Pakistan: A Very Short Introduction by Pippa Virdee

Author:Pippa Virdee [Virdee, Pippa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Middle East, General
ISBN: 9780198847076
Google: xsxKEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-02-15T20:32:51+00:00

Civil society as survivors

Forming the counterpart to any functioning state, democratic or not, is a strong civil society which has the capacity to speak freely. With no elections from a universal franchise in its first twenty-three years, twelve of which were spent under martial law, concepts like ‘public sphere’, ‘civil society’, and ‘free press’ become relative in Pakistan. But as is often the way, overt state oppression presents opportunities for covert resistance by groups that mobilize underground. One problem in Pakistan from the outset was that the urban middle class was and remains a smaller group when compared with the numbers in provincial towns and the rural countryside. Those above it form a tight-knit, well-networked elite, while those below comprise the masses, among whom a third are still counted as illiterate, with great variation between regions and by gender. Rallying them together behind the difficult and what must appear as ‘foreign’ concept of ‘freedoms’ or ‘human rights’ has been a concern for many of the country’s activist movements. Lawyers, journalists, women’s rights groups, student organizations, artists, and academics have often been at the heart of such movements and have played an important part in offering an opposition, when democratic institutions have been rendered irrelevant.

The decline in democratic values set in under Jinnah, who, as noted above, himself set precedents of meeting dissent with dismissal. Liaquat followed in earnest by concentrating power at the centre and playing off the bickering provincial elite. Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who had been editor of The Pakistan Times from before independence, was imprisoned in early 1951 in the notorious Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case, an alleged coup d’état against Liaquat’s government led by Major General Akbar Khan. Later that year, Liaquat himself was sensationally gunned down in circumstances that remain unresolved to this day. The whole chain of events provided a cue to rid the public sphere of intellectuals like Faiz and political activists like Sajjad Zaheer, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Pakistan.

The Communist Party of Pakistan was eventually banned in 1954, making clear the state’s lack of tolerance for critical voices, particularly on the left, and never had the chance to grow into a mass movement, in spite of its influence in neighbouring USSR and China and presence in India. Peasant or kisan movements, despite their existence, have been unsuccessful in enforcing land reform, and thus power and wealth remain concentrated in the hands of a few. Refuting the claims by Ayub Khan of a ‘decade of development’, the Chief Economist of the Planning Commission in 1968 identified Pakistan’s twenty-two richest families, which collectively owned 87 per cent of the banking and insurance industry and controlled 66 per cent of the industries. Although the number of families has expanded and grown, wealth (and power) is still woefully concentrated. Even the charismatic Bhutto and his populist ‘Islamic Socialism’ around the dreams of ‘roti, kapda aur makan’ (‘food, clothing, and shelter’), which promised much in the form of redistribution of wealth and nationalization of key industries,

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