Mark-Andre and Pakistan’s elite

A week after Mark-Andre Franche, the outgoing country director of the UNDP, castigated Pakistan’s ruling elite for their insensitivity to the poor, a report by another UN agency has made uncomfortable headlines regarding the plight of education in the country.

According to the United Nations Global Education Monitoring Report 2016, prepared by Unicef, Pakistan is more than 50 years behind in its primary and more than 60 years behind in its secondary education targets. The report reveals that only about 10 percent of poor children complete lower secondary school, compared to 75 percent of rich children.

This is what Mark-Andre had said in his interview to a Pakistani newspaper: “…it is also extremely frustrating for me to see, a country and people that are so capable and intelligent, not making more progress… in terms of poverty reduction, inequality, modernising the state, and functioning institutions…The fact that even in 2016, Pakistan has 38 percent poverty; it has districts that live like sub-Saharan Africa; that the basic human rights of minorities, women and the people of Fata are not respected; that this country has not been able to get its act together and hold a census; or that it has not been able to push for reforms in Fata, an area that is institutionally living in 17th century.”

In Mark Andre’s opinion, this situation can be corrected only through a behavioural shift in Pakistan’s elite. “If there is one thing I leave with, it is a sense that the only way a critical change will happen in Pakistan is when the elite of this country, the politicians and the wealthy sections of the society, will sacrifice their short term, individual and family interest, in the benefit of the nation. You cannot have a political class in this country that uses its power to enrich itself, and to favour its friends and families. This fundamental flaw needs to be corrected if Pakistan is to transform into a modern, progressive developed country. The political and economic elite must also try to build consensus.”

How can a country that finds it roots in an education movement and calls itself an Islamic welfare state be so insensitive to the plight of the poor? There is no big riddle behind this irony. Sir Syed’s Aligarh University was meant only for the Ashraf, the upper caste Muslims. The lower caste including the Ajlaf, middle craftsmen, and Arzal, menials, had no place in that great institution. As Saeed Naqvi explains, “These divisions were as rigid as those in the Hindu caste system. Of course, there was a difference between the two. The varna or the caste based system was the social architecture designed by Brahmins. Muslim hierarchies evolved under the feudal system.”

Though based on economic exclusion rather than a religious ideology, the South Asian Muslim elite in the mid-nineteenth century did not comprise the rich alone. A large section of this elite consisted of members of the middle class who were desperately looking for good jobs in the British government to be at par with their Hindu neighbours. It is this salariat that came to dominate Pakistan after Partition because they were well entrenched in the system.

Mark-Andre gets a bit confused when he identifies the elite as the super-rich inside and outside politics and holds them solely responsible for the state of affairs in the country. According to him, “You cannot have an elite that takes advantage of very cheap and uneducated labour when it comes to making money, and when it is time to party it is found in London, and when it’s time to buy things it is in Dubai, and when it’s time to buy property it invests in Dubai or Europe or New York. The elite needs to decide do they want a country or not.” Here, he appears to have fallen for the middle-class narrative hook, line and sinker.

Over decades, Pakistani media and popular fiction have nurtured the image of the feudal who lords over an army of slave labour, wielding the ultimate power in the country and bearing responsibility for all ills. While this image is not totally untrue and landholders do exploit the poor in the rural areas, the ‘feudal’ is only a junior partner – with waning influence – in the system.

As one historian has noted: “The military-bureaucratic elite which rules Pakistan is on the whole conservative. A large part of their education is Western, the organization framework within which they work is British and their working language is English. Their houses, messes, cantonments and lifestyle are British colonial. Although they are at the apex of Pakistani society in terms of power, prestige and income, they persist in thinking of themselves as ‘middle class’ – classifying themselves subconsciously as if they were still part of British society.”

Both the traditional landowning elite and the newly rich businessmen formed a patron-client relationship with the military-bureaucratic elite – feudals to get a share in power and industrialists to get permits and other benefits in the crony capitalism. According to Angus Maddison, a British economist, “Because of the enormous power of government controls, and because industry was still relatively small and run by minority groups, the relationship between the bureaucracy and business has been one of patron and client.”

While giving a presidential address on August 11, 1947 to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, Quaid-e-Azam promised that Pakistan would be a state for the “well-being of the people, and especially of the masses and the poor”. However, Pakistan’s ruling elite, including the large landholders and the post-colonial military bureaucratic elite had different ideas. In a travesty of a welfare state, Pakistan was turned into a country where the state serves the interests of the rich and the middle class, keeping the poor in their place by denying education to their children.

The exploitation of the poor is by no means the preserve of the rich industrialist or large landholder. The poor are exploited the most at the hands of small enterprises owned by the middle class and in the middle class homes that employ a good part of the child labour.

In fact, the whole system survives through an alliance between the country’s power elite and the economic middle class. The middle class is rewarded by prioritising state resources to their benefit and through impunity from paying taxes. Any surprise that traders who hold 24 percent of the economy pay less than one percent tax and any effort to change this situation turns out to be a farce. The system also keeps the hopes of the middle class high. After all, their sons can one day join the government and their grandson can become a minister or an industrialist or can get a seat in parliament while remaining in the middle class.

Can this structure change only by changing the mindset of the ruling elite? Even if it can, what can nudge the elite to relinquish their interests for the sake of the Ajlaf and Arzal children? It is not a problem that can be solved through behaviour change communication. The strength of the poor lies in their number and change can come only when they understand the dynamics of the system and turn the tables on the middle class-elite nexus. Did you leave behind a project for that, Mark-Andre?

The writer is a social anthropologist and development professional.

Email: zaighamkhan@yahoo.com

Twitter: @zaighamkhan