Class Formation Behind ‘Overdeveloped’ State
After independence, state formation and legal/constitutional formation did not change under Jinnah. Indian Act of 1935,[179] with a few modifications, became the constitution of the newly independent Pakistan.
Jinnah became Governor-General with 3 out of 4 provincial governors as British technocrats. All British chiefs of armed forces stayed in their offices and the important ministries of finance and foreign affairs were given to Ghulam Muhammad and Muhammad Zufrullah Khan, who were technocrats of international reputation and had ‘connections’. Whereas the delinking of the colonial hegemony was not substantial, rather non-existent leading to deep centre-periphery relations of Pakistan, the reigning class in postcolonial Pakistan was in transition. A number of key political and economic figures of the time concurred, including Iskandar Mirza, Akhtar Hussian, Amjad Ali, Yousaf Haroon and Chaudhri Salahuddin. Amjad Ali and Haroon (Karachi) were from influential business families, and Salahuddin was the General Secretary of the Muslim League. Habib Bank gave Rs. 80 million as a loan equal to half of the revenue.[180] The statement of Industrial Policy came in 1948. This was the beginning of a capitalist class. In the 1950s, 99% of the growth was through Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI).[181] We can see, therefore, how “the alliance between big business and the bureaucratic-military axis was already well-established in the 1950s”.[182]Unlike India’s congress, the Muslim League had thin roots in the territory which became Pakistan. Internally, the Muslim League was facing pressure for land reforms from Doltana and left-wing Mian Iftikhar-ud-din. In 1947, the Government Hari Committee was formed, which declared landlords as friends of the peasants, whereas a dissenting opinion of an ICS Muhammad Masud portrayed the real miseries of the peasantry in Sindh and recommended urgent land reforms. The report was stopped and not published till 1949. The Muslim League had to make an agrarian Reforms Committee under Mumtaz Daultana in February 1949. The East Bengal Land Acquisition and Tenancy Act, 1950 abolished large land holdings by fixing a ceiling of 33 acres self-cultivated land.[183] Landlords started ejecting tenants, so the situation began to deteriorate and took on ‘semi-revolutionary’ proportions.[184] Hence, the agrarian question continued to be volatile. According to Toor, the ruling classes were concerned with an increasingly unruly populace and were determined to expel socialism/communism from the realm of legislative politics. The left was seeking to articulate an alternate narrative of nationalism and the nation-state project on the basis of ‘vision’ of progressive society as opposed to liberal anti-communists. She has discussed this conflict between the liberal capitalist vision and socialist progressive vision in 1950-1960s in detail.After Jinnah’s death, under the leadership of Liaqat Ali Khan, the Muslim League was not united and lost popular support.[185] This led to a process of creating parties internally from within state which Waseem called as ‘official’ parties. These were to counter an emerging anti-colonial popular alliance of ethno-nationalist (Bengali, Pashtoon and Baluchi) and socialists.[186] To make it possible, Liaqat Ali Khan took two steps; first, he decided to rely on West Pakistan’s landed elite as his natural constituency as a big landlord; second, he brought the Objectives Resolution to please Mullahs, who had already opposed land reforms declaring them as un-Islamic.[187]
The vulnerability of the feeble reigning class of Pakistan made it dependent on neo-colonial powers also. Liaqat’s 1950 visit to the U.S., ostensibly in response to President Truman’s Point IV Program to let the developing world benefit from the technical advances of the U.S., was a starting point for this.
It was the acceptance of the new hegemonic project of the U.S. by the reigning class. Liaqat’s request for private investment from the U.S.[188] in 1950 was for Pakistan to catch up and make up for lost centuries within the shortest possible time.[189] One can note that this rhetoric of ‘catch up’ fits with the rhetoric of Truman’s speech and with the dominant modernization approach to development. He was convinced that the modernization of Pakistan could not be accomplished without the help of advanced countries like the United States.[190] Thus, he took a clear stand in the Cold War, siding with the U.S. He predicted that ‘liberal civilization’ and its institutions were under attack by ‘dark forces’ and identified the U.S. as the torchbearer of ‘civilization’.[191] He emphasized the common values of individual enterprise, civil liberties and private ownership as opposed to distribution.[192] In his formation of modernization for Pakistan, he replaced U.S. morality with Islam as “the best security of law and the surest pledge of freedom” for Pakistan. According to Ali Khan, Islam was a necessary supplement due to the “mental confusion of the colonial world or their struggle”.[193]Soon after this came the support of Pakistan in Korean War and joining of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and later CENTO (the Baghdad Pact). In the wake of these moves, Pakistan lost the sympathy of the Soviet Union.[194] So far, the imperialist bloc wanted to use the legislature as a seat of power under the leadership of Liaqat Ali Khan and not military. Therefore, the Pindi conspiracy case was to clear communists from the military. Later, Nixon found the military under the leadership of Ayub to meet the daunting needs of cold war and Pakistan as a front line state. Nixon, after meeting with General Ayub in 1953 in Pakistan, described him in his memoirs as, “one Pakistani leader who was more anti-communist than anti-Indian”.[195] Ayub credited himself as promoting U.S.- Pakistan relations.
Jalal is of the opinion that the entry of Pakistan into Middle East defense pacts re-established the dwindling influence of the government.To sum up, the state formation in Pakistan, from the outset, was a class formation, which included an alliance between three fundamental classes (metropolitan bourgeoisie, landed elite and an emerging merchant and industrial class). But the reigning class was unable to control the masses and fulfill the emerging needs of the cold war. Long before joining SEATO and CENTO, the reigning class under the leadership of Liaqat went through the test of the Pindi Conspiracy case and later, the consequent banning of the Communist Party and Progressive Association (PWA) and the take over of Progressive Papers Ltd.[196] [197] Toor also connects this struggle with the McCarthy era, liberal anti-communist 64 consensus. 2.5