A very healthy campaign has been launched by an urban-based political party from Sindh against the role of feudals in the decadence of our society. Pakistan has suffered a lot due to intrigues of these feudals most of whom owe their pelf and power to grant of favors by the British Raj in return for their collaboration with them. The Raj cultivated a class within the natives to serve them in bureaucracy and British Indian army and bought their loyalties by generous grant of state lands, titles and power to extend their colonial rule. The Raj is no more, but its remnants have not only survived but are playing their usual pernicious role in our society. Years of living under subjugation has given birth to an admiration for the feudal mindset even amongst the urban sections of our society in people with no claim to feudal heritage of large land holdings or ancestral property grants. What is shocking is that this feudal mindset has been adopted even by certain political parties who have no appetite or tolerance for dissent and have a history of resort to kidnappings, extortion, organized torture and murder of opponents. They assert their feudalism to exercise political hegemony in their area of control. We witnessed the brutality of this mindset on May 12 in Karachi, when a political party that supported Musharraf's illegitimate rule, resorted to large-scale killings to stop the Chief Justice of Pakistan from entering Karachi. The same intolerance has been the hallmark of military juntas led by Musharraf and Zia-ul-Haq and their aligned civil toadies. -GULL ZAMAN, Kohat, via e-mail, January 13.