¹ Election Manifesto of Pakistan People's Party, 1970 (Lahore, 1970), pp. 28–29.Google Scholar

² See, for example, Coulborn, Rushton, ed., Feudalism in History (Hamden, Conn: Archon, 1965)Google Scholar. Daniel Thorner, a premier scholar and observer of rural India, rejected the idea of Indian feudalism in his case study of the Rajputs, (pp. 133–150).Google Scholar

³ Strayer, Joseph R. and Rushton Coulborn, “The Idea of Feudalism”, in Coulborn, op. cit. Perry Anderson, in Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: New Left Books, 1974), Part II, provides a breathtaking overview of variations over time and geography.Google Scholar

⁴ From Capital, Vol. IIIGoogle Scholar. For reference and discussion, see Hobsbawm's, Eric J. excellent Introduction to Marx, Karl, Precapitalist Economic Formations, Jack Cohen trans. (New York: International Publishers, 1965) pp. 42 ff. Marx's comments on feudalism are spread throughout his works; nowhere is there a rigorous systematic consideration of the subject. As Hobsbawm notes, Marx was more concerned with what feudalism spawned than how it worked.Google Scholar

⁵ Marx, Karl, Theories of Surplus Value, in McLellan, David, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1977), pp. 393, 397, et passim.Google Scholar

⁶ For a discussion, see Banaji, Jairus, “The Peasantry in the Feudal Mode of Production: Towards an Economic Model,” Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 3, No. 3 (04 1976) pp. 299–320CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an excellent collection of contending positions within the Marxian tradition, see Hilton, Rodney, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1976).Google Scholar

⁷ For example, Strayer, and Coulborn, , op. cit., and other authors in the volume Feudalism in HistoryGoogle Scholar. A similar perspective is that of the institutional economist Commons, John R., Legal Foundations of Capitalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), especially Ch. VI, “The Rent Bargain—Feudalism and Use-Value”.Google Scholar

⁸ Anderson, Perry, Passages from Antiquity lo Feudalism; also. Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974).Google Scholar

⁹ Powell, B. H. Baden, The Land Systems of British India (London: Oxford University Press, 1892), Vol. III, p. 332.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Neale, Walter C. “Land is to Rule,” in Frykenberg, Robert E., ed., Land Control and Social Structure in Indian History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), pp. 3–16.Google Scholar

¹¹ Powell, Baden, The Land Systems of British India, Vol. III, p. 327.Google Scholar

¹² Ibid.

¹³ For an official treatment of how the writ of the central government did not apply in Baluchistan, as late as 1974, see Government of Pakistan “White Paper on Baluchistan,” printed in Dawn (Karachi), 10 20, 1974Google Scholar. See also, Ahmad, Aijaz “Baluchistan's Agrarian Question,” Pakistan Forum, May-June 1973, 19–29Google Scholar. Frederik Barth compiled and analyzed the field notes of Pehrson, Robert N. to publish The Social Organization of the Marri Baluch (Chicago: Aldine, 1966)Google Scholar. Barth's own classic is Political Leadership Among Swat Pathans (London: University of London Athlone Press, 1959)Google Scholar. Barth explicitly terms the society of Swat Pathans feudal. The fusion of polity and economy is suggested even in the term “Khan,” which means both land lord and chiefin the region. For amorerecent treatment of these areas. see Ainslee Embree, ed., Pakistan's Western Borderlands (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1977).Google Scholar

¹⁴ What Marx termed “personal unfreedom” in the conditions of labor is part of a continuum, not an absolute. For an excellent treatment of power handles and control in the contemporary Punjab, see Alavi, Hamza“The Politics of Dependence: A Village in West Punjab,” South Asian Review Vol. 4, No. 2 (01 1971) 111–25.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Government of Pakistan, Planning Board, First Five Year Plan (Karachi: 1956) p. 129.Google Scholar

¹⁶ See, for example, Government of West Pakistan, Report of the Land Reforms Commission for West Pakistan (Lahore: 01, 1959) p. 5 et passim.Google Scholar

¹⁷ For a sensitive and informed account of the differences between good landlords and bad landlords by an influential colonial practitioner, see SirDarling, Malcolm, The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt (London: Oxford University Press, 1932) especially pp. 114–15, 125–28, et passim.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Report of the West Pakistan Land Reforms Commission, p. 30Google Scholar. That the ceiling would seem rather high from the viewpoint of social justice certainly seems reasonable. About three-fourths of Pakistan's farm families owned less than fifteen acres at the time of the 1959 reforms, and even this estimate probably understates the degree of inequality in land ownership. Unfortunately, there are no precise data. The 1960 Census of Agriculture gives no data at all on ownership patterns, only on operated size of holding. The West Pakistan Land Reforms Commission compiled existing data on owners, but did not collect data on landless tenants or laborers. Calculations from their Report (1959), Appendix I, show that 64.4 percent of all owners owned less than 5 acres, 93.1 percent owned less than 25 acres. Altogether, the owners of fewer than 5 acres owned about as much land as those who held more than 500 acres, though the latter constituted only 0.12 percent of the total number of owners.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Report of the West Pakistan Land Reforms Commission, p. 30. The point was also emphasized to me by Mr. I. U. Khan, a member of both Ayub Khan's Commission and Bhutto's counterpart. Interview: Rawalpindi, March, 1974.Google Scholar

²⁰ Address of May 23, 1972. Government of Pakistan, President of Pakistan Zulfikar ali Bhutto Speeches and Statements (Department of Films and Publications, Karachi: 1972) Vol. II, p. 157.Google Scholar

²¹ The generous subsidies to fixed and working capital of the 1960s deteriorated under the economic pressures of the 1970s. For detailed treatment, see sources in Note 47, below.

²² Interview for Stern, June 15, 1972 in President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Speeches and Statements, Vol. II, p. 193. Bhutto's statement was in response to the interviewer's question about the possibility of production declines resulting from the land reforms.Google Scholar

²³ See, for example “ Address to the Nation,” March 1, 1972, reprinted by Government of Pakistan, Department of Films and Publications.

²⁴ The oppression of the sharecropper was one of the themes in the Address to the Nation which introduced the 1972 reforms. At public meetings Bhutto often reiterated his pledge that the age-old oppression of the haris had come to an end with his reforms. The sanad, or deed, given tenants who received land, read in part: “You stand free today.” This was the theme of a speech at Thatta (Sind), January 2, 1975 (reported in Dawn January 3, 1975): haris who receive land would not only benefit economically but would feel strong enough to fight tyranny and injustice.Google Scholar

²⁵ For an explication of the dynamics in rural Pakistan, see Alavi, Hamza, op. cit.Google Scholar, and Ahmad, Saghir, Class and Power In a Punjabi Village (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977) especially pp. 91–126.Google Scholar

²⁶ Such a reform has been legislated, and largely implemented, in the Indian State of Kerala. See Hart, Henry C. and Herring, Ronald J. “Political Conditions of Land Reform: Kerala and Maharashtra,” in Frykenberg, Robert E., ed., Land Tenure and Peasant in South Asia (Delhi: Longmans, 1977).Google Scholar

²⁷ For a discussion of how great landlord families entered Bhutto's PPP, based on extensive field work, see Jones, Philip E. “Changing Party Structures in Pakistan: From Muslim League to People's Party,” Quaid-E-Azam Conference on Contemporary Pakistan, Columbia University, New York. 03 9–11, 1978.Google Scholar

²⁸ Interview for Stern, June 15, 1972, cited above.Google Scholar

²⁹ Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali“Address to the Nation,” 03 1, 1972, reprinted by Government of Pakistan, Department of Films and Publications (Karachi: 1972), p. 3. This is not an inaccurate analysis of the reforms.Google Scholar

³⁰ Ibid., p. 1.

³² Ibid., p. 2

³² A detailed account and analysis of the provisions is available, and will not be reproduced in the text. Herring, Ronald J. and Chaudhry, M. Ghaffar“The 1972 Land Reforms in Pakistan and their Economic Implications: A Preliminary Analysis.” The Pakistan Development Review, 13, No. 3 (Autumn 1974) pp. 245–79. Also available as Reprint No. 126, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Land Tenure Center.Google Scholar

³³ Census of Agriculture data, prepared by the Agricultural Census Organization (Lahore) for UNFAO but unpublished. Islamabad, mimeo, February, 1975. For an analysis of the de facto and operative ceilings, see Herring, and Chaudhry, , op. cit.Google Scholar

³⁴ Mr. Bhutto was quite candid about the political impossibility of a more radical reform. He sometimes explained the 1972 reforms as the opening wedge of more radical reforms, though he also occasionally promised that the 1972 ceiling was final and would not be scaled down. On the politics of agrarian reform in Pakistan, see Esposito, Bruce J. “The Politics of Agrarian Reform in Pakistan,” Pakistan Economist, August 25, 1973, 14–19Google Scholar. Sanderatne, Nimal“Landowners and Land Reform in Pakistan,” South Asian Review, Vol. 7, No. 2 (01 1974), 123 ff. The work of Philip Jones, cited earlier, is also helpful in understanding the political constraints on land reform.Google Scholar

³⁵ “Address to the Nation,” March 1, 1972, p. 2.

³⁶ See Herring, and Chaudhry, “The 1972 Land Reforms …” loc. cit., p. 250, for discussion and calculations.Google Scholar

³⁷ Government of Pakistan, West Pakistan Land Commission, Implementation of Land Reforms Scheme in West Pakistan. Appraisal Paper for World Land Reforms Conference, Rome, 1966(Lahore:1966), Appendix J.Google Scholar

³⁸ “Address to the Nation,” March 1, 1972, p. 2.

³⁹ Ibid., p. 4; ct Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali “Message to Farmers,” 05 27, 1972, in President of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: Speeches and Statements (Karachi: 1972), p. 173.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ For documentation, and treatment of the continuity in policy, see Herring, Ronald J. “Good Landlords, Bad Landlords, Parasites and Entrepreneurs: The Policy Logic of Land Reforms in Pakistan” in Ahmed, Manzooruddin, ed., Contemporary Pakistan: Politics, Economy and Society (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, forthcoming.)Google Scholar

⁴¹ Lenin, V. I., Collected Works (Moscow: International Publishers, 1962), Vol, 13, pp. 238–242.Google Scholar

⁴² Moore, Barrington Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966) pp. 420, 424, 460–61.Google Scholar

⁴³ Neoclassical economists formalized objections to share tenancy on efficiency grounds which date back to Adam Smith. For treatments with special references to South Asia, see Bardhan, P. K. and Srinivasan, T. N.“Cropsharing Tenancy in Agriculture: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis,” American Economic Review, Vol. 61, No. 1 (03 1971), 48–64Google Scholar; Herring, Ronald J.. “Share Tenancy and Economic Efficiency: The South Asian Case,” Peasant Studies Vol. 7, No. 4 (Fall 1978), 225–49.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ In theory, the tenancy acts of the early 1950s are in force, but these acts have never been seriously enforced, and, more importantly, are construed to apply only to ground rent. Installation of a tubewell, for example, will allow the landowner to increase his share of the gross output by treating the increment as return to supply of working capital (water) rather than an increase in “rent.” The same has been done with tractors. Thus even if limits on ground rent could be enforced (and there is no mechanism to do so), the modernization of agriculture renders limitation of ground rent per se increasingly irrelevant.

⁴⁵ Assuming the output is shared 50–50, as are the input costs. This removes all neoclassical constraints on share tenant efficiency except the return to labor, which remains less than it would be under ownership conditions. However, with increases in labor productivity through fixed and working capital investment, and the absence of real off-farm labor opportunites, this theoretical constraint, too, may prove irrelevant on the ground. The tenancy reform section of Martial Law Regulation 115 contains no provision for enforcing rent control, allowing landowners to invest and raise de facto rents accordingly. There are instances in which landlords in Pakistan have installed tubewells and purchased tractors and increased their share of the gross produce to two-thirds or three-fourths. At this end of the rent spectrum, the sharecropper is as much a laborer on a piece-rate basis as a tenant, as all capital is provided by the owner. The prohibition of eviction of tenants is of course meaningless without rent control, for rents can be raised to ruinous levels should the owner wish to be rid of the tenant.

⁴⁶ Implementation of Land Reforms Scheme … p. 25.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ For a thorough treatment, see Kaneda, Hiromitsu “Economic Implications of the ‘Green Revolution’ and the Strategy of Agricultural Development in West Pakistan,” Pakistan Institute of Development Economics, Report No. 78 (Karachi: 1969)Google Scholar; also Gotsch, Carl “The Distributive Impact of Agricultural Growth: Low Income Farmers and the ‘Systemrsquo”, presented to the Seminar on Small Farmer Development Strategies, Columbus, Ohio, 09 13–15, 1971Google Scholar, mimeo, p. 57 ff; Griffin, Keith, The Political Economy of Agrarian Change (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 211 ff.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Government of Pakistan, Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Report of the Committee on Farm Mechanization, unpublished but circulated mimeographed report (Islamabad: 1970), p. 60.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Gotsch, Carl, in “The Distributive Impact of Agricultural Growth,” p. 50Google Scholar, concurs in this assessment, relying heavily on Javed Burki's work. Gotsch also cites examples of large owners selling land to tenants to generate capital to mechanize (p. 60). See also Shahid Javed Burki “The Development of Pakistan's Agriculture,” in Stevens, Robert, Alavi, Hamza, and Bertocci, Peter, eds.. Rural Development in Bangladesh and Pakistan (Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press, 1976), pp. 290–316.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ My calculations from Report of the Committee on Farm Mechanization, p. 60.Google Scholar

⁵¹ Data which would allow proper analysis do not exist. Land reforms have distorted the land records, and official data, such as the 1960 Census of Agriculture, do not apply to ownership units. For a more comprehensive treatment of these issues, see Herring, Ronald J. and Kennedy, Charles R. Jr,. “The Political Economy of Farm Mechanization Policy: Tractors in Pakistan,” in Hopkins, Raymond, Puchala, Donald, and Talbot, Ross, eds., Food, Politics, and Agricultural Development (Boulder: Westview, 1979).Google Scholar

⁵² “Address to the Nation,” March 1, 1972, p. 5.

⁵³ Herring, and Chaudhry, , op. cit., pp. 250–55Google Scholar. Also see Ahmed, Feroze“Supplementary Remarks,” Pakistan Forum, Vol. III, No. 3 (12 1972), p. 10 ff., for an excellent discussion.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Government of Pakistan, Agricultural Census Organization, Pakistan Census of Agriculture 1972 (Lahore: no date), Vol. I, Table 1.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Large owners do report a larger percentage of “unculturable waste” (ibid., Table 14), but the definition of “culturable” is problematic and the difference is not sufficient to explain all of the variation in intensity of land use.

⁵⁶ Ibid., Tables 5 and 6.

⁵⁷ Ibid., Table 7. Regional disaggregation does not reverse the argument, though large owners in the NWFP are much more likely, in the Punjab much less likely, to let out land to sharecroppers, compared to the national mean.

⁵⁸ Census of Agriculture 1972, Vol. I.Google Scholar, Tables 60, 61. There may be reporting biases, and problems of the exact meaning of a family “worker,” but one would expect that truly “feudal” families would not exaggerate the extent of family participation in agricultural work. The presence of so many family farm workers on the large estates suggests more the rich peasant or capitalist farmer organization of production than feudalism. See Tse-tung, Mao “How to Differentiate Classes in the Rural Areas,” Selected Works (Peking: 1967), Vol. I, pp. 137–41.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Disaggregation by province does not refute this argument. Indeed, in Sind, a stronghold of feudalism in popular perception and political rhetoric, the relationship holds even more strongly. The percentage of farms using fertilizer was highest on large estates in Sind, much higher than the national average. The same is true of pesticides. (Census Tables 53, 54). The NWFP is the exact opposite; very few large estates use fertilizer. The Punjab shows little variability by size of holding as does Baluchistan, where modern techniques are extremely rare.

⁶⁰ Data from 1972 Census, Vol. I, Table 1. “Subsistence holding” is an official designation and is agroeconomically meaningless. The percentage of landless laborers is from data of uncertain reliability collected by the Agricultural Census Organization for the Rural Credit Survey, 1972, as yet unpublished. That figure seems reasonable in light of population census data.

⁶¹ For a discussion, and calculations, see Herring, and Chaudhry, , op. cit., pp. 264, 274. The ceiling on unirrigated land, de jure, was 300 acres.Google Scholar

⁶² Rashid, Shaikh Muhammad“Land Reforms—The Dawn of a New Era,” unpublished mimeographed paper (Rawalpindi: 1977). Similar implications can be drawn from the Minister's public and private statements regarding implementation.Google Scholar

⁶³ I confirmed a number of instances myself through investigations in Pakistan. For a presentation of important examples, see Government of Pakistan, While Paper on the Performance of the Bhutto Regime, Vol. IV (Islamabad: 1979) pp. 13–25.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Rashid, Shaikh “Land Reforms-The Dawn of a New Era,” p. 3. This is precisely the same terminology used by President Bhutto in announcing the reforms in 1972.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ Government of Pakistan, Martial Law Regulation 115, Land Reforms Regulation 1972 (Gazette of Pakistan, Extraordinary. 11th March, 1972, pp. 291–300) Part III, Section 7.Google Scholar

⁶⁶ My understanding of the implementation process is based on interviews with officials of the Revenue Department and members of the Federal Land Commission. See, also, an informative paper “Land Reforms (Pakistan): Review of Implementation,” by Qayyum, Abdul, presented to the International Seminar on Agrarian Reform, Institutional Innovation, and Rural Development, Madison, Wisconsin, July 14–22, 1977.Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Shaikh Rashid “Land Reforms–Dawn of a New Era,” op cit.

⁶⁸ In addition to evidence of such fraud cited in Note 63, during the Bhutto reforms, there is solid evidence of the same phenomenon in the Ayub reforms. In the village studied by Saghir Ahmad for his doctoral dissertation, of 41 recorded recipients of land under the reform provisions, only 2 were actually owners of the land. Ahmad found that local landlords had threatened or bullied other tenants into not accepting land or relinquishing it once accepted. Landlords succesfully used control of irrigation water, other tenants and various pressures to vitiate the reform. Moreover, the land which was distributed was allocated in such small parcels (well under the official guidelines) that recipents were still dependent on landlords for employment. Ahmad, Saghir, Class and Power in a Punjabi Village, pp. 37–38.Google Scholar

⁶⁹ This point is reinforced by considering the province-wide distribution of land confiscated by the Federal Land Commission in exercise of its suo moto revisional powers (the authority to reopen and review cases previously decided). Of the 567,835 acres of fraudulently concealed land discovered and seized, 211,190 acres were in Baluchistan (37 percent of the total). Another 23 percent of the land so confiscated was in the NWFP, whereas the Punjab, with most of the farm area, contributed only 7 percent.

⁷⁰ All of the data in this section were provided by the Federal Land Commission.

⁷¹ For a discussion of theory, and evidence, see Herring, Ronald J.“Redistributive Agrarian Policy: Land and Credit in South Asia,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin Madison (Land Tenure Center: 1976) Chapters 2 and 3.Google Scholar

⁷² Census of Agriculture, Vol I, Table 8.Google Scholar

⁷³ See Barth, The Swat Pathans, Chapter 5.

⁷⁴ Herring, and Chaudhry, “The 1972 Land Reforms …,” p. 271Google Scholar, present the argument and the sources. See also, Government of the Punjab, The Report of the Land Revenue Committee (Lahore: 1938), p. 11 ff., for a vivid account.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali “Address to the Nation,” March 1, 1972, p. 6.Google Scholar

⁷⁶ In fairness to the Revenue Department, it must be noted that political interests representing landlords controlled the Pakistani state in the 1950s and were hostile to what Ayub Khan termed “even the very mild reforms” of 1952, and were able to scuttle reform initiatives. See Khan, M. Ayub, Friends Not Masters (Lahore: Oxford University Press, 1967) p. 87.Google ScholarPubMed

⁷⁷ For a treatment of the fatal flaws in the limited tenure reform model of land reform, and its paradigmatic structure, see Herring, Ronald J.“The Forgotten 1953 Paddv Lands Act in Ceylon: Ideology, Capacity and Response,” Modern Ceylon Studies Vol. 3, No. 2 (07, 1972).Google Scholar

⁷⁸ While Paper on the Performance of the Bhutto Regime, Vol. IV, p. 24.Google Scholar

⁷⁹ Perhaps the best report is Mclnerney, John P. and Donaldson, Graham F., The Consequences of Farm Tractors in Pakistan (IBRD, Washington, D.C.: 1973). An unpublished study by the Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan also documents tenant evictions during mechanization.Google Scholar

⁸⁰ Hamza Alavi, in “The Politics of Dependence” gives an example of effective resistance organized by Rajput farmers in the area he studied, though local conditions were rather special.

⁸¹ See, for example, Bhutto's speech in Thatta (Sind), reported in Dawn (Karachi), 01 3. 1975Google ScholarPubMed. Also, his reply to a delegation of landlords who complained of abusive peasants and underground movements in Pakistan Times (Rawalpindi), 01 26, 1974Google ScholarPubMed. Observers in the field corroborate these impressionistic findings. See, also “Sarhad Peasants Under Attack,” Pakistan Forum, Vol. 2, No. 9–10, (06–07 1972), 19 ff.Google Scholar

⁸² Addressing a gathering at Nawabshah (Sind), Bhutto admonished peasants that (in the press reporter's words) “if instead of working harder they just kept running after the Prime Minister and other Government leaders with complaints of ejectments and non-availability of seed, the peasants would achieve nothing.” Pakistan Times (Rawalpindi), 01 18, 1974Google ScholarPubMed. More recently, the Government expressed concern about the failure of landlord–tenant relations to “stabilize” after the promulgation of the land reform. See, Government of Pakistan (draft), Report to the Agricultural Enquiry Committee, typescript (Islamabad: 06 1975).Google Scholar

⁸³ Data from the Federal Land Commission. Reinstatement of evicted tenants, even after courts ordered restoration, proved a major obstacle to implementation of the tenancy reforms in Ceylon's 1958 Paddy Lands Act. In the Ceylon case, inability to restore tenants quickly and the uncertainty surrounding the restoration proceedings prevented many, probably a majority, of the evicted tenants from going to court and discouraged others from demanding newly-legislated legal rights.

⁸⁴ Government of Pakistan, Ordinance No. II of 1977. The full text was printed in the Pakistan Times (Rawalpindi), 01 6, 1977. An estimate of the ratio of compensation to market value by a senior revenue officer is one-third. Market prices are so inconsistently related to Produce Index Units that any estimate is only approximate.Google ScholarPubMed

⁸⁵ President of Pakistan Zulfikar AH Bhutto Speeches and Statements, Vol. II, p. 157.Google Scholar

⁸⁶ A full text of the speech was printed in the Pakistan Times (Rawalpindi) 01 6, 1977.Google Scholar

⁸⁷ I have used land revenue data on holdings wherever possible in this section because it was collected in 1976, four years after the census, and presumably reflects operation of the 1972 reforms. However, the Revenue Department data for Baluchistan are internally inconsistent and obviously inaccurate. The census data (1972) for Baluchistan suffer from the omission of the Mari Bugti area, but addition of that area would make the case in the text fortiori. Moreover, it is reasonable to use the data to judge the politics of reform because they are the information, whether accurate or inaccurate, that the Prime Minister had before him in making policy decisions and were collected for just that purpose.

⁸⁸ In signing the national charter, Bhutto said “All power to the peasants. May Allah bless them and their children.” For the official treatment of the charter, see Pakistan Affairs (Washington, D.C.) 01 1, 1977.Google ScholarPubMed

⁸⁹ There are regional difference in the officially-designated “subsistence holding”: 12.5 acres in the NWFP and Punjab, 16 acres in Sind and 32 acres in Baluchistan.

⁹⁰ Government of Pakistan, Ordinance No. Ill of 1977. For the Finance Minister's explanation, see Pakistan Affairs (Washington, D.C.) 02 1, 1978.Google ScholarPubMed

⁹¹ The details are specified in Sections 1 and 2 of the Ordinance. The accounting procedure proposed would estimate income as a multiple of the Produce Index Unit rating of the land. The setting of that ratio is the source of the differential impact of the tax, since productivity even on comparable land varies significantly. The critical question is whether the mechanism would be set to allow inefficient producers to continue with a moderate tax rate (leaving efficient producers with lightly taxed profits) or to tax the profits of efficient producers at a level comparable to the rate on urban income, imposing a very heavy tax burden on inefficient producers.

⁹² Pakistan Affairs (Washington, D.C.) 02 1, 1977. Statement by Federal Finance Minister Rana Mohammed Hanif.Google Scholar

⁹³ I have reluctantly excluded from this section any discussion of Bhutto's abolition of “feudal dues” (usher, etc.) for lack of reliable information.

⁹⁴ Lenin, V. I., Theory of the Agrarian Question in Selected Works, Vol. xii (New York: International Publishers, 1938) p. 331.Google Scholar

⁹⁵ For a theoretical treatment of the patron-client model of politics in agrarian societies, see Scott, James C.“The Erosion of Patron-Client Bonds and Social Change in Rural Southeast Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1 (11 1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The use of Government programs, and resources, to build client networks to support dominant political parties is well developed in India, particularly through cooperatives. See, for example, Carras, Mary C., The Dynamics of Indian Political Factions: A Study of District Councils in the State of Maharashtra (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁹⁶ For powerful theoretical insights on the uses of symbols in politics and public policy, see Edelman, Murray, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962)Google Scholar and Political Language: Words that Succeed and Policies that Fail (New York: Academic Press, 1977).Google Scholar

⁹⁷ Press conference explaining the 1972 reforms, March 2, 1972. Reprinted by Government of Pakistan, Department of Films and Publications (Karachi: 1972).Google Scholar

⁹⁸ The same evocation begins the National Charter for Peasants and the 1977 ceiling ordinance.

⁹⁹ The extent of political uses of land reform is difficult to ascertain without detailed village-level studies, but the belief that land reform is used to reward friends and punish enemies is widely shared. For example, one provincial opposition leader argued against the centralization of the land reform apparatus in Rawalpindi, claiming that the “Government wanted to snatch away land given certain people by the Provincial Land Commission and offer it to persons favorable disposed towards it politically,” Business Recorder (Karachi), 04 12, 1974. The belief alone, even if ill-founded, would serve some important political functions. As explained in Note 63, there is good evidence that these perceptions were well-founded.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁰ Announcement of the Chairman, Federal Land Commission (Shaikh Rashid), reported in Dawn and Pakistan Times, Apr. 30, 1974.Google Scholar

¹⁰¹ Government of Pakistan, Martial Law Regulation No. 115, in Gazette of Pakistan, Extraordinary, Mar. 11, 1972, pp. 291 fit, Part IX, 31.Google Scholar

¹⁰² An article in the Pakistan Times (Rawalpindi) 01 1, 1978 announced the Government's suspicions; the White Paper, as cited previously, documents cases.Google ScholarPubMed

¹⁰³ Other political parties had promised even lower ceilings, down to 25 acres, preceding the 1977 elections.

¹⁰⁴ Karl Marx, from Theories of Surplus Value, cited in Lenin, , Theory of the Agrarian Question, p. 331.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁵ present of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: Speeches and Statements, p. 219.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁶ In this, I concur with Hamza Alavi, but question his strict dichotomy between landowners and bourgeoisie and would stress the integration of landowning families into urban and rural nonagricultural enterprises. See Alavi's insightful “The State in Postcolonial Societies,” in Gough, Kathleen and Sharma, Hari P., eds., Imperialism and Revolution in South Asia (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973) pp. 145–73.Google Scholar