From: dogar@rtsg.mot.com (Haroon H. Dogar)
Subject: Why Development in Pakistan fails...(very long)
Organization: Motorola Inc., Cellular Infrastructure Group
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 16:34:05 GMT


The following post contains an article that Iftikhar Zaman
posted a long time ago. He did not cite the original author,
so I don't know who actually wrote it. Still, I found the
analysis to be extremely insightful and I hope that you all
enjoy it as much as I did.

It is very long, so I would recommend that you save it to disk
and read it [all] at your leisure.

Thanks,
-hd

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From: zama@ellis.uchicago.edu (iftikhar uz zaman)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.pakistan
Subject: Why Development in Pakistan fails...(long article)
Date: 8 Apr 91 07:16:21 GMT
Organization: U of Chicago

(Having just posted an article raising the possibility that we, too,
are "colonialists" in our own country, I would like to give some
substance to this possibility by posting this long article by one of
my favorite author's on why development in Pakistan fails.  In my
opinion he has tried to shake off some of the colonial attitude
and think in a fresh way about the situation--I leave it to you to
judge his success...The article is long, but I think it addresses
many of the issues which show up repeatedly on this forum in a fresh
manner...I am pretty sure I haven't posted this before, if I have,
please accept my apologies.)

 
 
 
 
                     WHY DEVELOPMENT FAILS:
 
          STRUCTURAL CONSTRAINTS IN ISLAMICATE SOCIETIES
                     [THE CASE OF PAKISTAN]
  
          In the classic Japanese movie Rashomon four different
versions of the "same" scene are presented. The participants are
a man, his wife, a stranger, and a hidden onlooker. Each of them
narrate a different version of the same events from their
personal perspectives. Manly heroism in one version is abject
cowardice in the other; chastity in one is carnal heat in the
other; magnanimity in one is brutality in the other; and so on.
Is only one of the versions correct, or are all "equally" true?
 
2.        A similar question can be raised about much of the
conventional wisdom about development in non-Western societies.
The participants in this process are the modernizing elites of
the so-called developing countries, the people themselves who are
the object of development--the bulk constituting what may be
called the "vernacular" class (those illiterate or literate only
in their mother tongues), the agents of foreign governments,
multilateral agencies and private interests carrying out the
policies of their principals, and Western scholars and experts
who enjoy a monopoly over the provision of truths about the
process of development.
 
3.        Unlike Rashomon, the story of development is narrated
exclusively by Western intellectuals and is echoed by all, except
the silent people who are its raison d'etre. The story narrated
in this paper is no exception. Nevertheless, an attempt is made
to sketch, in a historical context, the differences which exist
in elite perspectives and the nature of class structure, which
serve to constrain efforts at social, political and economic
development.  Although the argument is spelt out for Pakistan,
much of it may be applicable to post-colonial Islamicate nations
generally.
 
 
                    ORIGINS: ISLAM AND EUROPE
 
4.        Two nations live within the national boundaries of
Pakistan, and every other Muslim nation-state today. They hold
entirely different views of the purpose of human existence, the
nature of "good" society (in terms of political, social and
economic organization and conduct), and the use of natural
resources. The two are heirs to different civilizations and
cultures. They perceive different mechanisms in history (or, they
perceive differently the mechanisms of history), draw different
conclusions from it, and assess differently the diagnosis of the
human condition and prognosis of human civilization.
 
5.        The key differences arise firstly from the general
difference in secular and religious conceptions of human progress
and the perfectibility of man, secondly from the mechanistic
ideas which have triumphed among the secular views, and finally
from ideas specific to Islam among other religious conceptions.
As part of historical changes which occurred among peoples of
European stock [the "West"] over the last two hundred years--
modernization, for short--the pursuit of material comforts in
this world became a virtue from having been a vice.
 
6.        Equally, it became, and is conventional wisdom in the
West today that a good society (indeed, some would say the best
society) can be formed by actively encouraging individual
citizens to pursue their acquisitive instincts, subject to
certain legal constraints. On the other hand, it is a central
message of Islam that societies founded on avarice, greed and
hedonism have been destroyed, despite long periods of survival.
Instead, the good society can only be founded by encouraging
obedience to divine laws.
 
7.        These sharp differences emerged from a common
historical background. On the eve of the rise of Islam, around
A.D. 622, Constantinople was the center of a Judeo-Christian
civilization, centered on the shores of the Mediterranean. The
rise of Islam in the seventh century shattered the unity of the
two hundred years of Roman empire. The Mediterranean which had
been the centre of Christianity became its frontier and as the
locus of civilization shifted to the north, Europe was born. For
Europe, this break with the tradition of antiquity, caused by
Islam, was completed by Charlemagne in A. D. 800 when he gave the
West a new Roman empire, consecrating the break between the West
and the East, and heralding the dawn of the Middle Ages.
 
8.        During the next six hundred years, until the sack of
Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, the Muslims were blessed with a
temporal empire second to none. It is telling that the same
period, until the beginning of the Renaissance around A. D. 1347,
are termed the "dark" ages by European historians. It was in this
period that the two civilizations came to a parting of ways. In
the Muslim empire, the attack on faith by reason was resolved
convincingly in favor of faith, by the exceptional personal
character of those who stood for faith. In Europe, the personal
corruption of the Popes and the clergy led to a revulsion against
religion among common folks who yearned for religion; in time,
this led to the rise of two secular versions of Christianity:
democratic capitalism and popular socialism.
 
9.        In the West, the long nineteenth century [ca. 1789-
1914] was a period of major change in ways of thought, social,
political and economic organization, and utilization of natural
resources. This historical experience is referred to as
modernization, or development. This experience suggests that
there were broadly three routes to modern society: democratic,
authoritarian, and communist. The earliest combined capitalism
and Parliamentary democracy after a series of revolutions, as in
England, France and the United States of America. The second,
also capitalist but without a strong revolutionary surge, passed
through reactionary political forms to culminate in
authoritarianism, in Germany [as in Japan]. The third, based
mainly but not exclusively on peasant originated revolutions, led
to communism in Russia [and in Asia, in China].
 
10.       Over the same period, a number of non-European
countries also undertook programmes of reform and reorganization.
In the Muslim countries, although mass society remained more or
less unaffected, a strong conservative bias was lent to
indigenous reform efforts as the preservation of culture was
sought by retreat to tradition and conflict with alien powers was
avoided (conservative orthodoxy). At the same time, however, a
reactive nationalism also emerged, motivated primarily by the
desire for greater military power. This took two forms, one based
on furthering indigenous cultural goals with alien methods
(reactive-conservatism), and the other based on the complete
adoption of modernization goals and methods (reactive-modernism).
 
11.       Although Pakistan emerged as a nation in 1947, and its
present political boundaries date only to 1971, the Indus valley
is the site of the third oldest continuous civilization in the
world (pre-dated only by present day Iraq and Egypt). Pakistan's
history is conventionally divided into five periods: the pre-
Islamic age (up to A. D. 710); the Pre-Moghul Sultanates (A. D.
711-1526); the Moghul period (A.D. 1526-1857); the British
colonial period (A.D. 1858-1947); and the post-Independence
period (since 1947).
 
12.       For over 1,000 years the people of Pakistan have been,
and see themselves as, Muslims. After 90 years of formal colonial
rule, since 1947, they have lived in the nation state of
Pakistan, whose present geographical boundaries date from 1971
when one half of the country seceded to form Bangladesh. The
stream of social change in Pakistan has been fed with these two
major conceptual currents: one, a traditional Islamic one
containing three sub-currents--conservative orthodoxy, reactive
conservatism, and reactive modernism, and the other, a Western-
modern one, with three sub-currents--liberal-revolutionary
capitalism, reactionary-authoritarian capitalism, and peasant-
revolutionary communism.
 
13.       In what finally prevailed all of these concepts mixed
inseparably, but it is useful to keep the pedigree of these more
or less "pure" types in mind. In fact, the distribution of power
which emerged favored the modernists (both domestic and external)
overwhelmingly. Also, the modern concepts which prevailed were
influenced decisively by Pakistan's foreign policy, and by the
intensity of the global conflict between the two rival European
camps which emerged.




 
European routes to Modernization
 
14.       As the European experience is well-known, it may be
summarized briefly.
 
15.       Liberal Revolution  The development of Western
democracy was an effort to do three closely related things:
 
     (i)  to check arbitrary rulers--in Europe, the
          beheading of kings being the most dramatic
          aspect of this;
 
    (ii)  to replace arbitrary rules with just and
          rational ones--in Europe, the establishment
          of the rule of law, and the power of the
          legislature, being the chief aspects, but
          also the right to vote, and equality before
          law (at least in theory) in an objective
          system of law; and
 
   (iii)  to obtain a share for the underlying
          population in the making of rules--meaning
          many of the things under (ii) above, but also
          religious toleration (or, the toleration of
          irreligious behavior), freedom of speech, the
          right to peaceful assembly, and finally to
          use the state to provide for the welfare of
          the people.
 
16.       Admittedly, this is an ideal conception of a liberal
society many of whose features have yet to emerge even in the
West. A key feature of the Western experience was the decline of
the share of agriculture in national output, employment and
allocation of resources, and the rise of industrial (and later
service sector) employment. In Pakistan, as elsewhere, the
pursuit of this path today translates into the need to check the
civil-military bureaucratic rule, which has not been possible for
a variety of reasons, not the least because of an external
military threat, and that of a breakdown of law and order.
 
17.       Authoritarian Development     The main achievements of
conservative modernization in Germany and Japan were the
establishment of:
 
     (i)  a strong authoritarian central government, a
          powerful bureaucracy, and a uniform
          administrative system;
 
    (ii)  a uniform law code and a system of courts;
 
   (iii)  a military machine powerful enough to be
          significant in international politics, and
          large enough to stimulate industrialization
          under heavy tariff protection; and
 
    (iv)  the transformation of agriculture and
          industry into capitalist forms by squeezing
          greater surplus out of peasants and laborers,
          while maintaining intact the preexisting
          social arrangements.
 
18.       The key to conservative modernization on the European
model was the use of traditional social relationships and
attitudes to establish authority, and the use of strong political
methods to protect big agriculture and big industry at the
expense of agricultural labor, peasants and consumers. In this
way, capitalism took hold firmly in agriculture and industry, but
did so without any revolutionary upheaval. In later stages, a
rough coalition emerged between the landed upper classes and the
rising commercial industrial class, which sought to combine
political power with profit, and thus served to provide for the
rationalization of the political order.
 
19.       In the European context this was the only path to the
modern world without a revolution. As such, it should have been
of the greatest interest to  Pakistan [and similar post-colonial
countries]. There is also the fact that the bureaucracy in
Pakistan is a strong modernizing force, but the problem is that
unlike Japan and Germany, it is not identified with indigenous
values and lifestyles and can not command the loyalties of the
masses. Also, as the international rivalry between the liberal
democracies and the communists has extended to Afro-Asian
countries, foreign assistance has served to channel development
alternatives between these two competing models only. Germany and
Japan, having lost the war, have not been aggressive proponents
of their experience.
 
20.       Popular Revolution  In the context of Europe,
modernization in the nineteenth century began with peasant
revolutions that failed; in the twentieth century, it culminated
with peasant revolutions that succeeded. The proximate causes of
these revolutions are thought to be the absence of a commercial
revolution in agriculture by the landed upper classes, the
weakness of institutional links binding peasant society to the
upper classes, and the exploitative character of this
relationship. A contributing factor is the loss of support for
the regime among the wealthier peasants, in response both to the
extension of the state's coercive authority to the village, and
the opportunities provided by the extension of the market to the
countryside, which creates a conflict between the peasant and his
lord.
 
21.       Relevance to Modern Muslim Societies    All attempts at
economic and social development attempt to retrace, with minor
adaptation, the first two of these European routes to
modernization. To what extent is the European experience
relevant, especially to Islamic countries? There can be two
approaches to this question: one, internal to the logic of
European historiography, and the other, internal to the Islamic
weltanschauung.
 
22.       Under the first approach, a question can be raised
about the comparability of the initial conditions. Clearly, as
noted earlier, the perceptual frameworks are sharply different.
Also, Muslim societies are now sharply divided on fundamental
values, and in most countries no democratic revolution has taken
place to synthesize a social consensus (which is not without
implication for the maintenance of law and order). Second, the
size of the population engaged in agriculture is much larger.
Third, the disadvantages of being a latecomer, in terms of
opportunities for industrial investment and advantageous trade
(not to mention colonization) are much more limited.
 
23.       More importantly, however, Muslim societies are not
European societies. Apart from a small modernizing class, the
bulk of the population of Muslim states simply does not accept
the moral, as distinct from the technological, superiority of the
West. This has a profound impact on social psychology. On
November 10, 1793, the Christian God was deposed in Notre Dame,
in Paris, by the party of the Hebertists and atheistic Reason
proclaimed as anti-goddess, without event. By comparison, on
November 22, 1979, a Pakistani mob burned down the American
Embassy in Islamabad, on rumors (later found to be false) that
the Americans were involved in an incident in Mecca. Clearly, the
psychic structures of the two societies, separated in time and
space, are not comparable.
 
 
The Muslim Experience
 
24.       After the sack of Delhi in 1857, three centers of
Muslim national leadership emerged in British-colonized India:
Aligarh, Deoband and Nadwa. Although these three names are
associated with three institutions of learning, in present day
India, they symbolized three distinct ideological approaches
which had an influence far beyond their original location in time
and space.
 
25.       Conservative Orthodoxy (Deoband)   The conservative
orthodoxy was represented by the founding of Deoband in 1866 by
Haji Mohammad Abid of Deoband, who was joined later by Maulana
Mohammad Qasim Nanotvi. After the failure of the struggle for
independence of 1857, Maulana Nanotvi, who had fought the British
at Shamli, in Muzaffarnagar Division, in the company of Haji
Imdadullah Mahajir Makki and his friends (including Hafiz Zamin,
who lost his life there), decided to set up a school to train
people to avenge the defeat of 1857. Deoband started as a scheme
of reform and education but has become an approach to life in
modern times.
 
26.       Although Deoband sought to avoid confrontation in its
educational curriculum, the founders of Deoband, and later its
graduates, were in the forefront of violent struggles against the
British in and after 1857. When the British suppressed the
struggle of 1857, Maulana Rasheed Ahmed Gangohi, one of Maulana
Nanotvi's companions, was jailed, while their spiritual teacher
Haji Imdadullah had to seek refuge at Mecca. Because of the
virulently anti-British politics of Deoband, Maulana Mahmudul
Hassan, who was the head of the institution for twenty three
years, had to leave India during the First World War. One of his
pupils, Maulana Obaidullah Sindhi organised action against the
British from Afghanistan during the First World War, and then
spent many years in Moscow after the Russian revolution, and in
Turkey and Mecca, returning to India only in 1939. Although the
majority of the Deoband teachers remained aloof from the Pakistan
movement, Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani took active part in the
movement.
 
27.       Reactive-Modernism (Aligarh)  The task set by the
founder of Aligarh, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, who had fought alongside
the British in 1857, was slightly different: to incorporate Islam
within an uncompromisingly modern outlook. Sir Syed advocated the
uncritical acceptance of Western civilization and its materialist
basis, while rejecting those aspects of Islam and the Quran which
could not be verified by the senses or experience, so as to
evolve an Islam compatible with the scientific standards of late
nineteenth century Europe.
 
28.       In 1875, with the grant of an extensive piece of land
from the British Governor, Sir John Strachey, preparatory classes
were opened at Aligarh College. Sir Syed was a highly
controversial personality because of his personal beliefs, and as
a result of opposition to him, Aligarh also suffered.
Nevertheless, in time all enlightened Muslim opinion rallied
around the effort to educate Muslims for the modern world. The
Aligarh approach has come to be identified today with the one
most favourable to modernization and development in Pakistan.
 
29.       Reactive-Conservatism (Nadwa) In 1893, Maulana Mohammad
Ali Mongairy founded, and after him Maulana Shibli Naumani and
Maulana Syed Sulaiman Nadwi (who migrated to Pakistan) looked
after, Nadwatul Ulama. Nadwa was to serve as a bridge between
Islamic and Western culture, and between the orthodox ulama and
the modernists, and to arrive at a balanced synthesis between the
best of the old and the new. In sum, in the words of its
founders, Nadwa was to be "firm and unbending in principles and
aims, and wide and flexible in peripheral matters [furu'] and in
means [wasail]."
 
30.       To their way of thought, the need was to adapt the
curriculum of religious instruction to the changing times (while
protecting its spirit, objectives, and basic elements), instead
of remaining fossilized. This was an unfamiliar voice, not only
in India where the old curriculum of education was firmly
established, but also elsewhere in the Muslim world (even Al-
Azhar, in Egypt, had not raised the voice of reform as yet).
Maulana Shibli Naumani argued that Islam was no longer being
undermined by Greek philosophy, which had prompted its
introduction into the curriculum, but by new knowledge, new
questions, new research, with which there was a need to be
familiar.
 
31.       Unfortunately, the call to search for a common ground
fell on deaf ears both of the orthodox ulama and of the
modernists. According to some, all difficulties faced by the
Muslims since the fall of the Ottomans could be traced to a
polarization around orthodoxy and modernism, without the
emergence of a middle group. The failure of Nadwa is
instructive, if only because the task it set itself was heroic.
What Nadwa failed at was the effort to incorporate a "modern"
outlook within Islam--without compromising principles or
objectives. To this day, to paraphrase Allama Iqbal's famous
verse, the spirit of Islam is in search of this corpus.
 
 
               PAKISTAN: BUREAUCRACY AND POLITICS
 
32.       When Pakistan gained independence in 1947, the
character of society reflected these three currents of indigenous
thought. In all local communities, urban and rural, the maulvi in
charge of the local mosque, commanded the religious loyalties of
the community. Typically, he was the product of a madrasa or a
jamia (religious schools), which based its curriculum on the
dars-e-nizami, which was the mainstay of the curriculum
popularised by both Deoband and Nadwa. Although in many cases,
especially in poorer communities, the maulvi was typically a
drop-out from the madrasa, the more accomplished graduates of the
system [the ulama] were about the only Pakistanis who could be
said to have had an education, albeit dated, in the liberal arts
and the humanities.
 
 
Class Structure
 
33.       It is a common observation, however, that the classes
which provide the motive force for a revolution are typically
different from the class that carries it out, which in turn is
different from the classes which reap its benefits. In the
context of Pakistan, it may be said (figuratively) that Deoband
and Nadwa provided the emotional reserves which Quaid-e-Azam
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the Father of the Nation, drew upon to
create Pakistan. After the creation of Pakistan, naturally, power
was gradually consolidated in the hands of those in the Aligarh
mold, the anglophile class, who inherited the coercive power of
the colonial administration, without the political checks
provided by Whitehall and British public opinion in earlier
times.
 
34.       In this milieu, it is useful to look at the structure
of social classes in two different ways. First, in the idealist
tradition of social philosophy, which can be said to characterize
the indigenous thought structures, a distinction can be made
between the vernacular class and the anglophile class, according
to the views held about the moral superiority of indigenous
versus Western culture. Second, within the anglophile class the
traditional Western distinction can be made between interest-
based classes (like labor and capitalist, landowning and tenant,
etc.), in the materialist tradition of Western social philosophy.
All active politics takes place within the anglophile class,
within which political parties with more traditional platforms
also compete for power, while the vernacular class is at best a
passive participant in elections but not in politics or
government.
 
 
Bureaucracy
 
35.       The singular failure of Pakistan has been the inability
to provide effective checks on the bureaucracy either by way of
politics and government or by way of effective moral authority
exercised by the ulama or modern intellectuals. An important
consequence of this failure has been the progressive erosion of
public morals, which in earlier times were provided internally by
an Islamic education and ethos, and under the British, both by
internal checks provided by an education grounded in morality and
by external injunctions of English law and justice. As a result,
the ruling classes have been shorn of any social vision apart
from the maintenance of the status quo, and corruption, nepotism
and malpractices have grown to a point where many no longer know
the difference between good and bad.
 
36.       The failure to create representative politics and
government represents the fundamental conflict of morals, values,
purpose and lifestyles between the elite, who inherited the full
coercive apparatus of the state, and the traditional masses, who
stood to gain power at the expense of the elite in any
representative system of government and politics. Unless means
are found to cut this Gordian knot, there is little prospect of
any genuine progress or development. For it is difficult to
conceive of social and economic development, without a
concomitant realignment of social and economic power.
 
37.       Colonial political theory was based on a clear
distinction between government, run by politicians who made
policies, and administration, which executed these policies. The
pride of place in this system was given to administration. The
"steel frame" which held the system together consisted of the
Governor-General at the centre, the Governor in the provinces,
the Commissioners in the Divisions, and the district officers
in the District.  The district was the most important unit of
administration, and it was at the district level that the masses
came into contact with the government. This system is still more
or less intact today, although representative government has
diluted somewhat the power of the bureaucracy.
 
38.       In this system, the district officer wields all
regulatory and punitive powers of the law, and is consequently, a
most important functionary. He is charged with the collection of
land revenues, the maintenance of law and order, the coordination
of all government activities within his district, the stimulation
of economic development, and the encouragement of local
initiative. Below the district officer is the tehsildar (or
mukhtarkar) in the tehsil (or taluqa). The tehsildar, his
assistants, naib tehsildars, and his staff of qanungos, patwaris,
or tapedars are vernacular-speaking natives of the district, who
wield enormous powers as the go-betweens between the peasant and
the English language government of the district level and
above.
 
39.       The district officer saw himself as a successor to the
British public school ideology which, being based on the
proposition that the English were the modern descendants of
Periclean Athens, was hostile to science and found little virtue
outside the classics. This has had disastrous consequences in
more recent times, as the standard of education fell and the new
district officers were woefully unequipped for the tasks of
public service which fell to them.
 
 
Politics
 
40.       This system of district administration had no need, nor
place, for politics. As Platonic guardians, the district officers
provided such political input as was needed for good
administration, but the need for citizen participation (viewed as
"interference") in administration was not seen. The development
of politics, whether at the national level or the local level,
could only be at the expense of administration, and this was
successfully resisted. In fact, the bureaucracy was even able to
play local politics against national politics, when this was
demanded by authoritarian governments.
 
41.       At the same time, it is the peculiarity of politics in
Pakistan that despite regular complaints against the excesses of
bureaucracy, no political party has advocated that the
bureaucracy should be subject to institutional legislative
checks, as opposed to discretionary executive ones. Instead, all
parties have seen the control of the unrestrained powers of the
administration as the prize to be won by election to office. In
this milieu, political participation merely affords the people
the choice to select an authoritarian government, and not the
choice to influence the nature of government itself. This state
of events reflects the nature of class structure in Pakistan: a
vernacular class, with quite different aims and objectives, and
an anglophile class, within which traditional (Western) political
factions vie for control.
 
 
              IMPLICATIONS FOR DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY
 
42.       To recapitulate, like all post-colonial societies, the
Pakistani society is sharply divided between what might be called
the vernacular and the anglophile class. It is this divide across
which the sharpest differences can be observed on all
sociological, political and economic variables, and not across
the borrowed analytical categories like labour and capital, rural
and urban, landowning and landless. Between the two classes there
is no agreement on what the state of present society is, what
kind of future society should be created, and which path to take.
 
43.       The kind of society that the vernacular class would
like to see is very different from that which the anglophile
class is engaged in creating. This results, among other things,
in a failure to mobilize either popular support or finances for
modernization and development programmes, leading to dependence
on foreign powers. The foreign powers, with their own goals,
naturally restrict the paths that can be taken to those which
both rule out structural change and seek the impossible task of
creating a society in their own image.
 
 
Economic & Social Policy: The Grand Strategy
 
44.       All economic plans in Pakistan have spoken of
"releasing the creative energies of the people" but have insisted
that these energies be directed at the achievement of the goals
of the anglophile class. Obviously, these energies have not been
released. It is not surprising then that analysts of development
efforts have complained of a fundamental lack of enthusiasm in
the vernacular class for the programmes of the anglophile class.
It would have been simpler, not to mention cheaper, for the
nation to adopt the goals of the vernacular class--but this would
not have allowed the development of a Western lifestyle to which
the anglophile class is not only accustomed but which it regards
as morally superior.
 
45.       As a result, the social goals of the anglophile class,
affected strongly by changing intellectual fashions in the West,
have been the aims of public policy in Pakistan. The effort at
generating a social consensus around fundamental questions of
social philosophy was terminated early in the history of
independent Pakistan. Instead, it has been felt that growing
prosperity would automatically lead to better government and a
good society, around which a consensus would emerge. The grand
strategy for development, therefore, has been based on:
 
     (i)  a moral, intellectual, social, political and
          economic rejection of the values and
          lifestyles of the vernacular class of
          society--with, it might be added, the
          complicity of foreign lenders to Pakistan,
          whose antipathy to Islam, and misguided fear
          of the potential for communism in Asia, has
          prevailed over their commitment to democracy;
 
   (ii)   an attempt, instead, to create an exclusive
          urban-based island of privilege and
          prosperity mixing local values of the
          landowning (zamindar) classes, Western
          lifestyles, and a convenient blend of modern
          and zamindar ideas;
 
  (iii)   an effort to motivate social change in a two-
          step process, first, by weaning away small
          groups from the vernacular class toward the
          privileged class mainly through information
          and education policies, and second, by
          providing for the absorption of this
          alienated class in limited numbers, by
          providing them jobs in the civil and military
          bureaucracies, and opportunities for profit
          by exempting them from normal rules; and
 
   (iv)   in this way, with the support of foreign
          capital flows, to finesse the need to enter
          into a dialogue with the traditional class,
          which is an essential precondition to
          participative government, and the
          establishment of an open society.
 
46.       Threatened by the burden of history and the tradition
of its own people, the Pakistani elite (and the coopted alienated
class) has taken flight in a strategy which attempts to repress
or buy out the forces of tradition, rather than fight the
inherent contradictions in society by a dialogue and compromise.
In this, the Pakistani experience is in the mainstream of the
modern history of Muslim states. Today, from Rabat to Jakarta
modern Muslim rulers are engaged in a similar struggle with their
orthodox Muslim citizens.
 
47.       One lesson of this history is that unless the
modernizing class comes to terms with the traditional class,
unless a compromise is worked out, there is bound to be bloodshed
and anarchy: Adnan Menderes of Turkey died for Islam, Anwar Sadat
of Egypt, for the West; Qahtani, for orthodoxy, and the Shah of
Iran, for modernism. This is also the lesson of Western history,
where the only non-revolutionary route to modernism lay in the
close affiliation of the power elites with indigenous values and
lifestyles. If bloodshed is to be avoided, therefore, then the
establishment of effective political processes must take
precedence over economic development.
 
 
Strategy and Implementation
 
48.       Within the framework of this grand strategy, over the
course of years, development strategy has changed, partly in
response to national needs but mainly in response to fashions in
lending countries (mainly, the United States of America). Its
greatest success has been the ability to provide for a rising
standard of living for a growing elite class and to maintain the
size of the alienated to levels of manageable discontent. Its
greatest failure has been to impede the growth of social and
political institutions which could provide stability to economic
change and unity of national purpose.
 
49.       The viability of the strategy, however, has been eroded
by its own success. Even as the island of prosperity has grown,
it has brought within the fold of the elite a class of people
whose conception of modernization is diluted by vernacular ideas
that they have not been able to jettison. Thus, even as Islam
remains anathema, Islamization (the adaptation of Western
institutions to forms not repugnant to Islam) has emerged as a
priority item on the policy agenda, much to the discomfiture of
the more pure modernists. Also, with the induction of rural
elites, with zamindar values and ideas, the commitment of the
modernising elite to Western liberal ideas have been considerably
diluted.
 
50.       As a result, the elite are now much more divided than
they were at Independence. With increasing diversity in values
and approach, there has been a rise in the conflict over the
division of spoils within the modernising elite. This has taken
the form of a rise in social strife based on provincialism and
ethnicity. The key to understanding ethnic strife, however, lies
in understanding strife, not ethnicity [to paraphrase Ruth
Benedict's remark on racial strife]. The problem lies not in
ethnicity, which poses few problems for ethnic groups in the
vernacular class, but in the system of division of spoils within
the anglophile class in which domicile and location plays a
central role in access to public services, the distribution of
soft jobs in the bureaucracy, and profits associated with
licenses, permits and other devices for exclusion, on the basis
of which the surplus extracted is distributed as rent.
 
51.       Implementation problems have also arisen as this
pattern of privileged development is extended to the waiting
groups in an attempt to manage discontent. Not unexpectedly,
public services have deteriorated and informal special
arrangements have had to be made for the elite group. At the same
time, a financial crisis of a structural nature has developed as
the subsidised provision of public services to the privileged
class has been extended to the waiting groups, and the privileged
class has itself expanded. Local groups, in this process, have
either not been served (where they were of the vernacular class)
or have not been served well (where they were of the coopted
class).
 
 
                           CONCLUSION
 
52.       There is a fundamental contradiction in efforts to
promote self-reliant social and economic development in post-
colonial nations, divided as they are into an anglophile class,
"a class of persons Indian in colour and blood, but English in
tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect," and an
entirely different indigenous vernacular class. As long as the
anglophile class refuses to share the tastes, opinions, morals
and values of the vernacular class, it is forced to tackle
problems which are essentially colonial in nature, and to arrive
at essentially similar solutions.
 
53.       Where the ruling classes and the masses are
fundamentally antagonistic, law and order can only be maintained
either through military rule or through some form of
"constitutional autocracy" which suffers from the fatal flaw that
even when the wishes of the majority are ignored by those in
power, the democratic process must of necessity stop short of
removing the executive and taking office in its turn. As long
as the executive is not prepared to step aside [or equivalently,
to yield to the popular wishes of the people], the
representatives of the people are likely to engage in uninformed
and irresponsible criticism of the government and in general feel
little responsibility toward their constituents.
 
54.       In this situation, development schemes--whether at the
national level or the local--must posses the curious property
that they should enhance the interests of the people without
inflaming their passions.  This is a test that very few schemes
can pass; not surprisingly, development efforts meet with limited
success.
 
  
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