Apparently, there are two sides to the story of how voting works in Punjab. One is what you will know if you watch the myriad news channels that stream into our living rooms everyday: establishment machinations, biryani handouts and 11th hour ‘deals’. The other side, presented by Shandana Khan Mohmand in her book, Crafty Oligarchs, Savvy Voters: Democracy Under Inequality in Rural Pakistan, is far less sensational, and almost completely sanitised of the above. And yet, equally wholesome, it helps fill some of the missing gaps in our understanding of the politics of rural Punjab.

The author uses a mix of desk research and fieldwork in Sargodha — the heartland of rural Punjab — to study how voters decide which candidate to support in elections. She particularly looks at the impact that kinship patterns have on voting behaviour. While doing so, she finds that rural voters — especially those from more marginalised backgrounds, such as landless peasants — use competition between landlords to their advantage, flipping the notion of the powerless serf and the omnipotent landlord. Shining a light on city dwellers’ biases, she thus suggests that rural inhabitants use votes far more strategically — and intelligently — than most of us could have imagined.

At eight chapters long, Crafty Oligarchs, Savvy Voters is roughly one third literature review of existing research on the topic and two thirds Mohmand’s own study and analysis of the subject. It is bookended on each side by a useful glossary of local Urdu and Punjabi terms, and four annexures detailing her experiment design and Pakistan’s political chronology. It provides a long list of tables and figures, but a few maps of Sargodha, showing the location of the villages studied, would have been really helpful.

The concept of dharras, or vote blocs, is central to Mohmand’s thesis. These are defined as territorially-bounded, village-level informal institutions, which are led by political intermediaries. So, instead of canvassing for votes directly, election candidates will approach vote bloc leaders and attempt to secure their patronage in order to win votes from a village. Bloc leaders could be landlords, artisans and, very rarely, landless peasants.

The writer’s research finds that up to 80 percent of people in the villages she examines join voting blocs, though hardly half of them vote on election day. For vote bloc leaders, it appears that it is far more important to have membership of vote blocs than actual votes on polling day. In other words, it is vital to ensure that your vote doesn’t go to a rival bloc; it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t land in your candidate’s ballot box.

A research-based treatise on how rural Pakistanis in Sargodha district vote turns many assumptions on their heads and suggests further lines of inquiry

Some historical context to Punjab is necessary. Back in the 19th century, the combined pre-Partition state of Punjab was less densely populated than Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, and the British were desperate to settle its vast tracts of wasteland — ergo, one of the largest canal networks of the world was laid down and people were incentivised to move here. Today, our remnant of Punjab is the most densely populated province of Pakistan. But, employing a postcolonial approach, the author argues that the manner of the settlement of western Punjab — which survives as Pakistan’s Punjab — during the British Raj explains some of the disparity and unequal politics which one sees in the province today.

In particular, the distinction between ‘Crown’ villages — where the British retained land ownership rights with the State, and hence the social authority of landowner families remained limited — and ‘Proprietary’ villages — where the British gave land ownership rights to a few individuals — set up more than a hundred years ago, still matters. Crown villages are more egalitarian, it seems, when measured against Proprietary villages, using a variety of indicators.

If the British were sloppy with settlement, the local rulers who followed were no better. No land reforms in the early days of Pakistan, followed by largely insincere and half-hearted attempts to carry out land reforms, meant that the power of the landed elite continued to remain largely unchallenged in Punjab. Indeed, landowners’ influence has evolved, owing to their ability to adapt to changing political conditions. Consequently, we see the situation today, where landlords may have lost enormous land holdings, but still continue to exercise considerable clout through other patronage links to the state.

The role of the media is not mentioned in the book at all, with one exception — in passing — with reference to the 2013 elections. One might have expected more on the media because, sitting in our living rooms in front of the television, we assume politics and voting patterns are heavily influenced by the media. And yet, this book seems to say that the media doesn’t play that big a role in the politics of rural Punjab, driving home the fact that our understanding of rural politics is severely limited.

But while Mohmand narrates a compelling account, her generalisation of rural Punjabi politics with national politics is slightly unsettling. Sahiwal presents a great opportunity for using time-series data as a village that has been studied at length over time. But it isn’t clear if it is a good representation for all of Pakistan — even as the book acknowledges that Sahiwal is unlike other Punjabi villages. The book effortlessly surmises results from Punjab to all of rural Pakistan, which makes onewonder if this is a good idea, given that Mohmand’s research was conducted in 38 villages in one district of central Punjab: Sargodha. Though her research is painstaking and her credentials are impressive, can we really say anything about voting across Punjab, let alone all of rural Pakistan, based on a study of Sargodha?

One also wonders what the role of gender in voting patterns is, since it comes up sparingly in the book. Are women willingly absent from this discourse, or are they being denied agency? Except for one leading politician, and a discussion with women interlocutors about endogamy, few women interlocutors are present. There is some reference to women voters towards the end of the book but, even here, Mohmand says that women in villages vote as per the instructions of the menfolk. Perhaps this part — where the author discusses the political preference of women voters, albeit briefly — is of most interest.

Since the book compiles the author’s research over the years, it oscillates between tenses in a few places. For instance, at one point, it speaks about a politician in the present tense, as if he were alive. Suddenly, he is said to be dead. This is incongruous,

and could have been avoided with sharper editing.

Also, it would have been good if some terms were fleshed out a bit more — such as village proprietary bodies (VPBs), and the distinction between Crown and Proprietary villages, especially since these concepts recur so often. They are explained, but not to the detail to which their mention merits.

Though the political process described in the book is far from democratic ideals, it does seem untainted by conspiracy theories of direct establishment influence, contrary to what one would have thought. In fact, Mohmand doesn’t talk about the establishment’s involvement in voting outcomes, even though she interviews both voters and candidates. For instance, she talks about candidates switching parties because they felt they could get a better deal for voters, but doesn’t dwell on whether the decision was independent, or made under external pressure. Does this mean that the establishment does not influence Punjabi landlords, or pressurise them to switch sides? Given the extent to which some political parties routinely hint at the establishment of having influence around who gets elected, especially in urban areas, this seems strange. Does this also mean there is no establishment pressure on rural voters, either?

The reviewer is a political economist and has taught social sciences at various academic institutions in Karachi

Crafty Oligarchs, Savvy Voters: Democracy Under Inequality in Rural Pakistan
By Shandana Khan Mohmand
Cambridge University Press, UK
ISBN: 978-1108473637
298pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 3rd, 2020