Nicolas Martin - Politics, Landlords and Islam in Pakistan

When we set up the series Exploring the Political in South Asia, we had intended that we would be able to include within it rich studies of the political in all the countries of the Indian subcontinent, not just India on which the literature is without doubt the richest. It is therefore a particular pleasure to write the foreword to this volume as it is the first book on Pakistan that we are publishing in this series. I am delighted to note that Nicolas Martin has delivered a book that is unique and in keeping with the tradition of rigorous and insightful political ethnography that this series attempts to showcase. Martin presents an analysis of contemporary Pakistan on the basis of evidence gathered during a period of two years during which he lived in rural Punjab sometimes in a Sufishrine, sometimes in humble rural homes, made friends with locals from across classes, worked in the local languages and got to know their public and private lives with an intimacy only anthropologists dare to achieve. This book therefore adds a totally new perspective and insight into Pakistan, a country that is much written about by writers who gain but a fleeting familiarity with people and places and usually from a distance. Martins account adds to this corpus with a scholarly and evidence-based account of the Pakistani state, electoral politics and clientilism written with a nose firmly on the ground.

This book tackles the most knotty issue that lies at the heart of politics in the populous province of Punjab that of patronage. Almost any account of Pakistani politics and its chequered record of democracy has drawn attention to the importance of political patronage in the creation of vote blocs that are mobilised for elections. These accounts have drawn attention to the entrenched nature of the power of rural elites who keep an impoverished rural workforce under their thumb by mediating between the states resources and the intended recipients. Such clientelistic relationships are then mobilised for votes during the election season as clients are forced to support their patrons political loyalties to ensure their own survival. Scholars in their attempt to interpret such a situation empathetically have sometimes argued that exploitative as it might seem from the outside, such a system of patronage has its advantages as it alleviates poverty by at least making sure that state resources are allocated somewhere and in doing so possibly also stem the possibility of widespread protest movements among the rural poor.

Martin categorically rejects such a reading of rural Pakistan. His book makes it clear that patronage is nothing but locally embedded despotism. He shows how landlords continue to use debt bondage as a way of controlling their clients and the other ways in which elites continuously exploit institutional, religious and social mechanisms to reproduce their power. He shows how the combination of feudal patronage and electoral democracy undermines other social mechanisms of creating social solidarity through political parties representing sectoral interests. As a result all alliances are forced to become nakedly instrumental and transactional in the zero sum game of political power. The result is everyday violence and vendetta that in turn create a state of vulnerability and fear among the poor. In the long run, this kind of politics, therefore, undermines the everyday power of the state by stemming the effectiveness of public sector services and benefits that the state is able to provide, by capturing resources for personal gain. Martin conducted this study while a military regime was in power under President Musharraf. Many Pakistanis had hoped that the strong leadership at the centre would make such local factional politics irrelevant as a military government would undercut corrupt political structures to reach the people directly. But unfortunately, even military regimes need to create a legitimacy for their existence, and Martin notes, military regimes used devolution programmes to create a loyal class of politicians.