A Case of Rampaging Elephants: The Politics of the Middle Classes in Small-Town Pakistan

Abstract

This article draws on a year of ethnographic fieldwork with traders in a Pakistani agricultural commodity market. It analyses their business and wider networking strategies to show how they – as a segment of Pakistan’s middle classes – perceive and interact with the state in the process of accumulation. Ordered by custom, contract, and selective engagement with state functionaries who also engage them selectively, traders’ economic activity is inextricably bound up with political practices that defy democratic principles. Neither a concern with the public good nor programmatic politics is visible in what traders do; the state is viewed as an instrument of accumulation while itself appearing to have no project of its own separate from the local dominant classes; and collective organisation both substitutes for the regulatory state and staves off its attempts at enforcement. These trends further militate against viewing the middle classes as catalysts of democracy and have important implications for development strategies seeking to reform the state.

Key Words:

• middle classes
• Pakistan
• politics of accumulation
• state
• traders

Disclosure Statement

This article draws on many of the themes discussed in the author’s unpublished doctoral thesis (Amirali 2018). The author would like to thank Barbara Harriss-White for her generous support during the doctorate and Aasim Sajjad Akhtar and Neil Howard for their comments on this article which helped improve it. Financial support by the Pakistan Higher Education Commission and Saint Catherine’s College, Oxford is also gratefully acknowledged.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The informal economy is the composite of economic activities that take place outside the specified regulatory framework of the state. It is therefore always a deviation from the law, or as Roy (2005, 147) calls it, “a state of exception.” This article follows Roy in understanding informality as produced by the state itself when – exercising its sovereignty – its officials grant exceptions and suspend the validity of its previous pronouncements.

2 Data were gathered in eight visits lasting between 10 and 14 days at a time. Two follow-up visits were made in 2013 and 2014.

3 Eighty-three per cent of land is farmed by those controlling less than 50 acres and more than half of all farms are smaller than five acres (Government of Pakistan 2010).

4 There are no women agricultural traders in Punjabkot.

5 Profitability varies widely. Annual average rates of interest can range between 60% and 80% (Haq, Aslam, and Chaudry 2013). At the same time, many smaller aarthis are themselves indebted and therefore not accumulating despite high rates of interest.

6 This is a particularly apt metaphor for understanding unequal exchange and relations of dependence between different actors and sectors of the economy. I credit Barbara Harriss-White from whom I first heard it.

7 Mainstream analysts tend to view clientelism as: an adaptive response to scarce material resources and weak formal institutions (Khan 2005); ineffectively centralised power (Gellner and Waterbury 1977; Bardhan 1988); and high levels of poverty and inadequate public service provision (Wilkinson and Kitschelt 2007; Bardhan and Mookherjee 2012).

8 Sahib is a polite title for men.

9 Theorised as the “shadow state,” the “private interest state,” and the “private status state” in India (Harriss-White 2003), in Africa as the “criminalization of the state” (Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou 1999), and the “privatization of the state” (Hibou 1999), and across geographies as the “everyday state,” the use of public office to further private interests through selective implementation of the law is a widespread post-colonial phenomenon distinct from corruption and understood in these formulations as a mode of governance.

10 Successful accumulation and lower caste social mobility has been observed in a small number of contexts. Hasan (2009, 22) describes it occurring amongst clans of Punjab’s Mianwali district who were traditionally transporters and made it big in Karachi. Jan (2018) notes the rise of the Rehmanis in Okara, also seen in Punjabkot.

11 This holds true well beyond Punjabkot. Journalists have noted that “the offices and facilities of the market committees are being used in some areas as party offices for the ruling PML-N, according to sources familiar with the matter” (Express Tribune, August 15, 2011).

12 See Harriss-White and Michelutti (2019) on the ubiquity of criminal activity in South Asian politics and economies. Contributions to this volume demonstrate how criminal violence and collusion with the state are critical to processes of accumulation and “criminal” activity is understood as that which is in breach of the law.

13 When asked why there was no labour representative, council members laughed and one of the men jokingly motioned at a large landlord member across the room, saying “there’s your labour, he’s sweat more than anyone in this room today.” This provoked uproarious laughter. clearly no one felt the need to make even a purely discursive concession to the interests of labour.

14 Former Chief Minister of Punjab, Chaudry Pervaiz Elahi, was considered to have mastered this strategy, if in slightly unorthodox fashion. Multiple sources narrated that he had arranged for the education and upbringing of young girls from his area to eventually marry them off to high bureaucrats and thus strengthen his networks.

15 The family still trades in the mandi, but the business has been run by a less fortunate cousin. Similar to what Jan (2019) observes in Dipalpur, meaningful distinctions between landed and agro-commercial/industrial classes are often not viable. Almost all large landowners in Punjabkot have diversified their portfolios to include storage, agro-processing, or other agro-related activities.

16 Roy’s (2005) theorisation of informality as a “state of exception” provides a framework for understanding how conflict and complicity exist simultaneously. Public officials inhabit contradictory roles – because informality is produced by the state and its officials through granting de facto exemptions from official rules, there is always tension between officially mandated practices and those which deviate and actually come to exist.

17 For comparable commentary, see Javed (2018) on traders’ anti-tax mobilisations in Lahore.