On the Inside

I am a member of a land-owning family in Sindh. However, I refuse to call my family “feudals” because we do not act like feudals – for feudalism is a mindset more than an economic reality in a post-Ayub Pakistan where three land reforms took place and reduced most feudals’ holdings by thousands of acres in the 1960s and 1970s.

My father and his family were born into a certain system and they worked within the system that was established at the time. But they have made huge efforts to step out of this system and bring modernity both to themselves and to the people of their area. This essay is meant to bust a few myths and communicate a few home truths about “feudalism” in this country, which many people in the urban centers of the country believe to be the reason for why things in Pakistan are so amiss. This essay is based on my own personal knowledge of this world; it is the talk of an "insider" and you may accept it or not as you please. I am being honest about my background, and naturally you may find me a bit biased. But I have nothing to gain by touting the wrongdoings of this segment of society and nothing to lose by talking openly about its good points.

Let’s start with a very important distinction: the one between landholders and “feudals”. “Feudals” are people who have been in the business of agriculture for more than one generation. They have inherited large tracts of land, thousands of acres in many instances, and their methods of land management are processes that have evolved over generations. On the other hand, Pakistan also sees landowners who possess farms on a much smaller scale: a holding of 300-400 acres is typical of such a setup.

In Punjab, the system for settling people on the lands works in such a manner that land is set aside for the development of the village, whereas in Sindh, no formal system exists, and people have settled on the lands in small hamlets that can grow into larger villages; the case for ownership is decidedly more ambiguous in this province. But my father and his family do not "own" the village and they do not "own" the people who work on their lands. They hold no governmental positions at this point, although in the past they have been involved with Pakistani politics, but to the best of my knowledge, those were positions of service, not positions where they took advantage both economically and politically. Not every landowner is honest, but more than you would suspect actually care about their people and work hard to bring development to their areas of influence, because the government isn’t doing it now and isn’t going to do it any time in the future.

The question of mistreating any of their haris (sharecroppers) does not even arise, nor does the question of them sanctioning or approving the rape of women. Although I have heard of cases where landowners have kept their haris in chains to keep them from running away with large advances of money before completing any of their contracted work, there is a very strict social code in place on these lands. Still, there are miscreants and criminals who wish to break the rules of not just the law but of decency and honor everywhere, and you will often hear of cases where the ancient codes of tribalism overtakes the rule of law, the considerations of Islam, or the feudal code of honor itself. When the people of my family’s area try to carry out these old customs (for example, trying to get their children married at five or bringing the entire family, including the women, to my father’s doorstep to apologize for a slight), the members of my family unequivocally refuse to support or approve of these traditions. Unfortunately, the world of the interior is dreadfully harsh, but let me state categorically that I know of no man in my family who would ever encourage or permit the rape of a woman for any reason.

Assertions that “feudals” get fancy educations only for the sake of ostentation are really not very accurate; first of all, a good education is something not every feudal can actually afford these days. Every person that I know from this background who has been educated has worked hard to contribute back to the people of their areas. My father is one of the most well-known land-owners in Sindh, although not the largest. But he decided to break with tradition and pursued an education in the United States – one which, I might add, he struggled to attain because there wasn’t a lot of money in the family back in the 1970s, especially after the land reforms had cut down their holdings to a minimal amount. He returned to Pakistan to run his farm not because of the tremendous financial opportunities that it offered – in fact quite the opposite – but because his father did it before him and his before that, and something that’s in your blood, well, you can’t turn your back on it so easily.

My father continued the strong emphasis on education by sending me and my brother to university in the United States. The older female members of my family hardly went to school because of conservative traditions, so you can imagine what a revolutionary step this was – especially in my case. My father never blatantly pressured either of us to return to this country, but we both did because we realized how much he had sacrificed to educate us, and we felt an obligation to him and to our people, and felt we must bring our education back to help more people than just ourselves. We had no notions of coming back to “lord it” over the poorer members of our society. However misplaced the “feudals” may seem, a strong tradition of social responsibility has been bred into them for generations, and they take it very seriously indeed.

Many people, when arguing for the demise of feudalism, labor under the delusion that haris are somehow prevented by landowners from owning their own land, as if they are slaves or indentured servants. What they don’t seem to understand that the prevailing system of agriculture is the sharecropping system: the haris work the land and share a percentage of the profits with the landowner. The hari provides the manual labor; the landowner puts in all the resources, including the land itself, the water (do you have any idea how treacherously difficult and expensive it is to get a proper irrigation system going in Sindh?), the crops, the fertilizer, the maintenance, the costs of harvesting, and so on. He also provides a great deal of protection and leadership to the people. If there are losses, the landowner and the hari both suffer, but the landowner absorbs more of the loss precisely because he can afford to. That kind of responsibility and cooperation is prevalent everywhere in the Pakistani landowning system.

This is a system that has existed for a very long time. There is no law that says the haris cannot own their own land. But if you saw some of these people and how they lived, you would realize that owning their own land is an economic proposition that not only would be out of their reach, but would destroy the farming system of the entire nation. In fact, you would see that the agricultural productivity of the nation – which in all reality provides more than enough food to feed all the people of Pakistan (and let it be said here that nobody is dying of starvation in this country, alhamdullilah) – would be seriously affected, almost to the point of ruin.

Many people are probably not aware of this, but in recent years the World Bank has formulated a policy under "globalization" in which they envision that Pakistan stops being an agricultural country. Instead they want us to industrialize and for us to become dependent on food imports, as are quite a few developing world nations now. Just this morning the Pakistani government has approved the import of sugar in order to reduce local prices. Is that what we want for our nation? Do we want to see Pakistan having to import its sugar and wheat and rice, rather than producing its own? The World Bank and other powers have their own agenda, once which does not include the people of Pakistan successfully farming these lands. Already the landowning system involves many more small landowners than gigantic holdings of a thousand acres or more, but they would like nothing better than for even the medium-sized landholdings of Pakistan to be split up into lots of little, ineffective plots of land that poor people can do little more than barely eke out a subsistence level existence.

However, people of the “feudal” class do recognize that this system of landowning may not last very much longer than a generation or two. To this end, my family decided to establish two very major industrial projects in our area. These projects have brought vast economic improvement to our area. They have created jobs, brought development, created infrastructure, and brought a huge sense of pride and excitement to hundreds of families in the area. But you must recognize that these industrial projects are tied to agricultural production, because they use the byproducts of sugar to operate. So, remember that any attempts on our part to industrialize cannot be separated from the agricultural base from which 70% of our economy nationwide is actually based.

Many people think that affluence has come very easily to this stratum of society. It has not. The affluence that you see today in a lot of landowners has been the result of twenty or thirty or even fifty years of hard work across generations. Not everyone was born rolling in money - many people lost their positions or their lands or their holdings after Ayub’s land reforms. This set the landowners back many years. Whatever they have built themselves up to is the result of a hell of a lot of hard work. I have seen my father and my uncle and cousins travel to the lands for days, standing in the fields in 110 F heat, driving in un-air-conditioned cars or jeeps, meeting all day and night with the people of the area, supervising the planting or the harvesting of the various crops. They do this week in and week out, in the heat, in the cold, whether or not they’re sick, whether or not there are riots or the danger of kidnapping – and my father had to travel to his farm carrying a weapon for much of the 1980s and 1990s because this threat was so pronounced. They do this because they have to, in order to survive; survival is as much an issue for the landowners as it is for anyone else who needs to make a living.

I have seen my father stay up nights going over his accounts, making sure that everything is up to date and in order. I’ve seen my family members in despair over terrible water policies, the problems of dacoity and kidnappings, political manipulation, pestilence that has destroyed half the wheat crop, a storm that threatens the survival of an entire fruit orchard. One of my uncles had to destroy an entire orchard himself of mango trees that were at least thirty years old because there wasn’t enough water in the canals to keep them alive (he decided to hold a very public funeral for the orchard and even sent out invitation cards to the event, in a fit of creativity that most people deem beyond the average feudal’s mental capacity). Let me tell you that landowning is not a hobby. It is more than a job. It is, in all cases, a lifetime’s vocation and dedication and something that is back-breaking and heartless more than it is rewarding in any financial or social or emotional sense.

But they continue to do this because they are trapped; they were not equipped by their parents, for the most part, to know how to do anything else but tend the land. When I said that my father broke with tradition to get his education, I wasn’t kidding; those zamindars who could afford to do so would send their sons to expensive schools, but far more in numbers were those who couldn’t, and some who even pulled their children out of school because they didn’t see why an education might ever be a necessary means to survive beyond the lands. This lack of farsightedness has proven to be their downfall in many more ways than one.

One of the things I see people rankle at most is the fact that landowners enjoy tremendous positions of influence in their areas. This is true. It is also true that they have alliances with politicians and with the army for reasons that include a base instinct for survival, a hunger for financial gain, and great political greed, creating a nexus of power that is very hard to break into for the ordinary man in Pakistan. It has been a stranglehold in the past, but it is a system that is fragile in the present; it is going to continue in some ways and change in many more others.

People in the cities of Pakistan advocate a violent revolution or a sudden change in order to put an end to what they see as one of the greatest evils in the nation, but perhaps they don’t realize that this would be the most detrimental thing to happen to Pakistan – apart from a war with India. It would cause the sudden collapse of a system that has provided a sort of stability and a delicate balance of power to the majority of our population over centuries. Do you think our people could really deal with that? More importantly, do you think they need that kind of turmoil in their already difficult lives? Destroying the feudal system suddenly will bring about a power vacuum into which any opportunist – tribal warlord, overenthusiastic police force, or unchecked government agencies – could step in and wreak havoc over the people of the interior. Surely neither you nor I want that for our country.

Instead, let the slow process of change take its course. Education is spreading everywhere in the interior. Industrialization will follow. It isn’t an easy process, but it will happen. Don’t think that we landowners or “feudals” – and there is a vast difference between the two – don’t see our own demise coming. The smart ones are making the adaptations now; the stupid ones stick their heads in the sand and continue to exercise their petty influences over an already disenfranchised people. Don’t assume that throwing the landowners out and giving the land to the people is going to have the effect that you imagine. In fact, you will open a Pandora’s Box that will dismay you with the violence and destructiveness of its power. And make no mistake, I am not arguing for any status quo. The status quo is dying in front of my eyes. We feudals will be no more in a generation or two, and it will happen without anyone actually having had to do anything about it.