There is plenty that is wrong with Pakistan. Over the past decade, it has slipped down the United Nations Human Development Index, and is currently ranked at 146 out of 182 countries on the basis of life expectancy, education, and per capita income. The picture is even more dismal when looking at the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Report for 2013, which ranks Pakistan as second-worst in the world when it comes to providing women with equal access to education, healthcare, and economic opportunities. According to UNICEF, the infant mortality rate is around 8.6%, one of the highest in the world. Pakistan is also plagued by tremendous inequality; the top 0.1% own twice as much as the bottom 10%, with income distribution showing no real improvement since the 1970s, and the gap between the rich and the poor increasing every year. While some progress has been made in reducing levels of corruption, they still remain high, with Pakistan being ranked 127 out of 175 countries by Transparency International in 2013. Politics in Pakistan remains monopolised by a small political elite, with only 400 families in Punjab dominating electoral contests since 1970 at both the provincial and national level. Finally, as the current food crisis in Sindh shows, as well as the response to the floods of 2010 and the earthquake in Kashmir in 2005, the state remains woefully incapable of responding to even the most basic humanitarian needs of its citizens.
These indicators make for depressing reading, and serve to illustrate the extent of Pakistan’s problems. Yet, while these issues occasionally receive some attention, debate in Pakistan, and about Pakistan, almost solely revolves around issues of militancy, violence, and the role of Islam in public life. Every day, thousands of column inches are devoted to dissecting the latest atrocities, policies, and proposals that are borne out of these concerns. More often than not, these opinions are accompanied by sage analysis, informing us of the origins of Islamist militancy in Pakistan and the causes of its persistence. The cycle continues on television, in print and social media, and even in academic publishing; it feeds on itself, constantly growing as it crowds out alternative issues and perspectives.
Across Pakistan, the religious right and conservatives justify the existence of Islamist militant groups, blaming the United States, drone strikes, and ‘secular’ parties for the persistence of violence. Alternatively, they make arguments on the basis of strategic concerns, pointing towards how Pakistan’s Islamist militants ultimately have value as tools to be deployed in the inevitable conflict against India. On the other hand, the liberal elite, cloistered in its insulated, exclusionary enclaves, decries the rising intolerance and bigotry in Pakistan, ineffectually calling for action, any action, in an environment where their principal antagonists, (backed by years of support from the state and military establishment), effectively set the parameters of the debate.
What is missing from all of this is not some kind of middle-ground that reconciles these opposing points of view. The tyranny of the centre lies precisely in its glorification of compromise, and the idea that both sides of an argument must necessarily be given equal weightage and legitimacy. In the case of violent terrorist organizations like the TTP, it is not clear that this should be the case. Instead, the poverty of this debate lies in the paucity of its ideas regarding finding solutions to the broader problems of poverty and participation that characterize Pakistan.
The irony here is that solving Pakistan’s problems of governance and institutional inefficiency arguably holds the key to addressing militancy and violence as well. Reducing deprivation, addressing the imbalance between democratic institutions and the military, accommodating the aspirations of ethnic minorities within the structure of the federal government, and increasing the state’s responsiveness to its citizens, must necessarily be parts of any attempt to address the root causes of political violence here.
Yet, debates of this kind remain conspicuous by their absence. The mainstream political parties, bereft of ideological principle and serving as little more than vehicles for the pursuit of elite interests, are capable of little more than opportunistic point scoring and posturing. This is as true for the PTI as it is for the older parties. For all their perceived ‘differences’ on the question of militancy, Pakistan’s parties remain fundamentally united in their common, perhaps unquestioned belief in capitalism and markets as engines of economic growth. The failure of this model to alleviate Pakistan’s problems over the past three decades has not been an obstacle to its continued propagation as economic orthodoxy.
Not coincidentally, the hegemony of this ideology has served to further enrich the political and economic elite, who have made use of their positions of power to appropriate the resources and opportunities freed up by the market. For the religious right in Pakistan, the one area on which Islam remains strangely silent is the pursuit of commerce and the accumulation of wealth. For the liberal elite, itself a beneficiary of Pakistan’s unequal economic system, the question of how wealth is generated and distributed is of much less importance than the maintenance of a privileged lifestyle. In both cases, political action on these issues is reduced to a fetishistic obsession with corruption, focusing on individual malfeasance by those in power and thus missing the wood for the trees.
There are, of course, notable exceptions to these general rules. Nonetheless, the fact remains that there is little space in Pakistan for the promotion of progressive political agendas that look beyond Islam and militancy and focus, instead, on social and economic justice. For all the sound and fury of public debate in Pakistan, what is perhaps most noticeable is the absence of voices that represent the aspirations and interests of the disadvantaged majority, the working poor in the cities and countryside. In the absence of strong leftist parties and organisations, dismantled and dissipated after decades of state-sponsored repression, there is an urgent need to build popular movements united by a desire for equality, tolerance, and democracy.
Militancy and rising religious intolerance represent clear and present dangers to Pakistan. However, even if these problems were to magically disappear overnight, the fact remains that Pakistan would still be a country plagued by crippling inequality, ineffective governance, dysfunctional institutions, and persistently deplorable standards of living for one of the poorest and largest populations on earth. Until meaningful efforts are made to address these issues, the prospects for progress in Pakistan will remain bleak.
The writer is an assistant professor of political science at LUMS.
Email:hassan.javid@lums.edu.pk