The word feudalism is thrown around freely in Pakistan, but the term’s definition is contemporary and tailored to the country. To the rest of the world, feudalism means developing and cultivating relationships between groups that involve owning portions of land, providing services, or even labor. But when one speaks of feudalism in Pakistan, the air charges with contempt and anger towards the nation’s feudal system and feudal lords. It is the one country in the sub-continent that has its economic and political roots in the feudal system. Locals associate the feudal system with politically and financially powerful families that own large portions of land throughout the country.
As per the Pakistan Institute of Labor Education and Research (PILER), two-thirds of the country’s agricultural land is owned by the agricultural families of the country. The said landowners enjoy immense influence in the government, armed forces of the country, and the arena of politics, enabling them to have a certain authority in national matters.
Does it bode well for the “little people” that the control over most of the agricultural land of the entire country belongs to just a few powerful feudal families? It can be speculated so if the evidence is taken into consideration; the feudal mindset of Pakistan is one of brutality and corruption. As feudal lords have sunk their claws in the government and army, the non-feudal people do not stand a chance against them in any matter.
In 2014, a landlord’s son, namely Ghulam Mustafa, severed the arms of a 10-year-old child. Tabassum Iqbal was the boy whose only fault was that he fancied a swim in the local landlord’s well without permission. Before the child was thrown into the water pumping machine, he was tortured by Mustafa. Is it unusual to assume that such a brutal attack must have immediately grabbed the local police’s attention? No, unsurprisingly, that is not what happened. When the father of the boy, Nasir, went to the police to file a report against the attacker, he said
“The police refused to open a case without a medical report. A case wasn’t even opened after the report was presented.”
Like many other cases of feudal brutality and police incompetency, this case would have gotten no notice. Once the local media got a wind of it, it spread like wildfire, forcing the local authorities to take action. It was only after the media outrage that the chief minister of Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif, showed some degree of interest in the case. If a lucky few cases make themselves known, like that of Shahrukh Jatoi murdering Shahzeb, the killer is often pardoned due to immense political pressure on the victim’s family.
As most of the villages in the country have their own system of jirga or panchayat, the reigning feudal lord has enormous power over every decision of the region. Jirga systems are big on settling scores in the most barbaric ways like murders, rape, and other heinous acts. Feudal lords tend to have an army of men to do their bidding of every sort and even have private prisons built for anyone who dares to cross them.
A local author named Shaukat Qadir paints the picture quite correctly,
“The landlord ensures a system of very cruel slavery by creating dependencies for peasants…. [Farm workers] and their families are subservient to the system.”
The serfs are made to be completely dependent on the landlords. The feudal lords allow them to live on a portion of land with the bare minimum necessities in exchange for their agricultural skills. The farmers toil away hard on the fields from dawn to dusk whilst the rich sit in their houses. The landlords benefit enormously and give a minuscule amount of money to the farmers.
The reason that politicians do not jump in and correct the abuse of power by feudal lords is that most of the governing politicians own huge portions of land. A Pakistani economist, Manzur Ejaz, observed,
“Political office is inherited in Pakistan… “The provincial and national assemblies are dominated by feudal landowners.”
When the majority of the legislative branch of the government is made of feudal landlords, how can there be any change? The military is not behind in this race of corruption. Shaukat Qadir expressed,
“The army also contributes to and benefits from feudalism, unconsciously. One of the benefits army officers get for their service is agricultural land, which they then rent out to larger landowners.”
Most people in Pakistan lean towards believing that the army is a conscious and active part of this corruption cycle.
It is not strange that the religious arena of the country, a powerful and influential force, is also painted with feudalism. Religious and political leaders like Shah Mehmood Qureshi shrewdly gather thousands of farmer followers. The devotees religiously vote for these leaders when the time for casting the votes in the election comes. With such an intermingling of religious and political power, feudalism spreads strongly through the land. It does not cross the serf’s mind to do away with this feudal system because they are sorely unaware. Even the schools that are built in the villages are owned by the feudal lords who only allow restrictive religious teaching to be done so that no one rebels.
As Shaukat Qadir points out,
“Landlords are beneficiaries of a broken system that exploits the poor and empowers the rich… Consequently, their desire to do away with this [system] is very limited, and their primitive beliefs of dominance, such as suppression of women, continue to exist.”
Eqbal Ahmed presented a slightly different point of view where he said,
“Feudalism serves as the whipping boy of Pakistan’s intelligentsia. Yet, to my knowledge few serious studies have been published on the nature and extent of feudal power in Pakistan, and none to my knowledge on the hegemony which feudal culture enjoys in this country.”
Micheal Kugelman, an author, observed that most of the Pakistanis seemed to be fixated on the concept of feudalism. Critics of the local notion of feudalism raise the point that feudal lords are not to be blamed for the rampant injustice, corruption, and brutality of the system. There are other powers at play who are responsible for the condition the country is in now. According to them, if Pakistanis would stop holding feudal lords responsible for every fault there is with the country, there is a chance to detect the real issues and perhaps even solve them.
There is something to be said about many feudal landlords living in harmony with common men. As Bina Shah, an author and member of a feudal family said,
“Sindhis, feudal and non-feudal alike, have been a peaceful part of Karachi’s social fabric for decades.”
There is no doubt that there is a certain percentage of feudal landlords who are industrialists that are furthering different industries of the countries. Whilst some are involved in philanthropy or creating a better society. Even in the families of feudal lords, some can be found who criticize the entire feudal system and hold it responsible for the worsening conditions of the country. Shahbaz Sharif, the former chief minister of Punjab and coming from a powerful feudal family, commented that feudal lords have brought ruin to Pakistan.
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