On dynastic politics

Not as simple as it seems

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 is premised on rational, free-market type principles. You vote for someone based on what you know about them and what you think they are offering. It’s, on paper, the outcome of a perfectly objective decision making process. Very much like buying toothpaste. Except that’s not how people vote. Even in countries where such ideas were historically developed.

The issue of substantive vs procedural democracy remains a key sticking point on our political landscape. 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. An urban perception of rural reality entails the following: birth in a certain social class means deference to the local big-wigs, it means participating in what we call a biraderi complete with attached obligations. Intuitively, we believe that those guys don’t know the concept of informed choice-making, which is why they keep sending their ‘mai-baaps’ back to parliament.

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 influences. I think equating urban rationality with objective freedom is a consequence of the high premium the world places on knowledge and education. Which is why the simplest urban critique of our current democracy starts off from the presence of pervasive illiteracy. 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.

Anyways, 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.

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 when they came here as colonising saviours. 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 Chaudhry. 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.

What our history shows is that characteristics of an agrarian, decentralised society became legal principles under colonialism. 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 is of course we have. Within two generations people have gone from being wage labourers 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 urbanisation 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 that to the distant observer seem like a herd of peasants voting to appease their feudal overlord.

All 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 Rafiques and MQM sorts).

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 the other way to look at it is that cult of personalities arise out of the social capital that every individual and group possesses. 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. I’d like to see the legal-rational precedence for such behaviour – 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 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 lineage).

I’ll conclude with a small remark on impersonal political rationality: it doesn’t exist.