have the seats in the countryside and you can’t win a majority without them. So throughout Pakistani history, state resources have gone to buying feudals and their families and followers, and not on turning Pakistan into a modern economy.
The obvious question is why, with their wealth, intelligence and economic dynamism, the industrialists and businessmen themselves have not been able to gain greater influence over state policies. After all, even the PPP is no longer explicitly hostile to private industry (as it was in the days of Z. A. Bhutto) and the other major forces are strongly in favour of industry: the PML(N) because the Sharifs are industrialists themselves, the MQM because industry is part of their vision of a modern, successful Karachi, and the military not only because it too believes strongly in modernizing Pakistan, but also because indirectly (thanks to the Fauji Foundation and Army Welfare Trust) it is itself a major industrial force.
The answer seems to lie partly in a combination of sheer lack of weight within society, and an absence of kinship networks. For all that the textile industry dominates Pakistan’s exports and is absolutely crucial to its balance of payments and ability to import essential goods, its share of the economy is relatively small, and its workers form a small part of the population as a whole – and this is especially true of modern industries like Chenab Mills.
For every semi-modern city like Faisalabad, there are dozens of medium-sized towns (which in Pakistan means towns with populations of hundreds of thousands of people), where the entire local economy is based on small shops and stalls, small family-owned workshops, and mostly fairly primitive food-processing. In these towns, kinship remains of central political importance, and the political scene is dominated not by modern businessmen but by interlinked clans of urban and rural notables living mainly off rents. The constant swamping of settled urban populations by new waves of migrants also plays a key role in preventing the growth of truly urban politics.
The business community is also fractured along lines of kinship, and by the rivalries and bitterness caused by past political alignments, and the victimization by governments