[Reader-list] Feudalism in Pakistan

Tue Aug 4 18:29:48 IST 2009

Dear Rajan,

To be honest, i don't think you understood the article or the mail or may be it was not clear enough for you. It is not a problem involving faith at all.

let me try to put it in a different way.

It is about a group of people in Pakistan who because of bad policies decades ago are running their own states specially in some rural areas of Sindh, Balouchistan and few urban areas of Punjab. It has no implicit or explicit relation with faith as you have come to understood. 

There is more to world problems than those  faith obsessed people, who blame everything on faith or do everything because of faith. Because some people are allowed to preach their faith but what they lack is freedom to live their lives.

Regards,

Asad

Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2009 14:39:58 +0530
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Feudalism in Pakistan
From: rajen786uppinangady at gmail.com
To: asad_abbasi at hotmail.com
CC: reader-list at sarai.net

Thanks to secular society and the faith of majority in India which is truely tolerant, this nation is a nation today, is having its few aberrations when the feudal lords get elected to parliament, with divisive politics, but the nation remains united thanks to occasional calamities which unites the society to face them, this inspite of efforts by the pseudo seculars and walking talking nations in this democracy.Ofcourse there are some special citizens who wear the faith on their sleeve for seeking apartments, change faiths for marriage three or four times, to defend the criminals,and media loves to be on their panel to preach morality.!

Regards,

Rajen.

On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 6:59 PM, asad abbasi <asad_abbasi at hotmail.com> wrote:

Dear All,

Nicholas Kristoff in his NY Times blog poses a serious question about the feudal structure in Pakistan. He is right about the feudal lords- as they are called- and their antics to remain in power. They are power of their own, having their own rules. But can Pakistan allow these personal states within her? But if this is the problem why can government not stop it? They may be because the "land owners" are now powerful politicians.

There was once a time in England when only land owners had the right to vote, but it is may not be wrong to say that in a country like Pakistan only land owners have the right to say.

Pakistan has a cyclical problem. Politicians can break this feudal structure but that would hurt their politics. Will they cut their own leg for greater good of Pakistan? or Pakistan needs to finds a different solution.

Warm Regards,

Asad

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/feudalism-in-pakistan/?pagemode=print

I sometimes wonder if what Pakistan doesn’t really need is a good dose of land reform to break up feudal power. The extraordinary inequities in Pakistan seem not only unjust but also an impediment to both economic growth and national consensus.

For those who haven’t been to Pakistan, you should know that in remote areas you periodically run into vast estates — comparable to medieval Europe — in which the landowner runs the town, perhaps operates a private prison in which enemies are placed, and sometimes pretty much enslaves local people through debt bondage, generation after generation. This feudal elite has migrated into politics, where it exerts huge influence. And just as the heartlessness of feudal and capitalist barons in the 19th century created space for Communists, so in Pakistan this same lack of compassion for ordinary people seems to create space for Islamic extremists. There are other answers, of course, such as education, civil society, and the lawyers’ movement. But I wonder if land reform wouldn’t be a big help.

Dwight Perkins, the great Harvard economist of development, argued that a crucial factor in the rise of East Asia was the land reform and division in countries like Japan and South Korea after World War II, creating a more equal society. (In Japan, this was done under U.S. auspices: we were much more socialist outside our country than in it.) Likewise, India had its own land reform in 1953, but Pakistan was left out.

I’ve often focused on education as the greatest need for Pakistan, but even there the feudal structure is replicated. There are first-rate schools in English for the elite, second-rate schools for the strivers, and execrable schools for the masses. At the bad schools, teachers don’t even bother to show up. This highly stratified system tends to perpetuate an ossified economic and social structure, and creates less room for the country to innovate and build or use human capital.

But I’m a novice here. Those of you who know Pakistan much better than I — what do you think? Is the feudal land structure a major part of the problem? And if so, is it so entrenched that it’s not even worth dreaming of land reform? Is it more feasible to chip away at the feudal structure by broadening education? I’m all ears. Let me know what you think.

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-- 
Rajen.

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