The Punjab card.

Byline: Aasim Sajjad Akhtar

IT'S as close to a truism as possible in Pakistani politics: Punjab was, is, and presumably will be, for the foreseeable future, the heartland of the establishment-centric structure of power.

The British made Punjabis the dominant component in the army, transformed its ecology and society by building the world's biggest perennial irrigation system and also introduced a uniquely authoritarian method of government known affectionately in the annals of colonial bureaucracy as the 'Punjab school of administration'.

When Pakistan came into being, Punjab became a hegemon for these interrelated reasons: first, it supplied the majority of both the rank and file and officers of the emergent Pakistan army; second, Punjabis, alongside Urdu-speakers, dominated the civil bureaucracy; and third, Punjabi landowning politicians at home with the authoritarian 'Punjab school of administration' put their lot in with the civil-military state apparatus to thwart democratic rule.

This hegemonic bloc offset East Pakistan's demographic majority with the refrain that democracy could wait in lieu of defending the country from India and Afghanistan. Landed and other influential politicians in Sindh, Balochistan and then NWFP who sided with the Punjabi and Urdu-speaking combine were given a share of the proverbial booty, while others were deemed seditious and criminalised in the 'greater national interest'. The charade was christened by Western imperialist powers who wanted a garrison state in southwest Asia to safeguard their interests in the Cold War.

Counter-hegemonic social forces in East and West Pakistan demolished both the material and discursive foundations of the oligarchic project in the 1970 election. Yet even after the eastern wing seceded, the Punjab-centric establishment refused to budge, now armed with demographic power whilst continuing to be the 'guardian of the country's physical and ideological frontiers'.

So Balochistan, Sindh, the NWFP and other peripheral regions continued to be coerced and cajoled, with the junior partner of the military establishment now a more urbanised and vernacular 'bourgeois' politician that reflected socioeconomic changes in Punjabi. Cue Nawaz Sharif. More than 30 years after his emergence, Mian Sahib is now biting the hand that once fed him. So, is the 'Punjab card' being played against the establishment that has always employed it to perpetuate its own authoritarian project?

Only time will...

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