MUCH political practice and intellectual commentary currently revolves around the terms ‘corruption’ and ‘development’ (in principle I should also mention ‘security’ but this idea has been dominant for so long that I need not cover it again here). To put it simply, we are constantly lamenting ‘corruption’ and just as constantly seeking out avenues for and then celebrating ‘development’.

On the surface, corruption and development are diametrically opposed. Development is theoretically compromised by corrupt practices. But I would argue that the link between the two is to be thought of counter-intuitively, ie both corruption and development go hand in hand.

When we think of development — as is the case with the current buzzword: CPEC — our imagination tends to be limited to mass physical infrastructure like roads and power plants. Quite aside from who benefits from these projects once completed, the manner in which money is made through them throws up serious questions about what ‘development’ actually means.

What does development actually mean?

Departing from the norm, Khurram Hussain’s genuine investigative journalism has clarified that CPEC has numerous hidden costs that are being ignored. Expenditures on the ‘security force’ that has been commissioned to protect Chinese investments is likely to be in excess of Rs100 billion per year. More generally, CPEC is not a freebie; our annual debt payments to China once the project is fully operational are projected to be more than $3.5bn.

So CPEC is generating economic activity, just like ‘development’ always has. The question, as ever, is: for whom? It can be argued that there was more critical debate about development through the 20th century — in the current conjuncture policymakers and intellectuals consider development to be little more than investment of capital by states and corporations, which even the most conservative neo-classical economist will verify is an entirely rational exercise with the explicit purpose of generating profit.

It is thus that projects such as CPEC are accompanied by all manner of incentives to those investing money — it is almost taken as a truism that societies seeking development must provide potential investors extremely favourable terms lest foreign money goes elsewhere. In short, while development interventions may address some needs of ordinary Pakistanis, they are primarily profit-making exercises for investors, contractors, consultants and so on.

How is all of this linked to ‘corruption’? In the dominant discourse on corruption we all feel moral outrage at the loot and plunder of political elites. It is taken for granted that the elite’s money-making antics are patently illegal and therefore unacceptable. Yet this outrage does not correspond to our everyday political realities inasmuch as these same elites keep coming to power through the ballot box — as compromised as the electoral process is — precisely because ordinary voters cough up rishwat so as to secure the sifarish of ‘electables’ to get jobs, resolve disputes and secure ‘development’ projects at the local level.

There is a global consensus vis-à-vis ‘corruption’ amongst elites of all countries. Indeed, the Panama leaks — and WikiLeaks before it — confirms that rich people from all over the world save and invest money in startlingly similar ways. What the Pakistani media and parties like the PTI depict as ‘revelations’ are anything but; is it not common knowledge, for instance, that Swiss banks have for decades been faithfully providing global elites safe havens for illicitly accumulated money?

In the final analysis, (capitalist) development is as much about making money as anything else. And there’s a fine line bet­ween legal and illegal methods of making money. The global financial crisis of 2007-8 made clear that the state is always ready to bail out profiteers, in part by blurring the line between legality and illegality. The parallel in Pakistan is between the more overt corruption of the political elite and the more institutionalised rent-seeking practices of the security establishment.

Even if we ignore the blank cheque given to the latter in our corruption discourse, it is hard to understand how we can distinguish between that segment of the Pakistani political elite that is out of government at any point and decries ‘corruption’, from that which is in government and apparently responsible for every corrupt practice brought into the spotlight?

For lack of a better term, I would argue that ‘corrupt development’ is a fact of contemporary social life. The poor and voiceless tend not to make such a fuss about it, in contrast to the media-consuming urban middle-class. If we really want something to change we ought to conceive of an anti-establishment politics that gives the poor an alternative to both corruption and development.

For starters, we ought to be brave enough to critique the dominant discourse, which, needless to say, is exactly what the (security and political) establishment want us not to do.

The writer teaches at QAU, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, December 30th, 2016