Politics of Development in Pakistan: From the Post-Independence Modernization Project to ‘Vision 2025’

Pakistan: Post-Independence Development Aspiration, Modernization and Poverty

In 2014, the government of Pakistan presented Vision 2025 which aspires to revisit ‘the “Pakistani Dream”, a vision of a prosperous, equitable, tolerant, and dynamic society…’ (Pakistan 2025, 2017, p. 2). It is not surprising that Vision 2025 revisits the ‘Pakistani Dream’ given the extent of poverty and inequality in spite of decades of development programmes. Poverty in Pakistan has persisted in periods of robust economic growth, with Pakistan reporting a 5.1% annual increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) between 1980 and 2010 (Mahbub ul Haq Human Development Center [MHHDC], 2015, p. 1)—a conundrum termed ‘growth without development’ by a 2001 World Bank study (Easterly et al., 2004, p. 1). Pakistan continues to report the highest levels of poverty and inequality in South Asia as reflected by its low Human Development Index value of 0.560 (United Nations Development Programme [UNDP], 2019, pp. 2, 4, 5). A staggering proportion of 51.2% or over a hundred million people live in deprivation (UNDP, 2019, p. 5). An estimated 20% of adult population and 45% of children under five years old are malnourished (USAID, 2020). In this context, around 22.8 million children—second highest in the world—are deprived of formal education (UNICEF, 2020). Problems of child labour and street children are pervasive (A Reporter, 2016). While social protection programmes in the context of poverty are imperative (cf. Carswell & De Neve, 2014), Pakistan has focussed on targeted poverty alleviation initiatives, including the country’s largest Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP). However, it is considered to be limited in the face of fiscal constraints and corruption (Mumtaz & Whiteford, 2017). The COVID-19 crises have further dispelled pretentions of progress by illuminating higher vulnerability of impoverished families to infection, unemployment and mortality in Pakistan, and globally.

It is thus ironical that Vision 2025’s ‘people-centric’ approach places an emphasis on ‘economic growth’ led by the private sector and facilitated through further liberalization of the economy. This emphasis aligns with the World Bank’s view of high economic growth as an indicator of development, which resonates with the centrality of economic measures of progress in mainstream discourses in Pakistan. Proponents of the conventional development approach underscore the importance of developing Pakistan’s resources to sustain high economic growth assumed to be necessary to meet the needs of a ‘bourgeoning population’ by generating employment opportunities and alleviate poverty (cf. Pasha, 2018). Of particular importance are the mega development projects, including those initiated as part of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) since 2015 (see indicatively Tehsin et al., 2017).

Following other critics, I show how a reliance on economic growth that privileges the ideology of progress as modernization has failed to produce prosperity for all in the development history of Pakistan. The mainstream conception of high economic growth facilitated through adopting free market economic principles as the central measure of development resonates with Modernization Theory (MT). MT is premised upon a set of assumptions that conceive of high mass consumption to be achieved through a free-market economy as the end goal of development. ² Based on his ‘stages of economic growth’ logic, Rostow (1960, pp. 3–16), for instance, perceives social change as a linear process in which societies evolve through what is framed in terms of hierarchical stages, from traditional communities at one extreme (taken as the baseline) and the modern consumerist society at the other. Modernization theoretical assumptions of development frame people (and their ways of life) within and across states in hierarchical terms as underdeveloped in comparison to those considered developed (McMichael, 2017; Spann, 2014; Weber, 2015). This hierarchical conception of development is endorsed in Sachs’ (2005) ‘ladder metaphor’. Poor living and working conditions of people in the Global South are justified through the claim that sweatshops are an indicator of progress, reflecting a ‘first rung on the development ladder out of extreme poverty’ (Sachs, 2005, p. 11). As such, integral to progress conceived through MT are the projects, policies and programmes of state and non-state actors that boost economic growth irrespective of their implications for people and communities who consequently become—to borrow McMichael’s words—the ‘casualties of progress’ (McMichael, 2010, p. 1). In essence, processes through which the ends of economic growth and high mass consumption are achieved, including the violation of human rights, exploitation and social injustice, are discounted.

To develop a rigorous understanding of unequal power relations in society, there must be a consideration of the interplay between the representational and discursive dynamics of social and material inequality on the one hand and its structural aspects on the other (Kothari, 2006; McMichael, 2017; Walker et al., 2018; Weber, 2007, 2014b). Building on insights of scholars in critical development studies (CDS), this article seeks to reveal the tensions and contradictions underpinning Pakistan’s project of national development. Precisely, this article contributes to CDS through the case example of development in Pakistan and argues that an understanding of Pakistan’s development crises must entail a consideration of social relations of inequality transformed through colonialism and sanctioned by mainstream imageries of zat—a caste like construct. ³ Zat-based social hierarchies are central in reproducing and sustaining positions of prestige on the one hand, and social and economic disadvantage and deprivation on the other hand. Mainstream Pakistani society adopts double standards when it comes to zat inequalities, which are sustained in ‘mundane’ life while maintaining ‘public silencing’ on the issue (Gazdar, 2007). More than silencing, inequalities are justified through framing impoverished families as ‘inferior others’ who need guidance to break out of ‘tradition’ through learning modern ethics of hard work, obeying laws and adopting the values of wider society. Yet, mainstream discourses conceptualize social change in binary terms where caste-based stratifications are assumed to be the remnants of a distant past destined to fade away with modernization (see, for example, Haque, 2014). These discourses share the dominant notion of development underpinned by MT assumptions about some people and societies as advanced and developed compared to those framed as underdeveloped and backward (see Tehsin et al., 2017 for accepting these frames). Such imageries of development inform benchmarks set to assess progress conceptualized through modernization including industrialization and GDP growth rates. Furthermore, dominant narratives of development lack critical engagement with the politics of unequal power relations and how these have come to be constituted and reproduced in the history of development practice and theory.

This article is organized in five sections. The first section provides the conceptual framework for my critical inquiry. For this, I draw on insights from scholars in CDS and their approach to critical historical analysis of development, which I deploy to conceptualize the politics of Pakistan’s project of modernization. Dominant discourses of development in Pakistan resonate with MT assumptions of progress as a linear trajectory of economic growth aimed at achieving the ultimate end of high mass consumption. This has serious implications in terms of normalizing poverty as an ‘originating condition’ (Walker et al., 2018; Weber, 2014b; Weber & Berger, 2011) and reproducing the justification of entrenched relations of inequality based on zat in mainstream society. The article then outlines methodological considerations. Critical discourse analysis is employed for analysing how development as a hegemonic notion and a project has come to be constituted in the post-World War II, post-colonial world order, and its implications for struggles against social injustice (Herrera & Braumoeller, 2004, p. 19).

In Section 3, I critically analyse the ideological premises of the proposed development policy framework of 2014 called ‘Pakistan 2025—one nation one vision’ or the ‘Vision 2025’—which promises to materialize the ‘Pakistani Dream’ of dignified lives for all, especially impoverished and deprived families. The Vision 2025 document supports the expansion of a free-market economy to generate the (economic) growth assumed to be necessary for the realization of the ‘rights of every Pakistani citizen’ (p. 30). However, associating ‘development’ first and foremost with economic growth is highly problematic as it serves to sustain inequality and discount alternative worldviews (McMichael, 2010, 2017; Nandy, 2002; Weber & Winanti, 2016, 2014b; Weber & Berger, 2011). The fourth section includes a critical discussion of a brief but formative immediate post-colonial era marked by struggles and aspirations of social justice through the building of a nation state on the one hand and the reconstitution of colonial legacies of social stratification and material deprivation through the development project shaped by Cold War politics on the other.

In order to understand how Pakistan has come to endorse the privileging of development through liberal capitalism, Part 4 problematizes the development project which evolved through Cold War politics and perpetuated violence against dissent by supporting colonial legacies of authoritarianism to institute social change. Generally referred to as the ‘decade of development’, the dictatorial regime of General Ayub Khan (1958–1968) serves an important entry point to examine the contradictions of Pakistan’s national development project. This article also considers the poverty alleviation efforts of democratic governments through the BISP, which provides temporary relief to some but discounts the underlying causes of development crises. This article concludes in the final section that Vision 2025 reflects deep seated tensions inherent in Pakistan’s history of progress through liberal capitalism—whether pursued through Cold War politics or China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). These development projects entail massive transformations of Pakistani economy and society, including the displacement, dispossession and oppression of impoverished families who experience deprivation at the lower rungs of the social hierarchy of zat. Their everyday struggles for survival contradict the claims of progress and resonate demands for alternatives to the hegemonic global project of development.

Hegemonic Representations of Development as Modernization and Its Contradictions

The World Bank’s 2017 report entitled ‘South Asia’s Turn’ underscored the importance of channelling South Asia’s ‘vast untapped potential’ for it to become the next ‘global factory’. This assertion was made with special reference to the challenge of South Asia’s ‘youth bulge’ that can be turned into an opportunity if employment is generated through ‘boosting competitiveness and raising productivity to avoid falling further behind comparator countries in the global marketplace’ (Lopez-Acevedo et al., 2017, p. 13). Among the ‘global success stories’, we find export sectors such as the Fauji Foundation and Sialkot’s manufacturing cluster of sports goods and surgical instruments in Pakistan, the garment sector in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and India’s Information and Communication Technology industry. Initiated after the adoption of trade and economic liberalization policies in the 1980s and based on privatization, deregulation and financialization—a process generally referred to as neo-liberalism (Brenner et al., 2010, p. 183; Roberts & Zulfiqar, 2019, p. 1), these development ventures have boosted GDP and generated wealth for some. Sweatshops are framed as the engines of economic growth (Sachs, 2005) despite the controversies surrounding them, including poor wages and working conditions as well as child labour in their supply chains (Chowdhry, 2002; Mumtaz & Whiteford, 2017). Economic growth is perceived as ‘instrumental in reducing poverty’ in South Asia, from 52% of population subsisting on less than US$1 per day in 1980 to 32% in 2001 (Ahmed, 2006, p. 1; Ahmed & Ghani, 2008, p. 1). In spite of these claims of progress, mainstream development discourses grapple with what has been termed ‘the South Asia puzzle’ (Ahmed, 2006, p. 2) and ‘growth without development’ in the case of Pakistan (Easterly et al., 2004).

Pakistan’s puzzle of ‘growth without development’ has been conceptualized as an outcome of a number of inter-related factors. ⁴ Inefficient institutions, or what is referred to as the ‘phenomenon of hollow institutions’, is considered an underlying cause of social problems (Qadeer, 2014, p. 30). Institutions are expected to manage the social and economic transformations accompanied by modernization including material inequality, conflict and environmental degradation (Haque, 2014; Pasha, 2018; Qadeer, 2006, 2014). Mainstream development discourses in Pakistan share problematic assumptions of development as modernization. About his experience as a student in the United States during Cold War, a Pakistani economist, Gardezi & Mumtaz (2005, p. 427), critically recalls: ‘As students we were raised on a steady diet of authoritative works like Rostow’s Non-Communist Manifesto, and left with little time to ponder over our fallible real-life observations’. The promise to eradicate poverty and ensure social justice got lost in the ‘labyrinth of development “fashions” and econometric modelling learned assiduously by our scholars in the Ivy League universities of America and IMF/World Bank seminars’ (Gardezi & Mumtaz, 2005, p. 435). Development in Pakistan as what Gardezi & Mumtaz (2005, p. 427) argues was to be achieved through policies based on the assumptions of MT.

There is little realization in dominant development discourses that contemporary problems, including the pervasiveness of street children and child labourers as well as expanding slum settlements, occur in ‘direct relation with development processes, including industrialization and urbanization’ (Spann, 2014, p. 170; Weber & Berger, 2011, p. 347). These ‘urban problems’ have been exacerbated through the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the International Financial Institutions with devastating consequences for the wellbeing of impoverished families in urban and rural areas (see, for example, Davis, 2006, p. 158). As part of their survival strategy, family members of impoverished households—including children—work in informal sectors of the economy. Their expressions of resistance against the violence of development, ranging from food riots and the squatter movement, are misrepresented as criminal acts (Da Costa & McMichael, 2007; Davis, 2006; Jamali, 2012; Patel & McMichael, 2009). Recent efforts to make development an ‘inclusive’ process through making capital accumulation work for the poor are argued to reproduce a fetishized production and representation of poverty (Da Costa & McMichael, 2007, p. 589). In practice, poor people are disciplined to advance the neo-liberal policy objectives of financial sector liberalization and commercialization (Weber, 2014a).

Besides material aspects, it is imperative to understand that development challenges in Pakistan are complicated by the disposition of mainstream society to easily accept inequality by othering destitute families who are looked down upon as ‘inferior others’ based on their zat identity. While the institution of zat is generally conceived of as an organizing principle of ‘traditional’ societies in rural areas, critical perspectives show how ‘cultures of servitude’ underpin middle- and upper-class layers of society that conceive of themselves as ‘modern’ compared to those imagined as a ‘distinct pre-modern class’ in need of enlightenment (Roberts & Zulfiqar, 2019, p. 7). Throughout the country, poor people belonging to a lower zat status live in segregated communities and work as daily wage labourers, domestic helpers or cleaners and many are compelled to beg on the streets (Gazdar, 2007). Unlike in India, public silencing characterizes the issue of zat inequalities in Pakistan in sharp juxtaposition to ‘an obsession with it in private dealings and transactions’ (Gazdar, 2007, p. 7). Hence, discussions of monetary poverty rarely consider aspects of social oppression disproportionately experienced by those at the lower end of the social hierarchy. Pejorative titles are associated with the impoverished and oppressed communities including, for instance, churha (sweepers, mostly Christians), mussali (Muslim Shaikh menial workers), kammi and neech zat (lower caste), badnasal (bad lineage) and ghulams (slaves) (Gazdar, 2007 p. 6). When these impoverished families become the ‘casualties of progress’, they are judged as irresponsible and unable to break out of ‘tradition’. An understanding of formal inequality must be accompanied by a consideration of how relations of social inequality are justified through imageries of zat. Impoverished families are racially profiled for their refusal to accept subordination. I next delineate methodological considerations informing the analysis in the article.

Methodological Considerations

Critical discourse analysis is integrated with a critical historical approach to comprehend how development practices and concepts are made meaningful and normalized through their discursive elements. Historical analysis is important to avoid methodological nationalist tendencies of conceiving of state formation as a process ‘unaffected by the changing organizational principles and structure of the world economy’ (McMichael, 1990, p. 393). As a methodology, discourse analysis is useful for analysing how development as a hegemonic notion and a project has come to be constructed and what underlying assumptions inform its theories and practices (Herrera & Braumoeller, 2004, p. 19). Discursive representations are deeply political as they ‘privilege certain ways of looking at reality while marginalize others’ (Krishna, 2015, p. 860). Policy documents, reports and academic literature pertaining to development in Pakistan and more generally have been analysed to identify and distil the assumptions and representations underpinning the dominant discourse of development and its challenges. Importantly, as opposed to other qualitative methodologies that try to ‘understand and interpret social reality as it exists’, critical discourse analysis aims to reveal how ideals and concepts are produced and changed (Herrera & Braumoeller, 2004, pp. 18, 19). Such an understanding further enables the acknowledgement of ‘how theories are often based on a set of implicit assumptions derived from the methodology with which the researcher is most familiar’ (Herrera & Braumoeller, 2004, pp. 18, 19).

A critical reconstruction of Pakistan’s project of national development reveals its ‘market episteme’ (McMichael, 2010, 2017; Weber, 2014a, 2014b, 2015). An episteme can be defined as ‘an approach to knowledge about the world, based on a core set of assumptions that seem like common sense’ (McMichael, 2010, p. 3). For example, modern development is dominantly viewed in terms of the market and its ‘invisible hand’ assumptions of rationality, efficiency and neutrality (McMichael, 2010, p. 3). Important methodological and epistemological issues have been raised in Heloise Weber’s critique of how formal comparative methods corroborate the assumptions of development theory and analysis:

…temporalized notions of progress defined by reference to spatial categories, such as North–South or West–East, which always implied ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ respectively. These representations have conveyed an imaginary of progress to be realized in temporal terms—one only has to think of the various development plans that continue to be associated with the ‘developing’ countries—and progress in turn was (and continues to be) associated with modernization. (Weber, 2007, p. 560)

These imageries of progress as an ahistorical and linear process adopted and executed by states normalize historically constituted relations of class and racial inequality. This is enabled, not in the least, through the use of the benchmarks of industrialization and GDP to assess progress (Kothari, 2006, p. 13). Mainstream development discourses discount how local socio-political relations have come to be ‘constituted by encounters and inter-relations with distant others’ (Weber, 2007, p. 569). Furthermore, to generalize the scope of relations of inequality, it is necessary to appreciate ‘their specific situatedness within particular conjunctural and temporal dynamics and contexts’ (Weber, 2007, p. 569).

The methodological and epistemological insights offered by critical scholars in global development provide the basis for reconceptualizing development as a contested project as well as for revealing how substantive relations of poverty and inequality have been constituted within development, historically and in contemporary contexts. To further deepen our understanding of the politics of inequality in mainstream Pakistani society and of the increasing support for the United States among local ruling elites in the immediate aftermath of independence, the insights and experiences of Saadat Hasan Manto have been indispensable. Through his writings, Manto reveals how dissenting ‘voices’ of the people—dispossessed of land, victimized, marginalized and impoverished—and their ‘everyday’ struggles against injustice, patriarchal norms and positions of subjugation, have been purposefully ‘absented’ in mainstream discourses of national development. The universal conception of a ‘country’ as poor based on, for example, any aggregate measure of development like GDP, conceals its internal relations of inequality.

Development Vision 2025: A Promise of Prosperity For All?

Pakistan’s Vision 2025 aspires to alleviate poverty through a ‘people-centred’ approach to development. While this is not the first time Pakistan has instituted a development vision, ⁵ Vision 2025 is important as it intends to revive the ‘Pakistani Dream’ of an egalitarian society and achieve the status of a developed country by 2047. To achieve these objectives, it endorses the idea of ‘inclusive growth’ in alignment with and supported by Pakistan’s international development partners and financial institutions, such as the World Bank Group (WBG). For example, in the ‘Country Partnership Strategy’ of the WBG, poverty reduction and shared prosperity are identified as the most important policy goals for Pakistan in the Financial Years (FY) 2015–2019 (World Bank Group [WGB], 2014, p. i). Between the Pakistani government and the WBG (as well as Europe Aid), a consensus nevertheless exists that Pakistan’s full integration (referring especially to the areas that are conventionally regarded as poor and backward) into global capitalism is necessary to make development inclusive and lift people out of poverty. ⁶ To achieve prosperity, the targets of high GDP growth through foreign investment in the development of industry, infrastructure and energy remain central to the Vision 2025 framework. The expansion and privatization of power industry have been accorded the highest priority. For example, the CSP identifies the following development challenges and opportunities deemed to be most important for Pakistan.

Vision 2025 is carefully carved out in a context of increasing expectations in wider society of the role of Chinese enterprises in facilitating the modernization of Pakistan’s industrial base and lifting its economy through the development of infrastructure for energy and transportation (Ministry of Planning Development & Reform, Pakistan, 2017; Pakistan 2025, 2017, p. 44). Initiated in 2015, a major project of China’s global BRI, the CPEC is the country’s most extensive long-term mega development project worth between USD 46 and 75 billion (Deloittepk, n.d., p. 1; Husain, 2018, p. 9). Proponents consider CPEC important for the ‘expansion and possible take-off’ of Pakistan’s economy by enhancing its competitiveness and physical infrastructure resulting in technological advancement (Tehsin et al., 2017, p. 102). Collectively, these factors are perceived as necessary for a sustained GDP growth through what is seen as Pakistan’s initial ‘industrial stages and move on to the entrepreneurial stage’. Thus, a perception prevails in dominant development narrative that ‘CPEC should steer Pakistan’s economy toward a sustained and sustainable economic growth trajectory, presaged by Rostow’s “take-off” point’ (Tehsin et al., 2017, p. 105). Importantly, besides the traditional focus on the economic development of the country, CPEC is conceived of as a project of national interest with the potential to materialize the aspirations of sustained and inclusive economic growth as envisaged in Vision 2025 (Tehsin et al., 2017). As part of this vision, special emphasis is put on the social and economic integration and modernization of ‘lagged’ regions or backward areas of Pakistan including, for instance, the largest, least populous and most natural resource rich province of Baluchistan (Husain, 2018, p. 13).

A series of infrastructure projects have been initiated in and around Baluchistan’s port city of Gwadar which is at the heart of CPEC. While the narrative of Gwadar’s potential to transform Pakistan’s economy was central during Musharraf’s military regime and still enjoys the support of mainstream society, the dream of transforming a ‘backward’ fishing village into a hub of global trade caught pace in the context of CPEC. Gwadar port is being extended through, for instance, the project of ‘Infrastructure Development for Free Zone Gwadar’ (2015–2023) with an estimated cost of USD 23 million (Belt and Road Initiative, n.d.). It includes the construction of export processing, industrial and free zones on 6,280 acres of coastal land inhabited by local fishing communities.

‘Development’ in Gwadar is claimed to benefit the indigenous communities by creating better employment opportunities in the formal economy and improved prospects for education and health care in an urbanizing landscape (Husain, 2018). Such a perception is largely shared by wider Pakistani society which conceives of modernization as a means of releasing Baluchistan from the clutches of backwardness, tribalism and tradition (see Jamali, 2012 for his critical analysis of development in Gwadar). More importantly, such an intervention is assumed to be necessary for realizing Pakistan’s vision of acquiring the status of a high-income country by its 100th anniversary in 2047. Yet, the social costs of development are either muted or justified as necessary to safeguard the national interests and ensure prosperity in a distant future.

Critical perspectives of development (which the state attempts to mute) underscore the social and ecological costs involved in efforts of state and non-state actors to transform Gwadar into a mega city (Ebrahim, 2019; Jamali, 2012; Notezai & Baloch, 2017). While CPEC projects in Gwadar are still under construction, local communities are fearful of losing their homes and livelihoods in a new wave of development, which has so far failed to bring any promised benefits of education, health care and improved standards of living.

During the Musharraf era, one community of fishermen in the neighbourhood of Mulla Band, which became the port construction site, agreed to being relocated to a planned New Town Housing Scheme where each family was allotted a plot of land and received money to build a concrete house. While people got their new homes as promised, the neighbourhood lacks civic amenities and their distance to the sea increased, causing ‘new’ hardships (Ebrahim, 2019; Notezai & Baloch, 2017). Their access to the sea has been severely restricted as their old neighbourhood has been encroached by private capital and state enterprise under the watchful eye of the Pakistan military who maintains a heavy presence in Gwadar and throughout Baluchistan (Jamali, 2012). It is against this backdrop that local communities in Gwadar lack trust in the official narrative of progress propagated by both state and non-state actors. Due to the projects of CPEC, people in Gwadar suspect that they all will eventually be displaced and lose all rights to sea as they are being pushed to fish in the neighbouring Sur Bandar (Ebrahim, 2019). Similar fears engulf the residents of Sur, a place that has already reached its full capacity and is unable to absorb the influx of more displaced fishermen.

Feeling betrayed by the state, indigenous communities have been putting up resistance against development that benefits just a few powerful segments of the military establishment as well as local and global capitalists at the expense of their lives, wellbeing and livelihoods. Local organizations of fishermen, including The Fisherfolk Movement or Med Ittehad, have been active in demanding an end to illegal fishing with devastating ecological implications (Jamali, 2012, p. 180). Peaceful sit-ins and protests are also common to demand social justice (Jamali, 2012, p. 180). Yet, development in Gwadar involves the violence of displacement and destitution exacerbated by the state’s reliance on its military apparatus in an attempt to curb any resistance against the institution of the free market (Jamali, 2012, p. 180). The main drivers of development underpinning CPEC are ‘technology, trade liberalization, free capital movements, advances in communication and transportation, infrastructure and creation of cross border supply chains’ (Ministry of Planning, 2017). Considerations of social and material inequality based on the intersection of zat and class are discounted in Pakistan’s neo-liberal development framework in which the ‘free market’ is even assumed to be central to the provision of basic welfare services (see Multiannual Indicative Programme, 2007–2010, p. 9). For example, technical education and vocational training programs to develop skills for income generation are assumed to be best achieved through a ‘market-oriented framework’ (Multiannual Indicative Programme, 2007–2010, p. 7).

Absented in these official ‘success stories’ based on market epistemology are the social costs of development, which entail the constitution of new forms of marginalization and social division, while increasing existent relations of inequality (De Neve, 2015; Pasha, 2000, p. 72). Experiences of local fishing communities in Gwadar are shared across the country by those who endure suffering inflicted by the state and its development partners in the name of development. In search of livelihoods, families who are dispossessed of their homes and displaced from their land end up in cities where the problems of slum settlements, homelessness, street children and child labour are on the rise (Klasra, 2018). Yet, mega development projects, including CPEC, that involve the creation of new housing societies, road networks, economic zones and power generation schemes to boost economic growth and extend modernization enjoy legitimacy in wider society. Mainstream society in Pakistan relies on the cheaply available services of impoverished families whose members work as cleaners, gardeners, babysitters, security guards, car washers, porters, peons and construction workers and are routinely treated as ‘inferior others’. Bari (2016) notes in his critical newspaper article, ‘Our society and institutions are structured to perpetuate inequality across generations. A poor child is likely to remain poor in his/her lifetime and his/her children are likely to remain poor too’. It is usual for many upper- and middle-class families to take pride and comfort in hiring ‘servants and maids’, including children. Domestic workers are vulnerable and subjected to verbal and physical abuse (Khan, 2019). Their everyday resistance to subjugation, including refusal to be obedient and stealing of food, have costed them lives in extreme case (Khan, 2019). This ‘culture of servitude’ reflects the embeddedness of zat-based stratification in the social fabric of society (see Qayum & Ray, 2003).

Development projects and narratives premised upon a view of progress as a linear trajectory of economic growth through liberal capitalism sustain and reproduce colonial legacies of zat-based social stratification through the violence of displacement and dispossession perpetrated disproportionately against poor families. In the next section, I critically discuss the immediate post-colonial era which was marked by struggles and aspirations of social justice through the building of a nation state on the one hand and the reconstitution of colonial legacies of social stratification and material deprivation through development project shaped by Cold War politics on the other hand.

Colonial Legacies of Social Stratification and Hopes of Development in Post-Colonial Pakistan

In his ‘First Letter to Uncle Sam’—a pejorative title used for the United States of America to refer to its dominating character in the post-World War II context—written on 16 December 1951, Manto highlighted the social, economic and political disparities in the post-colonial context, questioning the relevance of capitalist (and communist) enterprise(s) of development for achieving universal wellbeing in Pakistan:

I am poor because my country is poor. Two meals a day I can somehow manage but many of my brothers are not so fortunate…

You will certainly ask me out of astonishment why my country is poor when it boasts of so many Packards, Buicks and Max Factor cosmetics…

That section of my country’s population which rides in Packards and Buicks is really not of my country. Where poor people like me and those even poorer live, that is my country…These are bitter things, but there is a shortage of sugar here otherwise I would have coated my words appropriately… [emphasis mine]. ⁷

Contrary to mainstream representations of Pakistan as a community unified through the bonds of nationalism and Muslim brotherhood, Manto’s stories revealed the fragmented composition of its society. At the time of independence from British colonial rule, Pakistani society was highly stratified along the dimensions of zat and material class (Alavi, 1972a). As a consequence of colonial intervention, which also instituted policies aligned with liberal political economy, colonized India and its social institutions and material practices underwent significant transformations. Relations of inequality, including caste-like hierarchies and feudalism, were reconfigured in the course of their interaction with the colonial project (Dirks, 2001, p. 5). It was done specifically through capitalist reforms and criminalization of poor families’ resistance through penal laws including anti-begging and anti-vagrancy laws. ⁸ Thus, what has been categorized as ‘traditional cultural (and religious) practice’, such as, for instance, the caste system and bonded labour are in fact ‘modern phenomena’. Colonial legacies of development include the experiences of dispossession and destitution of those who were relegated to the lowest social hierarchy and later came to be characterized as the ‘beggars’, ‘vagrants’ and Christian ‘outcasts’ in Pakistan. ⁹ These relations of domination and subjugation are contradictory and never static, and they entail contestations and challenges by those who are suppressed (see, for example, Guha, 1997, pp. 20–23). Unequal power relations are thus challenged and destabilized not only through the relatively more acknowledged large-scale or organized forms of protests but, more importantly, also in the often overlooked ‘everyday’ struggles of the oppressed and the poor—whether during the colonial period or in the post-colonized world (Guha, 1997; Scott, 1990).

To rectify societal injustices exacerbated through colonialism, the state in general became a vehicle through which to ensure universal wellbeing (McMichael, 2017, pp. 39–42). The ideal of equality resonated with impoverished people’s desires for decent livelihoods. Posing a challenge to European and US hegemony, decolonial struggles and demands for equal rights characterized the Post-World War II and the Cold War contexts (cf. McMichael, 2017; Pasha, 2013; Shilliam, 2014, p. 38; Weber, 2007; Weber & Winanti, 2016). Alliances with post-colonial state elites were thus sought to safeguard US interests and manage social upheavals ascending from modernization processes (Shilliam, 2014). As such, ambitions of inclusive development that would ensure the wellbeing of all were derailed by the particular development project that took shape in the Cold War context. The complex of what Alavi (1972b, p. 63) has famously referred to as the military–bureaucracy oligarchy (in the Pakistani context), created by the colonial state to control and suppress popular resistance against its rule, was re-appropriated by the Cold War policy of ‘modernization through militarization’ (Shilliam, 2014, p. 38). Against this backdrop, while many other post-colonial states remained active in their struggles against colonialism and the dominance of the two ideological blocks (Pasha, 2013; Weber & Winanti, 2016), Pakistan became a major US ally in the South Asian region.

Generally referred to as the ‘decade of development’, the dictatorial regime of General Ayub Khan (1958–1968) serves an important entry point to examine the contradictions of Pakistan’s national development project. It is to a discussion of this that I turn to next.

Contradictions of the ‘Decade of Development’: ‘Lived Experiences’ of Development and the Politics of Welfare

The General Ayub Khan era is represented as the ‘decade of development’ in conventional accounts of progress in Pakistan. His military dictatorship was well-received in the United States because such regimes at the time were considered necessary to promote political stability, ‘a prerequisite for development’ and for nurturing ‘modernizing elites’ (Gardezi & Mumtaz, 2005, p. 425). Mega development projects included the construction of new cities, such as Islamabad, and the Tarbela and Mangla Dams, and they were framed as part of efforts to put Pakistan onto the trajectory of progress. For the country to make progress and fulfil ‘the task of shaking our people out of stagnation’, Ayub Khan in his July 1961 speech in the United States reassured his commitment to liberal capitalism: ‘…any country that falters in Asia, for even a year or two, will find itself subjugated to communism. And that threat is always present…’ ¹⁰ A ‘threat’ that only a military dictatorial regime like his was capable of containing in its search for liberal progress.

Ayub Khan initiated import substitution industrial policies and supported industries, such as textiles, sugar and jute, owned by a few influential families, through ‘industrial licensing procedures, overhauled exchange rates, tariff protection against imports, input subsidies and preferential access to capital’ (Ashraf & Ghani, 2005, p. 185). The state took up the role of facilitator of capital accumulation by providing support to private investors and keeping the wages of labour to the lowest possible level based on what is called the notion of ‘functional inequality’ (Gardezi & Mumtaz, 2005, p. 426). In this context, foreign assistance mostly from the United States, comprising of grants and loans, doubled in the 1960s (Gardezi & Mumtaz, 2005, p. 426). A growth rate of 6% of GDP was recorded for the years 1965–1968 and reached 10% in 1970 (Gardezi & Mumtaz, 2005, p. 426). Consequently, economic inequality increased considerably: Some of the most cited indicators of this include the decline in real wages and the persistence and worsening of unemployment rates from 5.5 million in 1960 to 5.8 million in 1964 (Robert LaPorte, 1969, p. 847).

Ayub Khan’s legacies included poverty, inequality and the use of force against dissent. Social injustice was among the major reasons for Bangladesh’s movement for national independence, which West Pakistan tried to prevent through the use of force. ¹¹ Following the independence of Bangladesh, the socialist democratic government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1973–1977) raised the slogan of Roti, Kapra aur Makan [food, shelter and clothing] as a way of acknowledging people’s demands for social justice. Bhutto’s policies of nationalization of industries, education and health care as well as of distancing Pakistan from the capitalist block made him extremely unpopular, both among indigenous (domestic) capitalist elites as well as in the United States. The institution of socialist democratic policies in Pakistan was interrupted by the military regime of General Zia-ul-Haq (1978–1988) who hanged Bhutto to death (Aziz, 2019). Zia’s dictatorship got the support of the United States as he de-nationalized the economy and pursued a policy of Islamization of society to facilitate the recruitment of ‘Mujahideen’, deployed to fight a war of ‘freedom’ against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In cooperation with the World Bank, General Zia-ul-Haq introduced neo-liberal structural adjustment programmes in Pakistan and played a central role as a major US ally in the Soviet–Afghan war. ¹² Pakistan continued with neo-liberal principles of governance during its fragile democratic governments (1989–1999) that followed the Zia regime, despite resistance from workers, labourers and masses against the privatization and downsizing of public sector organizations as well as inflation, unemployment and hunger (Pasha, 2000).

In the context of neo-liberal economic reforms implemented by General Pervaiz Musharraf’s regime (1999–2008) through his framework of ‘good governance’ and devolution plans, high GDP and massive infrastructure projects were framed as integral for national development. A reflection of ‘Rostowian developmentalism’, slogans were raised ahead of annual donor consultation in Islamabad in 2004: ‘Infrastructure for Growth’, ‘Take off needs Runways’, ‘Mega-projects bridge to the future’ (these slogans are from Craig & Porter, 2006, pp. 210–211). ¹³ The development of infrastructure and industry in Pakistan was considered necessary to counter poverty. Yet, poverty and inequality have been shown to have increased dramatically in Pakistan between 1988 and 2002 (Craig & Porter, 2006, pp. 210–211). Contrary to the official claims that poverty is declining, ¹⁴ its persistence is further confirmed by the latest measure of Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI).

Although official statistics about poverty and interprovincial disparity provide some information about the scale of the problem, critical scholars caution against the limitation of such data as a ‘measure of human condition’ (Krishna, 2015; Saurin, 1996, p. 665; Weber, 2015). The tendency to fetishize development as a measure of economic growth limits and misleads the study of substantive experiences of deprivation sustained through the intersection of class and zat relations. Claims about rising GDP growth rates and their centrality for declining poverty may serve as a psychological subterfuge for mainstream society (Nandy, 2002). Such hegemonic knowledge production, however, tends to normalize sufferings induced by ‘progress’ (McMichael, 2010; Nandy, 2002). Moreover, although the MPI reflects an official acknowledgment of the need to take into account non-monetary aspects of poverty, countries can choose their own indicators based on their priorities. For example, child mortality and nutrition are not included in Pakistan’s MPI despite its infant and child mortality, stunting and malnourishment rates being amongst the highest in the world (UNDP, 2016, p. 9). Clear differences exist in the living standard and life prospects of the urban rich, middle classes and the poor. For example, poor people living in city slums are twice as likely to die from preventable conditions related to malnutrition compared to their richer counterparts (Buhne, 2016). The average survival rate of children born into impoverished families is lower than of those born into rich people due to malnourishment and poor hygiene (Buhne, 2016). These material deprivations are further accompanied by claims to a superior social and moral character by the wealthier sections of society against those looked down upon as inferior due to their zat identities. In this context, shrinking expenditures on social welfare services deteriorate the quality of services and their availability to families compelled to live in sub-human conditions in the wake of the hegemony of the neo-liberal economic order.

The Politics of Social Protection

Poverty alleviation through the establishment of a national social protection system has been set as a development priority in Vision 2025. Since 2008, democratic governments have significantly increased fiscal allocation for social protection, which emerged as a central policy concern (Gazdar, 2011). As Pakistan’s biggest cash assistance programme established in 2008, the BISP has continued to expand and evolve since its inception. Although BISP initially started as an unconditional cash transfer programme with a monthly payment of Rs 1,000, certain conditions have come to be attached to it over time. One example is the initiation of the Co-responsibility Cash Transfer Programme called Waseela-e-Taleem (educational support) or WeT in 2012 (BISP, 2019a). The BISP beneficiaries receive a cash transfer of Rs 750 on a quarterly basis to enrol their children in the age group of 4 to 12 in primary schools. In order to receive a cash stipend, it is a requirement for the beneficiaries to provide admission verification of the child in the first quarter and maintain a school attendance rate of 70% (BISP, 2019c).

For its country-wide outreach and its targeting of the poorest people in Pakistan, BISP has been compared favourably with similar programmes elsewhere, including Brazil’s Bolsa Familia, Mexican Prospera (former Oportunidades) and Philippines’ 4P (BISP, 2019a). In her analysis of Programa Bolsa Familia which was initiated in Brazil in 2003, Pires (2014) has demonstrated that one of the conditions of Bolsa Familia (Similar to BISP’s WeT program) is that children must attend school. Pires (2014) shows that the children have assumed the role of their families’ sponsors by maintaining rigorous school attendance in return for which their mothers get the stipend. If interpreted against CDS, Pires’ (2014) findings provide important insights about how survival has become a matter of competition among members of poor families who could barely afford to make ends meet in the impoverished global liberal political economic world (Da Costa & McMichael, 2007). In the context of his excellent critique of SAPs, Mike Davis (2006, p. 158) argues:

Everywhere in the Third World, the economic shocks of the 1980s forced individuals to regroup around the pooled resources of households and, especially, the survival skills and desperate ingenuity of women … This is the guilty secret variable in most neoclassical equations of economic adjustment: poor women and their children are expected to lift the weight of Third World debt upon their shoulders.

In the case of destitute families in Pakistan, even BISP can be out of reach. For example, one of the criteria to access BISP is that its beneficiaries must possess legal identification documents (BISP, 2019b). One consequence of this condition is that people who do not possess a legal identification document, have lost it or hold an expired or a damaged document can be excluded from BISP. As a result, many people who live in slum settlements are left out of social protection programmes. Without an entitlement to universal welfare provisions, many impoverished people along with their children rely on personal charity, NGOs and the compulsion of working in harmful conditions.

As the social protection system evolves in Pakistan, a focus on providing poor people monthly cash benefits through the BISP has moved towards conditional cash assistance programmes as well as microcredit schemes. Conditional cash transfer programmes in developing countries in general dovetail with the World Bank’s push for neo-liberal economic reforms. In the dominant narrative of development, neo-liberal reforms—including poor people’s access to credit—are presented as a promising solution to widespread poverty and inequality (Da Costa & McMichael, 2007). Microcredit schemes have a prominent place in poverty alleviation programmes despite critical research into their social and political implications. For example, Heloise Weber (2004, p. 356) has forcefully argued that the microcredit approach to poverty is a neo-liberal development strategy.

Albeit limited in their number and reach, microcredit programmes have been operating in Pakistan since the late 1990s. It is notable how the emphasis on microcredit aligns with the shift in the policy of BISP which initially started as an unconditional cash assistance programme. Conditional cash transfer came to be framed as ‘part of the Graduation strategy aiming to link the Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT) to [the] attainment of human development goals’ (BISP, 2019a). As part of BISP, the government developed additional microcredit programmes, such as Waseela-e-Rozgar (means for livelihood), ‘as an exit strategy for BISP beneficiaries to come out of dependency syndrome of getting Rs 4,700 per quarter’ (Benazir Income Support Programme [BISP], 2018). The assumption that welfare relief leads to ‘dependency’ is deep-seated in liberal capitalist thought and associated policy practices. ¹⁵

Conclusion

To alleviate poverty, Vision 2025 aspires to renew the promises of equality and universal welfare provisions that figured prominently in the immediate post-independence era. For realizing its vision, mega development projects such as those initiated as part of the multi-billion-dollar economic corridor CPEC are considered essential to further expand the market and sustain levels of economic growth needed to climb the ‘development ladder’. This hegemonic development approach worked against the spirit of the simultaneous ‘Pakistani Dream’ of a welfare state. Mega development projects implemented in the past—including during Ayub Khan’s era which was celebrated by its supporters as ‘the decade of development’—have entailed forceful displacement and dispossession of impoverished families belonging to a lower zat status. Resistance against the social costs of the hegemonic development project is violently suppressed and justified in the name of national interest and a shared prosperous future.

Employing a critical historical approach to analyse the politics of Pakistan’s project of modernization, the analysis in this article suggests that poor living conditions and public wellbeing in Pakistan can be attributed to a number of inter-related factors ranging from continuous commitment to capitalist enterprise of development and neo-liberal reforms, backed by dictatorial regimes and the institution of zat that feed into the reproduction of entrenched inequalities. These factors collectively manifest in low priority being accorded to public welfare and wellbeing by the Pakistani state.

Pakistan’s challenges of creating a welfare state were compounded by the Cold War politics of the post-World War II world. Pakistan ‘formally’ and ‘officially’ leant towards liberal capitalism and remained a close US ally in most of its history of long dictatorships and precarious democratic governments. During the Ayub Khan regime, Mahbub-ul-Haq, the then Chief Economist of the Pakistan Planning Commission, stated the following to challenge the notion of ‘functional’ or income inequality:

It is well to recognize that economic growth is a brutal, sordid process. The essence of it lies in making the labourer produce more than he [or she] is allowed to consume for his [or her] immediate needs, and to invest and reinvest the surplus thus obtained. (cited in Gardezi & Mumtaz, 2005, p. 426)

After witnessing social upheavals of liberal policies pursued aggressively by the dictatorial regime of Ayub Khan, serving as Minister of Finance in the 1980s during Zia-ul-Haq regime, Mahbub-ul-Haq argued that ‘development goals must be defined in terms of progressive … elimination of malnutrition, disease, illiteracy, squalor, unemployment and inequality’ (Mahbub-ul-Haq, 1971–1977, p. 8). Mahbub-ul-Haq’s perspective is reflective of struggles for social justice and democracy that were met with brute force under dictatorships enjoying the support of the capitalist block during the Cold War. A glimpse of the contradictions of uneven development and of the defiance of state brutality is captured in an excerpt of Habib Jalib’s poem Dastoor:

The one whose beacon brightens up palaces only

Who only promotes the happiness of a powerful few,

Who moves only in the shadows of compromise,

Such a debased tradition, such a dark dawn

I refuse to submit; I refuse to follow… ¹⁶

While mass protests and monetary poverty grab the attention of development debates, conditions of destitute families are ‘normalized’ in mainstream society through the institution of zat. At the societal level, there are hierarchical divisions along the institution of zat—a caste-like ‘identity’ that ascribes a person to a position of prestige in relation to those relegated to a lower social status. These social positions correspond to economic power as those belonging to kammi zat or lower caste and those categorized as ‘outcastes’ are also the most impoverished and deprived. The compulsion of destitute families to live in sub-human conditions in urban slum settlements is discounted in accounts that profile them as ‘inferior others’ seen to be physically unclean and morally corrupt. Mundane acts of resistance or the ‘infrapolitics of the poor’ as Scott (1990) conceives it—petty theft, refusal to obey command, slowing down the pace of work, scratching shiny cars and making up stories to gain sympathy, for instance—are profiled as peculiar zat characteristics. While mainstream society is largely tolerant of and benefits from these relations of inequality justified through zat, it confronts the dilemma of condemning instances of extreme violence against domestic child labourers and forceful displacement of families in slum settlements whenever these come under the spotlight. Pretentions to superior knowledge about the wellbeing of the ‘inferior other’ are dispelled by everyday struggles of destitute families unable to escape their material conditions and lower zat status despite their best efforts. In essence, colonial legacies of zat and class-based stratifications constituted in the national development project premised upon the assumptions of MT explain the persistence of experiences of deprivation of poor families.

Vision 2025 is representative of Pakistan’s dominant development ideology and approach, which has been premised upon the assumptions of MT with far-ranging implications for the justification of development-led violence and formal material inequality. Social protection measures to alleviate poverty have remained limited in the context of liberalization of economy, privatization and reduced state expenditure on public welfare services. Instead, sustainable economic growth generated through technological advancement and new economic alliances in the context of China’s One Belt One Road Initiative provide new hopes of modernization to its proponents. Any form of resistance to the state’s development projects that entail the displacement and destitution of local communities is dealt with forcefully and framed as unpatriotic. Everyday struggles of survival and demands for social justice, nevertheless, reveal the limits of conventional development and its market episteme. Such individual and collective resistance movements are waged throughout the world with ever-expanding material and racial divides sustained by development through liberal capitalism.