INTRODUCTION

In his important essay ‘Rethinking Pakistan's Political Economy’, S. Akbar Zaidi has drawn our attention to the crucial task of updating the work of one of Pakistan's most seminal social scientists, Hamza Alavi (Zaidi 2014). Zaidi rightly points out that despite Alavi's path-breaking contributions to the study of Pakistan, his categorisation of the Pakistani state as a ‘military–bureaucratic’ oligarchy no longer holds as an accurate depiction of the state's evolution and needs to be reformulated. Not only have new power centres emerged from within state institutions, such as the judiciary, but formerly powerful ones no longer enjoy the kind of influence and prestige that they once possessed, most notably the bureaucracy and the landed elites. As a result, Alavi's thesis requires a major rethinking which takes into account these momentous changes in state institutions.

Two other observations by Zaidi are noteworthy: first, there has been a fracturing of state power in recent decades alongside the increasing informalisation of the economy, with many ‘competing contenders for power, all located at different places in the class and state hierarchy’ (Zaidi 2014:51); second, the bulk of studies analysing changes in the character of the Pakistani state tend to eschew class in favour of purely institutional explanations such as the competition (and co-operation) between the military, judiciary and the private media. Zaidi concludes by arguing that although the ruling bloc by and large works in the interest of reproducing capital, in the absence of rigorous research there is less certainty as to the component parts of this bloc.

This chapter aims to contribute towards a clearer understanding of Pakistan's changing class relations and their implications for state policy and politics, by observing more closely what Alavi identified as the ‘most powerful indigenous class in Pakistan’: the landlords and how their internal composition and power has changed over time and what it can tell us about Pakistan's changing political economy (Alavi 1998:27). Drawing on secondary literature and the author's own ten months of fieldwork in two districts of Pakistani Punjab during 2013, this chapter argues that greater attention needs to be paid to the internal segmentation within the landlord class.