Loyalty is usually seen as a virtue whose expression is found in the bond of friendship; in myriad other relationships and associations, it acts as essential glue holding them together.
The feeling or sentiment of loyalty is as ancient as human association, albeit often manifested in its breach. Since it is considered a virtue, clear references to loyalty are found in almost all the foundational texts of all religions. The fickleness of human commitments, whether to God or to each other is recommended, neither in the Quran nor in the Old Testament. Coming to its definition, I found a most comprehensive one furnished in the Encyclopaedia Britannica Eleventh Edition which goes like this "allegiance to the sovereign or established government of one’s country" and also "personal devotion and reverence to the sovereign and royal family".
To describe it in simple terms, loyalty is devotion and faithfulness to a cause, country, group or a person. Therefore families expect it, organisations often demand it, and countries do what they can to foster it.
One may also be loyal to principles, to a certain cause or other abstractions. But, in this article, we are primarily concerned with the loyalty in our own social milieu that underpins the hierarchical relationship. The loyalty which a disciple demonstrates towards its pir or a political worker of a party shows towards his/her leader. A politician from Sindh who rose to the enviable rank of provincial party president and, by virtue thereof, also became chief minister used to say it rather openly, "even if my leader asks me to affix my signature on my death warrant, I will have no qualms doing it."
Every leader attaches optimal importance to unequivocal loyalty; hence it is the inter-personal relationship rather than association with any larger cause or objective which is at issue here. But it will be worthwhile to understand ‘loyalty’ as a philosophical category in the perspective of history before coming to the way it manifests in the socio-political setting of Pakistan.
The term "loyalty" has its immediate philological origins in Old French, its older and mostly abandoned linguistic roots are in the Latin lex. In the ancient times, the phrase mostly deployed to mean (dis)loyalty was (un)faithfulness, though nowadays we might be inclined to use the more restricted language of (in)fidelity, with regards to specific commitments.
In Europe, during the medieval to early modern uses of the term, loyalty came to be affirmed primarily in the oath or pledge of fealty or allegiance sworn by a vassal to his lord.
In the above lines, I have mentioned loyalty as a feeling or sentiment but social theorists like Ewin put it as "instinct to sociability" which can be tested only through ‘conduct’ and not through intensity of feeling, primarily a certain "stickingness or perseverance"-- the loyal person acts for or stays with or remains committed to the object of loyalty even when it is likely to be dangerous or costly to the loyal person to do so.
Late Jehangir Bader under Zia ul Haq’s regime and Saad Rafique and Javed Hashmi under Musharraf regime epitomise that perseverance. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, particularly, with his charisma instilled loyalty in many a youngster. Despite all odds, Khan Ghaffar Khan was another such leader who held sway over many people through the sheer force of his charisma, character and ideology. Maulana Maududi was another such figure, though loyalism for Maulana is articulated, even to this day, in the potency of his ideas preserved in his books.
In a particular socio-political setting of Pakistan, loyalty has remained confined to inter-personal level. One may argue that Islamists (like TTP operatives or those associated with Lashker-i-Jhangvi) with their loyalty to the religious cause defies this assertion. But the close sociological analysis would lead us to conclude that the followers are mostly responding to the call of their leader(s). Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, Mufti Jaffar Hussain, Sufi Muhammad and Mulla Omer are all personalities who have stirred so many to action and hundreds of their followers have laid down their lives. Thus the loyalty for a particular person, in whom the cause was personified, has been of vital significance here.
Simply put, the personality and a cause gets conflated in such cases. History is witness to such a pattern like Syed Ahmed Shaheed’s Jihad Tehreek (in 1831). That was a spectacular exhibition of loyalty by Syed Ahmed’s followers.
However, the fundamental problematic, when it comes to Pakistan, is the loyalty of an employee with the state or the institution(s) representing the state. Ironically, except the institution of Pakistan Army, no other state institution commands the loyalty that we are concerned here with. Until 25 years ago, the Civil Services of Pakistan could claim to elicit that ‘impersonal’ loyalty but the deterioration has pervaded deep and it has been reduced to a haphazard congregation of personalities and nothing more.
So, it is a movement in reverse direction -- from modernity to medievalism. That assertion calls for clarification. To my reckoning, with the onset of modernity, the sentiment/feeling of loyalty became more complex. In the medieval ages, loyalty was essentially inter-personal. But in the modern era, with the dismantling of monarchy and feudalism, power-relations having become impersonal ‘loyalty’ too has ceased to be inter-personal. Thus ‘loyalty’ has acquired a new socio-intellectual configuration.
The modern individual is expected to be loyal to his state via demonstration of his loyalty for its institution. The loyalty for state is expressed through the loyalty accorded to the institution one is attached to. That is one way the social stability can be restored in Pakistan. The power-relations and loyalty ought to be impersonal.