A reliance on family-based patronage systems and dynastic tendencies ensures that the nature of our democratic process comes into question from time to time. When people aren't talking about governance and corruption, they talk about 'the same old tried, tested, and failed faces'. The important point often raised is that substantive democracy, at least in its theoretical manifestation, is premised on rational, free-market type principles. You vote for someone based on what you know about them and what you think they and their party is offering. It's, on paper, the outcome of a perfectly objective decision making process. Very much like buying toothpaste, or a bar of soap. Except it's quite clear that's not how people vote, even in countries where such ideas were historically developed.
The reason why I bring this up (again), and why i'm sort of ending my partially enforced blogging hiatus, is because the issue of substantive vs. procedural democracy remains a key sticking point on our political landscape for a segment of the population. The principal difference between the two is that the former implies objective rationality in voting preferences, as outlined above, while the latter means the simple procedure of holding an election, where people just come in and vote, either under duress or under sway of 'subjective' influence. Most elections in third world countries, and specifically in South Asia, fall under the second category.
One of the quintessential urban critiques of our political system is that a vast majority of people are born into straitjackets, which prevent them from casting a free and objective vote. This argument is partially based on perception of reality, and partially premised on intuition. Perception of rural reality entails: birth in a certain social class means deference to the local big-wigs, it means participating in the pre-ordained social collective that we call biraderi - complete with attached responsibilities and obligations, and it also implies that you're expected to marry your cousin. All of these factors combine to create a straitjacket that restricts 'free choice' as it is commonly understood. Secondly, the intuition aspect kicks in to fill in gaps of knowledge. 'yaar why else would they vote for the same people again and again'. The intuition aspect basically leads us to believe that those guys don't know the concept of free and informed choice-making, which is why they keep sending their 'mai-baaps' back to parliament.
Let's get one thing straight: it's unwise to dismiss the urban argument of restricted/un-free elections as superfluous, detached from reality, or misinformed. Authors, most notably found on the other side of the border, have reinvented history in a way that grants agency to marginalized and oppressed groups. By this flip of historiography, they've enabled people to look at how the 'masses' are in fact making rational choices - where rationality is defined as the process of assessing costs and benefits in a specific context. While i do think they make some valid points about the existence of agency at every level of society, i also see the glaring pitfall of associating them with too much of it - which would basically go to say 'well this is what they do, and what they're getting (i.e. a raw deal, oppression etc) is basically a consequence of their own actions'. Such thinking lends the idea that all lack of freedom is merely a lifestyle choice. Which it isn't.
The trick is to find a fence to sit on.
The problem becomes, well, more problematic when this dichotomy between urban and rural rationality is drawn up. Rural rationality is equated with irrationality, principally because it appears to be the result of traditional/primordial/ancient influences. Leadership in rural areas, is a consequence of lineage and genes. Biraderi-ism, is a medieval hangover that has no grounding in modernity. Piri-muridi and ritualistic practices show a deviation from a) scripture, and/or b) brainwashing. I think, and i may be completely wrong here, but equating urban rationality with objective freedom is a consequence of the high premium the world places on knowledge and education. Which, when you think about it, is why the most simple urban critique of our current democracy starts off from the presence of pervasive illiteracy.
I guess I find it amusing at one level that the free - unfree dichotomy fails to take into account the kinds of straitjackets that the peddlers of this distinction, i.e. the middle class (and above) urbanites, are born into as well, amongst which class remains the most binding. Almost all decisions taken by a head of household are done in order to preserve socio-economic status. From the question of a daughter's marriage, to a child's education, to association with the 'right' crowd, as opposed to the 'wrong' crowd, every step is a move to preserve and perpetuate upward mobility. And perhaps even more epic is the fact that people imbibe and regurgitate such 'objective freedoms' on a day to day basis. 'I'm very liberal, I have allowed my daughter to marry a boy of her own choice. Yes, he was with her at college,and yes I do know the boy's family, they're good people'. This is where the daughter would step in and say 'my parents have given me complete freedom to marry, and I chose to marry XYZ whose dad also happens to go to Gymkhana every Sunday afternoon, and he was with me at college.' (on a side note, i've seen consequences of people trying to deviate from 'expected' norms, and the end-result is always lots of crying, and parents mostly getting their way).
Personally, i'd like to see how liberal the dad stays if her daughter had decided to marry the driver's son. Anyway, the point is that throughout the last century, authors like Foucault and Gramsci have shown how compliance and passivity is inculcated in the urban population through the very modern institutions of the school, the mental asylum, the prison system, and i think it's fair to add the media here as well. You can argue all you want, but to me, compliance, of the 'irrational' rural kind, or of the media driven, global consumption culture kind are essentially guaranteeing the same thing.
Anyway, i digress. The thing i wanted to look at was dynasticism and the presence of traditional authority in the Pakistani political system. As things stand, we have two kinds of gene-based politics operating in the country: one is at the local level, where the son of a big-wig is accepted as the next big-wig by common folks. The second one is at the level of national politics, where political parties are conferred upon heirs - like a bow-tied car given to newly married daughters by their dads. Both are clear violations of objective rational politics because they both come out of a reliance on cult of personality, and traditional subservience.
Europe moved from such personality cults (not entirely though) and traditional subservience slowly and surely because of, well, history. urbanization and the rise of new groups meant that people wanted a bigger share of the pie, which the monarchy and the nobility wasnt willing to give. Hence we saw civil wars, and guillotines, and other such activities, till finally people came to their senses and a sliver of representative rule began to take root. In the backdrop to all of this, the important thing that happened was the creation of the modern state, dictated by rules and codified law, and run by a bureaucracy operating on impersonal legal-rational principles.
Ab sirf woh ho ga jo qanoon mein likha hay.
Writing in the 19th century, Marx, being the poster-boy of European modernity that he was, saw colonialism as a necessary evil that would forcefully replace primitive forms of rule and production in South Asia with capitalism and an administration based on legal-rational principals. After all, if peasants kept doing their silly little rain dances and kept giving up their surplus to rulers hell-bent on building ostentatious monuments, how will we ever see modernization -> urbanization -> alienated labor -> revolution?
So right on cue, enter colonialism. Promising commerce, civilization, and (for some Christianity), a one-way ticket to modernization, and all of the other goodies that Europe had achieved after literally a thousand years of bickering. Except that's not really why they entered South Asia. And it shows.
One of the reasons why we see the persistence of traditional forms of authority in this region is because that's exactly what the British wanted. After 1857, the Brits were quite keen on ensuring that 'local institutions' were preserved, that the natural order of things not be disturbed, so as to make sure that another 1857 doesn't happen. Anthropologists spent days observing 'quintessential village life' and came up with complicated manuals on the role of a Tarkhaan, and the role of a Chaudhary. Ultimately, the champions of impersonal legal-rational rule created a legal system that not only preserved traditional modes of authority, but also backed it up with the coercive apparatus that a modern state has. There are several very glaring examples from all over India, but the closest to home are land laws found in the province of Punjab. The Brits, now smug with the knowledge that only certain classified castes could hold land and other couldn't, introduced the land alienation act of 1900, that simply banned non-classified castes from holding land. Also, close inspection of the Land Settlement and Revenue Manual of Punjab shows that the British paid specific value to the concept of heirs and their right on land especially with respect to the rights of tenants. Till the 1950's, tenancy laws offered next to no protection to tenants, and heirs had complete right to shift tenants at wil, which is partially one of the reasons why Punjab's canal colonies saw the largest peasant rebellion in India. But the real icing on the legal-rational cake is that women, under law, were forbidden to hold land till the late 1930's.
There are plenty of other examples, including how the colonial government supported sufi pirs in Sindh and gave them revenue estates in certain cases, and the inheritance system placed for village propriety bodies in canal colony districts of Punjab. All of this shows that what appears to be a modern state structure had plenty of 'traditional' characteristics. The deputy commissioner under the British, designed to be the embodiment of impersonal authority, was essentially a local Chaudhary.
Given this history, one can see how traditional forms of authority were mixed with very modern aspects of economy, political rule and administration. The role of a 'mai-baap' is partially a cultural phenomenon and partially because the 'mai-baap' was literally the be all, end all of village life. Even to this day, the office of the numberdaar, i.e. the village headman is enshrined under law. Similarly, biraderi is still very much relevant because colonial authorities ensured that 'zaat' and 'quom' were important markers of differentiation, a truth that continues to this day.
What our history shows is that characteristics of an agrarian, decentralized society became legal principals under colonialism. But acha chalo, what happened then, happened. Can't really do much about that. What we should be asking is have we actually not progressed at all since independence? The answer, at least based on my reading of things, is of course we have. Within two generations, people have gone from being wage laborers on a piece of land, to proper middle class members of urban society. Similarly, the notion of an all-encompassing traditional leader has progressively broken down, and will continue to do so as urbanization grows. Based on the fieldwork conducted by Ali Cheema in Sargodha, it was apparent that villages make cost-benefit calculations before backing particular candidates in elections. These calculations result in the creation of voting blocks (because people in a village have a shared existence), that to the distant observer, seem like a herd of peasants voting to appease their feudal overlord. All of that aside, perhaps the most pressing argument is that if tradition was the dictating principle of politics in this country, we would have seen absolutely no new faces in our assemblies over the last 64 years. While inter-generational incumbency is still high, it is by no means absolute, and we've seen a new class of politicians emerge over the last 30 years (the Saad Rafique and MQM sorts).
In any case, enough with this rambling on local politics and the interplay of tradition and modernity at that particular level. The other thing to look at is the lack of internal democracy in political parties. There are two ways of looking at it: one is that cult of personalities are intrinsic to our society. That till such time we have Pakistan, we'll have Bilawals and Hamzas. Or conversely, the other way to look at it is that cult of personalities arise out of the sheer amount of social capital that every individual and group possesses. If our legal history has placed importance on who inherits what, and associates political and economic power with this inheritance, it is easy to understand why personality cults develop. People have social capital, which is basically their influence, their charisma, and the connections they have with the rest of society. The simplest example of this is that tish-tosh private schools interview parents before admitting children. If the parents, and the family, are deemed to be of the 'right' kind, the child is enrolled. I'd like to see the legal-rational precedence for such behavior - which, by the way, is pervasive in Pakistan and across the 'modern' west.
Bilawal inheriting the PPP after his mother's death is, unfortunately, not in line with principles of substantive, free democracy. But it does make sense when you consider the amount of social capital the Bhutto family has in this country. In fact, looking at it that way, it makes perfect sense why the PPP would want a Bhutto to lead the party. Does that mean we're stuck in the 15th century, when people would just be anointed as leaders? No, of course it doesn't. Cults develop in modern contexts as well (think Altaf and the Karachi middle class). At the same time, it should also be remembered that till such time society orders itself into groups (based on whatever principle: class, religion, ethnicity), some people will command a following purely based on their group association (in this case family and lineage). It is the same principle we have when we use our father's name to obtain favor and acceptance at a micro-level.
I'll conclude this incredibly long rant with a small remark on impersonal political rationality: it doesn't exist.
