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- Convenor:
-
Shandana Khan Mohmand
(Institute of Development Studies)
- Location:
- 44H11
- Start time:
- 26 July, 2014 at
Time zone: Europe/Zurich
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
The panel analyses the political economy of power, patronage and agrarian relations in rural Pakistan, bringing together for the first time a set of new articles that employ different methodologies to explore the impact of these issues on politics and production in rural Pakistan.
Long Abstract:
At a time when most scholarship on Pakistan has come to focus on "bombs and beards" discussions focused on the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the country's current security situation, this panel turns its attention to look instead at issues that determine the everyday political and economic situation of its rural areas - home to its agriculture-dominated economy and about 70 percent of its voters, and yet largely ignored in the literature. Specifically, the panel will analyse the political economy of power, patronage and agrarian relations in rural Pakistan to deepen understanding of their impact on politics and rural production. It will bring together a set of articles that are all based on new research in a number of disciplines (including political science, development studies, economics and anthropology), and which employ various methodologies (including archival research, qualitative case study analysis, anthropological work and quantitative methods) to explore these issues. Most of these articles deal with the political economy of rural Punjab in particular, and thus engage directly with one another while presenting quite different perspectives.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses institutional development in colonial Punjab, particularly the provision of secure property rights and cheap credit in the early twentieth century, with a particular view towards discussing the ideological underpinnings and long-term ramifications of these changes.
Paper long abstract:
This paper rethinks institutional development in colonial Punjab (1849-1947) by distilling the various economic reforms carried out by the British government to engage with the underlying theoretical paradigms and ideological commitments of the state. In particular, changes in the provision of cheap credit and land rights are interrogated in their ideological role as core values of liberalism as well as cornerstones of the British strategy of 'economic development.' Since the transition also marks the shift to a capitalist economy imperial efforts to engineer and influence the everyday lives of the peasants (shaped by a liberalism that is outmoded in Britain itself) are carefully studied. A particular focus is laid on the 1920s and 1930s when many of these political and economic reforms start to bear fruit and the imperial state also prepares to battle its ideological rival, communism. In an attempt to finetune the discussion, particular emphasis is laid on the career of the Indian Civil Service officer, Sir Malcolm Darling, and his career spanning thirty years in the Punjab. Using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative sources, an attempt is made to detail a comprehensive account of changes in the administrative structure of the Punjab alongside the personal trajectory and initiatives of an influential colonial officer to question the limits and possibilities of individual agency, as well as to confront the generation and perpetuation of a larger ideological and political project on the part of the 'state.'
Paper short abstract:
Development actors mobilise the poor but fail to understand power relations. Critical researchers explain power relations, but remain vague on what is to be done. Focusing on re-emerging left politics, I explore left activists' challenges between knowledge on power relations and the poors'everyday needs.
Paper long abstract:
The challenges faced by rural poor in Pakistan (this paper focuses on its Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province) are on the agenda of mainly two groups of researchers, i.e. those linked to mainstream development circles, and those engaged in critical reflection on agrarian relations. While the first group emphasises analysis that facilitates development interventions (and such interventions talk a lot of 'empowerment' these days), the second prioritises the in-depth understanding of why poverty persists. Though this dichotomisation risks simplification, it hints at a core challenge of contemporary engagements with rural grassroots: Development agents (e.g. NGOs) consider 'social mobilisation' (in the guise of 'community-based organisations') as central to interlink the poor with 'service delivery', but fail to understand local power relations and processes of dis-empowerment. Critical researchers (often following theories of exploitative relations of production) gain deep insights into political processes, but remain vague (at times utopian) in their discussions on "what is to be done, by whom, and how" (Bernstein 2013: 2). It is with this puzzle that the present paper engages, by selecting the recent (re-)emergence in Pakistan of left politics and of debates on land reform as empirical field. Based on interviews with (leftist) activists, it explores the challenges they face in their endeavours of social mobilisation - challenges that are conceptualised in the paper as embedded in (dis)junctures between (critical) analytical knowledge on how power relations (re)produce poverty, and the everyday needs of people in misery that (to put it bluntly) can not wait for social relations to radically change.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I put forth and analyse some of the key factors that transformed Pakistan-administered Kashmir's social stratification over time.
Paper long abstract:
Most inhabitants of a cluster of villages in central Pakistan-administered Kashmir (PaK) state that the strict hierarchy that once characterised their society has almost ceased to exist, as many features of this hierarchy are no longer present in their everyday lives. They profess that there is now more equality among quoms (caste-like status groups) and biradaris (kinship groups), as the distinction between these groups is now based on 'difference' rather than hierarchy. In other words, social stratification has changed from being vertical to being horizontal. In this paper I put forth and analyse four key interconnected factors that changed over time and contributed to a transformation of social stratification in the region (or the perception of transformation), namely changes in patterns of land ownership, migration, electoral politics, and education levels.
Paper short abstract:
This paper studies large landlords’ political advantage in rural Pakistan, its consequences for public goods provision, and response to shifts in land productivity.
Paper long abstract:
This paper studies vote buying and public good provision in a rural polity with unequal distribution of land and interlinked tenancy (sharecropping) contracts. I model a monopsonist landowner who can buy cheap votes through transferring private utility to his tenants, which leads to political advantage for the landlord over a non-landed competitor, and consequently low incentives to provide broad public goods. The political advantage of a landowner is considered in response to exogenous shifts in land productivity; particularly, I show that the benefit of running for office for landlords diminishes with exogenous technical change. Household data from Pakistan is used to test the model; I show that during a period with general elections, politician landlords transfer benefits to tenants by offering more favorable tenancy contracts, while landlords with no political incentives do not change their contracts. To extend the empirical analysis, I study the colonial roots of the ‘feudal effect’, by looking at prevalence of large estates or `jagirs’ during the British and pre-British rules. A higher incidence of these estates is correlated with low public goods and large landowning politicians in the post-colonial era. I call this the ‘feudal effect’, whereby the inter-linkage of land and power leads to an environment with weak political competition and low public good provision. Using the green revolution as a shock to agricultural productivity, I study the degree to which this ‘feudal effect’ persists across areas with varying response to technical change. The hypothesis I test is whether high productivity land makes it less likely that large landowners will run and win in elections and provide low public goods.
Paper short abstract:
We analyse patron-client relationships in rural Punjab to argue that clientelism is not simply a negotiated relationship between two groups of unequal power, but one that is based on obligations and embedded exchanges that voters have come to interpret as helplessness, or "majboori".
Paper long abstract:
What defines voting behaviour and determines electoral wins in rural Punjab? According to voters in its villages it is "majboori ki siyasat", or the politics of helplessness. In this paper we cast the politics of majboori as the local manifestation of clientelism. Using the case study of six villages in one district of central Punjab, we trace and disaggregate the nature of clientelistic exchanges in rural Pakistan and realize that the picture that emerges directly counters the notion of clientelism as a purely strategic, negotiated deal. While the patron-client relationship in this case maintains elements of negotiations and bargaining, these are not free of an added sense of obligations and of socially embedded exchanges that constrain the political behaviour of rural citizens. We argue in this paper that clientelism in rural Punjab is not simply a negotiated relationship between two groups of unequal power, but rather one that binds voters in exchanges that they come to interpret as helplessness. Such exchanges emanate from a variety of sources, including the nature of social relationships, the particular evolution of historical institutions, and the nature of public service delivery. Together these create the discourse of majboori that reproduces, and perhaps even legitimises, Punjab's patron-client politics.