Pakistan grapples with feudal political system

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "This election is not going to be productive," said Gen. Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistan's military intelligence service. "It will be disastrous and will bring more misery." He is probably right. The Pakistani election yesterday was never likely to change anything. But the real question now is: what would bring change?

Pakistan is an enduring mystery. It has huge agricultural and mineral resources and 140 million hardworking people. It started out with the legacy of an impartial judiciary, an uncorrupted civil service, and a professional, nonpartisan army that the British bequeathed to neighboring India. And it has fought no foreign wars for the past quarter of a century.

So why has Pakistan been ruled by generals for 25 of its fifty years of independence, and by members of one rich feudal family for the rest? Why are levels of illiteracy and infant mortality comparable to sub-Saharan Africa? Why did the German group Transparency International last year rate Pakistan as second only to Nigeria in the world for its level of corruption?

Much of what is wrong in Pakistan is embodied in the person of Benazir Bhutto, who was deposed as prime minister last November. Bhutto worked hard to project the image of a democrat and feminist trying to drag Pakistan into the present, but it is interesting to note what she said at the outset of the election campaign that followed her removal from office: "We will not accept the results if we do not win."

President Farooq Leghari, who precipitated the election by removing her from office last November, retorted that Bhutto was "unable to understand the concept of an institutionalized responsibility which transcends personal feelings". It is a judgment that applies to most of Pakistan's political class.

Benazir Bhutto feels betrayed by Leghari, because she ensured he was elected president in 1993. He was a loyal member of her Pakistan People's Party (PPP), and she needed a friendly president to avoid a repetition of August, 1990, when her first term as prime minister ended in dismissal by a previous president for corruption and mismanagement. She never expected her own handpicked president to make the same call.

Leghari removed Bhutto from office last November for using the national treasury as "a kitty for her and her cohorts", bugging the telephones of senior judges, and authorizing the use of death squads to quell urban violence in Karachi. In the election that followed, the voters' backed Leghari.

But Pakistan's next prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, is no new broom. He, too, was fired as prime minister for corruption and mismanagement (by a different president, in April, 1993). He also leads a party, the Moslem League, which is held together more by promises than by questions of principle.

The most notable feature of Sharif's last term was the great "yellow-taxi" scam, in which his government imported more than US$1 billion worth of cars and leased them to supposedly unemployed youths -- the vast majority of whom, of course, turned out to be Moslem League supporters. Sharif is as much a creature of the system as Benazir Bhutto, and equally unable to change his spots.

The Pakistani system is the closest thing to feudalism that you can find in a large modern country. Pakistan operates much of the time behind a facade of democracy, but it is a genuine feudal state in the sense that its political system is designed to defend the interests of precisely two classes of people: the feudal landowners, and the professional military caste who serve them.

The 300 great landed families of Pakistan still control most of the nation's land, most of its wealth and more than two-thirds of the seats in both the national and the four provincial legislatures. A 15-year-old census that ignores Pakistan's subsequent urbanization gives rural voters far more clout, and in rural areas you vote whichever way the landlord wants.

Almost none of Pakistan's landowner politicians (including President Leghari) have ever paid taxes on their vast landholdings, let alone been pressured to redistribute them. Since they control the law-making process, they can see that it would stay that way. And to make sure they sleep easily at night, they handed over 26 percent of the national budget to the military, who intervened whenever the system was under serious threat.

It was the military who overthrew and hanged Benazir Bhutto's father, former prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the only politician who ever seriously challenged the system (in the early 1970s). But neither Benazir nor any of her contemporaries are from that mold: they play the game, and reap the rewards.

Individually, Pakistanis are just as brave and intelligent as any of their neighbors. Why, collectively, do they put up with this odious and archaic nonsense decade after decade? Why do the best and the brightest simply leave, creating the biggest brain drain in all of Asia?

In this anniversary year, it helps to recall how Pakistan was created in 1947. It was carved from the territory of Britain's united Indian empire in haste, its borders drawn up in secrecy to include all the contiguous areas where Moslems were a majority. But India had been ruled by a conquering Moslem elite before the British arrived, and all the great Moslem intellectual and cultural centers in the sub-continent were still in the centers of power; that is, in the heartlands of what became Hindu- majority India.

Pakistan was the periphery, with various rural centers united by nothing except the fact that the peasants were mostly Moslems. So the local landlords quickly made common cause with the soldiers whose duty it was to defend this new state, and the Moslem intellectuals, politicians, educators and industrialists from the great urban centers of British India were frozen out.

Fifty years later, Pakistan is still paying a heavy price for the circumstances of its birth and there is no sign that the cost will drop soon.