Brainwashed rulers

A few days ago, I was at a gathering where a certain minister was to deliver the keynote address. There was hardly any enthusiasm from onlookers as he walked up on stage, although a mindless round of applause — robotic and apathetic — rang across the venue. While speaking, he would take a tremendous amount of liberty deviating off topic to praise himself, his team, his political party and his ‘initiatives’.

None of this was surprising — indeed, it is all generally part of the course — but there was one statement that was particularly perplexing given Pakistan’s socioeconomic and political history. This was when he took a hard detour and began speaking about the 1970s, criticising the policies of the decade before concluding with, “Thank God we didn’t allow ourselves to go down the Socialism route. For all our faults and failures, that really would have been a disaster.” It has been 50 years since that period, yet ruling elites continue to refer to it as if the country is a handful of steps removed from full Communism.

What explains this paranoia? A popular belief within policy circles in Pakistan is that a lack of continuity stands at the heart of the nation’s troubles. Whether it be education, healthcare, agriculture, social protection, trade/commerce, energy production or any other critical sector of the economy, a spur-of-the-moment approach has always been the modus operandi. Those at the helm are perpetually in restart mode, shutting down projects initiated under previous governments and replacing them with their own versions for political clout. On closer inspection, however, this is largely only illusion.

The underlying logic of most programmes, in terms of their structure, target audience, financial allocations, internal incentive mechanisms, etc are quite well-preserved over time: the only difference being in terms of external branding and publicity strategy. One of the primary reasons for this is that since independence, the governing class has been beholden to the geopolitical and economic interests of the West: predominantly the US.

This is evidenced by the fact that Pakistan, not long after independence, joined the SEATO and CENTO agreements — both part of an intricately designed initiative by the US to curtail the influence of the USSR at the time by capturing countries in the Global South via ‘development assistance’ in the form of fiscal aid. While India was restructuring its institutions to propel human development in the 1960s, Pakistan was undergoing the ‘Green Revolution’ — whereby resources were funnelled into the agricultural sector, mostly to big landlords who did not require them. This triggered premature urbanisation, with the landless peasantry and labouring classes abandoning their deep roots in the countryside in favour of cities that were hardly in the position to accommodate these inflows.

Indeed, the ‘Green’ Revolution was what took the place of a potential ‘Red’ Revolution: which could have been geared around comprehensive land reform that redistributed holdings carrying forward from British rule, breaking the hold of landed elites (electables) in the process for political contestation and boosting productivity in agriculture via competitive dynamics. This in turn could have generated inputs for the manufacturing sector, propelling the process of industrial growth and development. None of it came to pass.

Fast forward into the 1980s, and the Ziaul Haq regime has entered the conflict in Afghanistan in exchange for economic and military assistance from the US. IMF structural adjustment programmes begin rolling in during this period and the promise to privatise, liberalise and deregulate key domains is made, triggering the start of large scale restructuring of the economy in favour of the ‘free market’ model. This process really takes off following the Washington Consensus of 1989 and hundreds of enterprises are handed over to private hands during the 1990s, although fiscal account deficits remained constant (or worsened) throughout.

Finally, following 9/11 the Musharraf administration jumped into the War on Terror — again in exchange for geopolitical rents, in which ruling elites toed the US line in terms of policy direction; liberalising the media sector and continuing to sell off state owned enterprises with little to no thought about the nature of their internal operations, managerial strategies or the accessibility of their services to vulnerable segments of the population. To sum, Pakistan’s policies have followed a consistent structure since independence, closely in line with the preferences of the Pentagon.

As a result, the overarching economic ideology of the US — which itself evolved as a response to Cold War dynamics with the Soviet Union post-WWII — was uncritically adopted by domestic politicians, bureaucrats, development practitioners, the business community and the security apparatus. Central to this was the total rejection (and fear) of anything that may be critical of free market capitalism: particularly its neoliberal variant. McCarthyism, named after US Senator Joseph McCarthy, was a campaign initiated in the late 1940s to insulate the government, policy community and general culture of the US of any signs of ‘disloyalty’ to the state — which sympathy to Communism and its ideals was treated as the surest indicator of.

Major clampdowns on organisations and individuals that leaned left were pursued, with many being ridiculed, denied of employment opportunities, subjected to social isolation, placed under surveillance and even formally prosecuted for their alleged ties to ideals such as equity, liberty, autonomy, economic justice and political communitarianism. Indeed, many were forced to self-censor during this period — either refusing to let their actual thoughts be known about various societal concerns or simply lying to feign ‘loyalty’ to whomever they happened to be engaging with.

This ideology has been internalised by virtually everyone occupying the policy arena in Pakistan, not due to the inherent superiority of its ideas but the fact that this space has been flush with funds from international financial institutions that espouse it as the Gospel Truth, closely working with domestic power brokers who approve ‘projects’ for a quick buck. These individuals are almost invariably old in age, rigid in approach, opportunistic in temperament and arrogant in demeanour, behaving no differently to administrators during colonial times. With an air of superiority, these ‘uncles’ perceive ordinary citizens as unruly, ignorant and helpless, even though their lack of imaginativeness would suggest those labels were much more suited to themselves. If their decisions did not have significant consequences for the population, perhaps all this might be excused.

Except they do.