Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-8mjnm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T11:40:36.847Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - The Segmented ‘Rural Elite’: Agrarian Transformation and Rural Politics in Pakistani Punjab

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2019

Muhammad Ali Jan
Affiliation:
Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, where he recently completed his DPhil from the Department of International Development.
Matthew McCartney
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
S. Akbar Zaidi
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
Get access

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In his important essay ‘Rethinking Pakistan's Political Economy’, S. Akbar Zaidi has drawn our attention to the crucial task of updating the work of one of Pakistan's most seminal social scientists, Hamza Alavi (Zaidi 2014). Zaidi rightly points out that despite Alavi's path-breaking contributions to the study of Pakistan, his categorisation of the Pakistani state as a ‘military–bureaucratic’ oligarchy no longer holds as an accurate depiction of the state's evolution and needs to be reformulated. Not only have new power centres emerged from within state institutions, such as the judiciary, but formerly powerful ones no longer enjoy the kind of influence and prestige that they once possessed, most notably the bureaucracy and the landed elites. As a result, Alavi's thesis requires a major rethinking which takes into account these momentous changes in state institutions.

Two other observations by Zaidi are noteworthy: first, there has been a fracturing of state power in recent decades alongside the increasing informalisation of the economy, with many ‘competing contenders for power, all located at different places in the class and state hierarchy’ (Zaidi 2014:51); second, the bulk of studies analysing changes in the character of the Pakistani state tend to eschew class in favour of purely institutional explanations such as the competition (and co-operation) between the military, judiciary and the private media. Zaidi concludes by arguing that although the ruling bloc by and large works in the interest of reproducing capital, in the absence of rigorous research there is less certainty as to the component parts of this bloc.

This chapter aims to contribute towards a clearer understanding of Pakistan's changing class relations and their implications for state policy and politics, by observing more closely what Alavi identified as the ‘most powerful indigenous class in Pakistan’: the landlords and how their internal composition and power has changed over time and what it can tell us about Pakistan's changing political economy (Alavi 1998:27). Drawing on secondary literature and the author's own ten months of fieldwork in two districts of Pakistani Punjab during 2013, this chapter argues that greater attention needs to be paid to the internal segmentation within the landlord class.

Type
Chapter
Information
New Perspectives on Pakistan's Political Economy
State, Class and Social Change
, pp. 176 - 198
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×