Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [44]
This was partly because state control of the large-scale commercial economy proved such a lucrative source of political patronage that for a long time it was continued in several areas by succeeding administrations. Direction of the state companies was handed over as patronage to PPP supporters from inside and outside the bureaucracy, a task at which they proved both incompetent and corrupt. Nationalization contained a provision for partial workers’ control in the form of workers’ committees which were supposed to work together with management. In practice these proved largely a dead letter. Over the succeeding decades, both trade union power and worker commitment to the PPP eroded, until by 2009 they were hardly visible in most sectors.
Despite the genuine radicalism of Bhutto’s measures in these areas, they did not go far enough for the left-wing radicals within the PPP. The socialist finance minister Mubashir Hasan had wanted the nationalization of urban land, and the collectivization of agriculture – something that would have led to counter-revolution and bloody civil war across the country. When Bhutto reformed his cabinet in October 1974, Dr Hasan and other left-wingers were excluded, and replaced by an influx of ‘feudal’ landowners who had rallied to the PPP in the hope of patronage, especially in the nationalized industries.
In the field of land reform, Bhutto was a good deal less radical than in the area of industry – but still more radical than any other Pakistani administration but Ayub’s. By a law of 1972, ceilings for landownership were reduced to 150 acres of irrigated land and to 300 acres of unirrigated land, from 500 and 1,000 acres, respectively, under Ayub’s land reform; still big farms by Pakistani standards, but nothing resembling the huge estates of Pakistan in the past, or indeed of Britain and America today.
This reform did indeed push agriculture in northern Punjab further in the direction of medium-sized commercial farming; and in Punjab and the NWFP, many of the great ‘feudal’ political families of today derive their wealth not from agricultural land, but from urban rentals; for many noble families either had patches of land around the edges of the old cities, with villas, orchards and pleasure gardens, or were wise enough to invest agricultural profits in urban land; and ten acres covered with houses and shops is easily worth a hundred times the same acreage in the countryside.
In much of Pakistan, however, Bhutto’s land reform was to a great extent subverted. Above all, great landowners would on paper distribute parts of their land to junior relatives and retainers, rewarding them with a share of the proceeds while in practice continuing to control them. Especially in Sindh and southern Punjab, the kinship system yet again worked as a critical element of what has wrongly been called ‘feudal’ power. Finally, and inevitably, Bhutto’s reform turned a blind eye to many of the holdings of Bhutto’s own landowning supporters, and own family. My travels with Bhutto’s cousin (and governor and later chief minister of Sindh under Bhutto), Sardar Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, will be described in Chapter 8. He is a magnificent figure, a splendid representative of his class and caste – and about as much of a radical agrarian reformer as the Earl of Northumberland c.1300 CE.
Land reform faltered still more towards the end of Bhutto’s administration, as his power crumbled, his party split, and he became more and more dependent on sections of the old landowning elites to keep him in power – a pattern which, as already argued, echoed the experience of Ayub and prefigured that of Zia-ul-Haq and Musharraf. Growing reliance on the landowning elites reflected Bhutto’s failure to consolidate