The Supremacy of the Bureaucracy and the Military in Pakistan

Abstract

The oligarchical relationship among the narrowly based ruling elites in the young country predated independence. It was mainly in the areas constituting West Pakistan that the traditional land-based feudatory system guaranteed through official patronage existed. In the Southwestern Punjab, Sindh and the tribal areas of the NWFP and Balochistan, there was a persistence of the tribal and aristocratic traditions owing allegiance to ‘localism’ and reinforcing ‘ruralism’. After independence, with a clear ‘bias’ for an administration-oriented rather than politics-based system, the civil bureaucracy and the feudal pressure group coopted the armed forces. As suggested earlier, this development disturbed non-Punjabi and non-Urdu speaking communities. East Pakistanis, excluding a few landed elites, were the main losers in the new state formation. In West Pakistan, suave, westernised and highly mobile bureaucrats forged closer bonds with the rural aristocracy in a relationship which had its antecedents in the Raj. The economic interests of the zamindar, wadera, pir and maulvi found more in common with the forces and functionaries of the state than with their respective tenets, followers or the fragile politicised urban middle class. The evolution of this new oligarchy shifted the political balance in favour of West Pakistan.KeywordsCivil SocietyPrime MinisterCivil ServiceArmed ForceQuota SystemThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.