In his book, “The Unravelling: Pakistan in the age of Jihad”, John R. Schmidt, a former senior American diplomat who served in Pakistan for three years, criticizes the feudal culture of Pakistan. To make his point, he reiterates the story of a rural landowner Malik Asif first recounted by Stephen Lyon in his study about Pakistan’s feudal culture:
“It is a bright sunny day in the Attock district of Punjab bordering the Indus River. With no other commitments to detain him (Malik Asif), he decides to hold one of his periodic morning audiences for local villagers. On this particular morning, two people have come to see him. One is an old sharecropper named Baba Raheem who used to farm land for Asif’s father when Malik was a boy and who now works for Asif’s uncle. He has come to ask Malik Asif for help in filling out a complicated form that his son must submit in order to apply for an identity card. This is something Baba Raheem and his son cannot possibly do on their own because they are illiterate. Baba Rahim has come to Malik Asif because his current employer, Malik Asif’s uncle, is angry with him for having refused to work some land and is punishing him by not helping. Baba Raheem hopes that Malik Asif will help him in appreciation for many long years of loyal service he provided to his father.The other man is a neighbouring landowner by the name of Zahir Khan. His uncle, who lives in another district some distance away, has asked him to help one of his local villagers find work as a sharecropper. Zahir Khan is unable to help his uncle by hiring the man himself since he has no spare land to farm. But he has heard that Malik Asif is looking for someone to farm several acres of his land. He has decided to seek his help while at the same time doing him a favour, a gesture he hopes will enable him to discharge the familial obligations he feels toward his uncle. He has no idea whether the man his uncle has recommended is any good at farming. If he turns out to be good at it, Malik Asif will be grateful. If not, little will be lost since Malik Asif needs someone badly and most sharecroppers are not very good at farming in any event.
Malik Asif seems prepared to help Baba Raheem, despite the fact that his uncle might not appreciate the gesture, because he does feel strong bonds of loyalty towards him due to his long years of association with his family. He also decides to take on the sharecropper recommended by Zahir Khan. He understands perfectly well that the man may not work out, but he needs someone to work his spare land and welcomes the opportunity to do a favour for his landlord neighbour.”
According to Schmidt, Lyon uses this real life vignette to illustrate some of the bonds of reciprocal obligations that lie at the heart of Pakistani feudal culture. He further argues that the story exemplifies the way in which such a culture would adapt to the demands of electoral politics.Thus, from his perspective, mainstream political parties in Pakistan can best be viewed as networks of patronage, whose primary goal is to seek political office to gain access to state resources, which can then be used to distribute patronage among their members.1
The fact is that the patron-client system is not a new phenomenon. According to researcher Sondra Steinbrenner, it was a constituent feature of Roman society, with such relationships acting as glues of the political and social system. Patrons, usually patricians, would take clients—young patricians or plebeians—under their wing, providing advice, money, business opportunities, or representation in court. In turn, clients would help to enhance their patrons’ status by providing reciprocal services, such as, participating in the patrons’ political campaign, appearing with the patrons in public as part of a group of faithful retainers, or using specialized skills or training to enhance the patrons status. Steinbrenner for instance illustrates that even Emperor Augustus involved himself in several individual patron-client relationships, assuming the role of patron to many of the budding young writers of Rome to enhance his status and popularity. Maecenas, Augustus’ chief adviser, secured some of the most promising poets early in their careers and brought them under the wing of the new ruler. By supporting the careers of talented but otherwise suffering poets, he managed to exert great influence over the literature produced at the time.2
Even as Schmidt criticizes Pakistan’s feudal culture and illustrates its working in a patron-client mode, heseems to forgot that patrimonial capitalism also works in the very same way, and cannot even survive, let alone thrive, without its vast, global-scale network of patron-client relations—a system deeply implicated in international power structures put in place since colonial times.
As Duncan Green of Oxfam points out, “the colonizers never built a road around the West Africa; they only needed extractive roads and railways like the fingers of a hand from coastal parts into interiors.”3 In order to continue their exploitative tactics even after their departure from colonies (having established the foundation of an exploitative system by giving it a face-lift of constitutional governance) the colonizers invented the categories of ‘good governance’ and ‘bad governance’. ‘Good Governance’ meant that their proxy rulers (installed through manipulated elections or a coup, such as,that of Zia and Musharraf in Pakistan) were willing to implement the agenda of their imperial masters through so called international donor agencies including World Bank and IMF. ‘Bad Governance’ meant the opposite. Nearly every government in the World (with the exception of Cuba and some other countries) claims that it is driven by public interest rather than self-interest of mostly corrupt rulers. But, the reality is that people everywhere in the world complain of being victim of some sort of injustices or wrong doings of their governments—even in places like the US and Europe,often hailed as models of good governance (although at the cost of bad governance everywhere else).
In view of the above it is not astonishing to note that even as the ideal of good governance dominates public policy in postcolonial polities in the last decades, politics and public administration in these countries continue to be marked by authoritarianism (sometimes maintaining the façade of democracy), nepotism, and corruption—the very practices good governance is supposed to eradicate.
It is also important to note that while the colonizers gave most of their colonies the ‘new institutions’ of governance—parliament, executive, judiciary—older institutions were not totally eradicated, rather they were deliberately distorted and maintained. According to Machiavelli, he who desires or proposes to change the form of government in a state must retain, at least, the shadow of its ancient customs, so that institutions may not appear to its people to have been changed, though in point of fact the new institutions may be radically different from the old ones. This he must do because men in general are as much affected by what a thing appears to be as by what it is, indeed they are frequently influenced more by appearances than by reality.4
Daan Beekers and Bas Van Gool in their ‘African Study Working Paper’ argue that challenges to good governance reform around the developing world are related to longer histories of political practices, often characterized by appropriation of power as a personal asset and by the redistribution of wealth and official position via client-patron networks. They further posit that in the context of the (post)colonial modernizing process, the scale of personalized politics has tended to move upward, from local ‘big man’ politics to intense political games at the level of central state. According to them, politically, the accumulation of patron-client ties in a society takes on a pyramid-like structure, in which patrons ‘at the top’ distribute their resources to their clients who, in their turn, redistribute it to their own clients and so on (one person’s client is typically another person’s patron). Even with the emergence of modern state institutions, usually introduced by colonial masters, this redistributive logic continues to exist and is extended to include the highest echelons of the state.5
The British colonialsystem of public sectors jobs—offering steady income, relative security, social prestige, and dignified retirement benefits can similarly be seen as a formal and organized system of political patronage. This system is now being carried forwardby local politicians and bureaucrats. The rapid expansion of bureaucratic activity further fuels thispostcolonial patronage politics. In additionto their inherited colonial functions of keeping peace (which for the colonial government meant preventing the masses from revolting or protesting the exploitative conditions they were kept in) and collecting revenues, the bureaucrats are now responsible for relatively newertasks in areas such as education, health, housing, scientific research, agriculture, and industrial development. Hence, as Riggs puts it, across postcolonial Asia, Africa, and Latin America inherited regimes of ‘security administration’ have now transformed into systems of ‘development administration’ consisting of formal, modern agencies closely resembling those of Europe and the United States (Riggs 1964: 12, 49).
The ways in which such regimes reconfigure and perpetuate themselves in postcolonial societies is exemplified by the case of Thailand and Indonesia. According to Yumeri Zhang, post monarchical and postcolonial governments in Thailand and Indonesia respectively, responded to long harboured anti-Chinese communal sentiments by pursuing a nationalist economic policy that sought to promote indigenous entrepreneurship at the expense of Chinese or other foreign business (Golay et.al, 1969). To defend their interests in the face of popular hostility and government discrimination, Chinese communities, in turn, developed client-like links with powerful indigenous officials in the civil and military bureaucracies, whilst keeping a low social and political profile. This resulted in the birth of rentier capitalism in South East Asia, in which government officials charged ‘rents’ for their protection of Chinese ‘Pariah entrepreneurs’ (Riggs 1966).6
According to Keohane (1984) and Wallerstein (2004) extreme asymmetric relations between states allow the patron (strong state) to dictate the terms of international regimes to client (weaker) states. Keohane stresses that powerful states are able to determine the constraints and terms of international regimes. Weak states join the international regimes out of fear of economic collapse or because of incentives provided by the patron. An example of this is that after the Second World War, “the United States sent material goods to Europe that were of greater value than those received. In return, the U.S. gained influence–the basis for what Klaus Knorr (1975, p-25) calls ‘patronal leadership’.” Wallerstein (2004) further emphasizes that the dynamics of patron-client relations exist at the inter-state level. I fact, his World System theory is based on the assertion that formal and informal international institutions facilitate asymmetric relations between strong states and weak states. Through formal and informal channels, “strong states relate to weak states by pressuring them to follow their lead in internal arenas (treaties, international organizations). And, while strong states...buy off the individual leaders of weak states, weak states...buy the protection of strong states by arranging appropriate flows of capital” (Wallerstein, 2004: 35). In other words, client states secure the “protection” of the patron states by showing deference and adhering to patron-centred institutions.7
As Neil Robinson, professor of Political Science at the University of Limerick, Ireland, points out, the end of cold war did more than expose a raft of new states to democratizing pressures, enable policy makers to make ‘democracy promotion’ a foreign policy priority and democracy (or so-called constitutional governance) ‘the only game in town’. Rulers who were forced to modify their defunct political system were also forced by the same global forces and agencies to modify their closed economic systems; the market was ‘other game in town’ and ‘capitalism promotion’ changed economic practices and development as much as ‘democracy promotion’ changed politics.8
Hence, it is not just Pakistan’s feudal culture that nurtures patron-client relationships, as Schmidt so vociferously condemns, but rather it is global capitalism, that not only sustains this relationship but also thrives on the basis of this very system. Capitalism cannot even survive without this patronage system. Schmidt must keep in mind, that the so-called Pakistani patronage system is just a small cog in the wheel of a much bigger patrimonial Capitalist system.
1.Schmidt J.,The Unravelling: Pakistan in the age of Jihad, Macmillan, India, 2102. P- 33-34.
2.www.roman-empire.net/articles/article-010.html.
3.http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/chinas-african-road-euro-governance-failures-patronage-accountability-building-fragile-states-blattman-needs-you-grey-planet-toxic-development-why-people-cheat-links-i-liked/
4. Crick B, Machiavelli: The Discourses, Penguin Books, England, reprinted 1974, 1976, 1978. P- 175.
5. D. Beekers and B. Van Gool, From Patronage to Neopatrimonialism. Postcolonial governance in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond., Afrika Studiecentrum, Leiden, 2102.
6.Zhang Y, Pacific Asia: The Politics of Development, Routledge, U.S.A. and Canada, 2003, P- 49.
7. www.alterinfos.org/spip.php?article1385.
8. Economic and political hybridity: Patrimonial Capitalism in the Post Soviet Sphere by Neil Robinson. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1879366513000134