Forward-Blocs and Punjabi Political Culture

Before i begin pontificating on forward-bloc politics, i just want to let everyone know that i'm in a pretty whimsical mood right now. My arguments will probably be lax and hollow, and at times grossly essentialist in nature, but that's okay because this is, after all, a blog, and the only purpose of this post is to create context to what's been happening in the Punjab assembly.

A day or two ago, the Punjab assembly speaker accepted an application submitted by a group of provincial legislators from the PML-Q asking the house to recognize them as a separate political entity within the legislature. Signed by 47 members, of which 43 were present, the primary effect of this particular move is that it shifts the tag of majority within the PML-Q on to the forward bloc (led by Dr. Tahir Ali Javed) and reduces the followers of current opposition leader Ch. Zaheerudin to around 30 odd. Under simple majoritarian principles, the numerically legitimate PML-Q legislature party is now the N-League supporting forward bloc because they have more numbers. Technically though, rules of procedure have stipulations to qualify such moves, and its probably safe to say that any attempt to shift the leadership of the provincial PML-Q from Zaheer to Dr Tahir will be contested by the Chaudharies and their friends in the backward bloc (??).

In case you're wondering, the forward bloc is a group of provincial legislators who were quick to recognize the fact that sticking with the Chaudhary-led PML-Q after the 2008 elections was not going to be very rewarding. They literally wasted no time in announcing support for the PML-N and immediately started making backdoor deals to get as many of their own party members on their side as possible. For a history of the PML-Q forward bloc, please read this fairly comprehensive summary by Faizan Bangash in The News from a couple of months ago.

At this point, it's probably fair to dismiss all of this with a casual shrug, especially when considering how the PML-Q first came into being. A party that was built on the en-masse defection of nearly every electable member of the Muslim League in Punjab was bound to fall victim to it's own rationale once it was out of power. All things considered, the fact of the matter is that in my beloved province power is institutionalized while parties are not. The effect of this latest round of large-scale defection is that it marks pretty much the beginning of the end to PML-Q's time in provincial politics, and if things continue in this way, the PML-Like Minded Group will ensure that the Chaudhary led faction of the party is pushed into electoral irrelevance at the national level as well.

(For those of you who don't know this either, the PML-LMG is another faction within the PML-Q, led by Hummayun Akhtar and Saleem Saifullah against the domination of the Gujrat brothers in the party. It's an open fact that Akhtar has hated the Chaudharies for a very long time, and this ultimately culminated with the Chaudharies ensuring that Akhtar was not made Prime Minister when Jamali was shown the door by Musharraf).

Factionalism has been the modus operandi for Muslim League politics in the post colonial period. It took only a few years after independence for the first major split to occur in the League when Feroze Khan Noon and Dr. Khan Sahib broke away to form the Republican Party in 1955. Incidentally, Khan took the governership of the newly formed West-Pakistan one unit while Noon became the Prime Minister of the country. Also incidentally, the faction was handcrafted by the bureaucratic machinery to have a more pliant political leadership in control of the country. All of this sounds incredibly familiar regardless of which example we choose to talk about - 1955, 1958-60 (convention League), 1985 (Nawaz-Chaudhary League brokered by Gen. Jillani), or 2001 (PML-Q).

So the Muslim League breaks up every now and then. It's understandable to the extent that you'd expect a party full of egos and aristocratic landlords to do just that. But why does it happen so often to the Muslim League, why does it happen so often in Punjab, and subsequently why is it that the politics of Punjab is marked by deal-making, backdoor brokering, and horse-trading (lota-baazi)?

Just think about this: there were 16 patriots who left the PPP and joined forces with the PML-Q after the 2002 election. Only 1, i repeat, 1 patriot was from Sindh (PPP MNA from Ghotki), while most of the remaining 15 were from Punjab (famous ones being Faisal Saleh Hayat of Jhang and Rao Sikandar of Okara). The 2002 election was won by a party that drew 80 percent of it's membership from another party, who's leader had just been packed off into exile. In 1970, there were only 2 major landlords in Punjab that contested the election from a PPP ticket. By 1977, 19 out of 23 of the largest landlords of the province had joined the PPP at some-point before the election. In the same vein, the 1946 Muslim League drew most of its support from the defecting electables of the Punjab Unionist party. Regardless of which way you look at it, the history of this province's electoral history is built on defection and deal-cutting. Punjab, apart from a few years in the late 60's and early 70's, has only had one overarching political domain, i.e. the domain of elite politics.

So the million dollar question is why?

Well part of the explanation has to do with the history of this region and the interaction its indigenous populations have had with the outside world. Punjab has always been a region of flux and change, regardless of whether its because of Afghan invaders, Central Asian invaders, or European invaders, the province has had to deal with competing cultures, multiple religions, and cross-cutting transformations in society and economy. The constant importation of different paradigms and world-views has, according to some scholars, developed a culture of resilience within Punjabis. What that essentially means is that Punjabis are amenable to change, but they also like protecting whatever they perceive as an important instrument of self-definition.

For example, Farina Mir in her book highlights how the Punjabi language survived and flourished despite no state-patronage whatsoever. It's a bit far-fetched trying to import a post-modern argument on language to the political circumstances of 20th and 21st century Punjab, but at one level it does make sense: For Punjabis, the most important instrument of self-definition is the identification of one's role in a particular community (normally biraderi/mohalla/village). Politicians, given their self-defined roles as important members of a particular community, act on the instinct of preserving themselves, their identity, and by consequence, their community.

When the survival of a community or a network is coupled with a rent-seeking tendency, politics becomes primarily a game of objective state-power as opposed to ideology, loyalty or commitment. What is also important is that the preservation of a community or a network is not at odds with modernity itself. In fact, Punjabis have synthesized primordial loyalty with a capitalist/accumulative ethos very well, which has further marginalized the concept of loyalty and commitment. Your first loyalty is with yourself and the community and your second loyalty is with anything that helps you maintain your responsibilities to the first. If this explanation is taken at face-value, it primarily implies that the lota-baaz culture of Punjabi politics is a function of the region's experience in terms of resilience and amenability to change. Resilience of community produces the instinct to accumulate power and resources, while amenability to change produces the instinct to jump wherever the first obligation can be fulfilled. In short, the next time when you hear about floor crossing or horse trading, just try to remember that it's engrained in the cultural fabric of this province and cannot be willed away.