Pakistan has never lacked plans. It has lacked a bargain. Every generation is told that the country has reached its turning point.
In the 1960s, we were the model others would supposedly copy. In the 1980s, strategic geography and remittances promised take-off. After 2001, foreign inflows, finance and telecommunications offered another beginning. Then came CPEC. Today, copper, gold, rare earths and other strategic minerals are advertised as the next great rescue. The names change. The underlying political economy changes much less.
Let us begin with the original case for Pakistan. The fear that Muslims could become permanently vulnerable under unrestrained religious majoritarianism was neither imaginary nor trivial. What is happening to minority citizenship in India today makes it even harder to dismiss that warning. Yet a justification for creating a homeland is not, by itself, a constitution for governing one. The first answered who needed protection. The second had to answer who would rule, by what consent, within which federal arrangement and with what rights!
Pakistan was not entirely unimagined. It was imagined by many but never constituted by a ‘collective’. There were competing ideas about Islam, democracy, citizenship, provincial autonomy, economic organisation and the relationship between the Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority regions of India. Sovereignty arrived before these disagreements became an enforceable social contract – and a sole person’s speeches constitute not a social contract.
Legally, Pakistan began as a parliamentary state with a sovereign Constituent Assembly. It is wrong to say there was no democratic aspiration at all. But the assembly came through indirect, pre-Partition arrangements; the Government of India Act 1935 remained the provisional constitutional shell; and the first Constitution did not arrive until 1956. Pakistan held no direct national election based on universal adult franchise until 1970. When that election produced a clear majority in East Pakistan, power was not transferred to it. The two-wing country broke apart.
No founder’s words, however revered, can substitute for rules owned by the people. Jinnah spoke of assembly sovereignty, equal citizenship and constitutional government. He also combined the offices of governor-general and president of the Constituent Assembly while exercising exceptional authority during an exceptional emergency. The historical question is whether emergency precedents survived the emergency and were inherited by successors who did not possess his legitimacy.
Pakistan’s regional circumstances pushed hard in that direction. Partition uprooted millions, divided Punjab and Bengal, severed commercial and administrative networks and left Pakistan with raw cotton and jute but little processing capacity. The Kashmir war began before the country had framed its constitution. Afghanistan contested the western border. The state consisted of two wings separated by Indian territory, with the demographic majority in Bengal but much of the senior bureaucracy and military power in the western wing.
These threats were real. They help explain centralisation; they do not make unaccountable centralisation inevitable. Objective insecurity created demand for a strong centre. Colonial institutions determined which organisations could supply it. Political choices determined whether that strength would remain answerable to citizens.
This is where rent enters the story. Rent-seeking is not only a bribe passed under a table. It is also the legal profit generated by access to an import licence, a protected tariff, a subsidised loan, a public contract, a tax exemption, a grant of state land, a posting, a development scheme or a mineral concession. Pakistan’s ruling coalition changed over time: from landed notables, pirs, colonial administrators and migrant commercial groups to military leaders, industrial families, political dynasties, contractors, traders, real-estate developers and security-linked businesses. The allocation machinery endured.
There is measurable evidence of the mechanism. A major study of more than 90,000 Pakistani firms found that politically connected firms borrowed 45 per cent more and had 50 per cent higher default rates, with the preferential treatment concentrated in government banks. This is not proof that every business or politician is captured. It is proof that control of public institutions can be converted into private advantage.
Our nostalgia for the ‘Asian tiger’ years needs similar discipline. The 1960s saw real gains in dams, irrigation, industry, planning capacity and agriculture. But the story that South Korea simply copied Pakistan’s plan has no documentary foundation. Pakistan protected firms serving its domestic market; South Korea forced supported firms to compete for world markets. East Asian states also created rents, but assistance was more often conditional on exports, technology and performance. In Pakistan, beneficiaries became harder to discipline than workers and taxpayers.
The repeated pattern was growth without transformation. The 1960s were aided by cold war flows; the 1980s by another Afghan war and Gulf remittances; the early 2000s by post-9/11 assistance, cheap credit and consumption; later periods by borrowing, real estate, and infrastructure. Each episode achieved something. None built enough cumulative export capability, taxation, learning, health or female economic participation to prevent the next balance-of-payments crisis.
The elected period since 2008 deserves a fairer verdict than either celebration or dismissal. It delivered completed assemblies, civilian transfers, the 18th Amendment, the Seventh National Finance Commission Award and the expansion of social protection. These are serious achievements. Yet electoral continuity did not become democratic consolidation. Prime ministers remained insecure, parties remained concentrated around leaders and ‘electables’, and the third tier of government was repeatedly suspended, redesigned or starved – yet the system lacked the ‘guts’ to add Gilgit-Baltistan and Kashmir as formal federated provinces.
Here lies one of our strongest findings: transfer without local power. The Seventh NFC correctly raised the provincial share of the divisible pool to 57.5 per cent, while the 18th Amendment restored overdue provincial authority. But Article 140A did not secure a predictable share for elected local governments. World Bank evidence indicates that local governments’ share of general-government spending fell from about 10 per cent in 2005 to 4.7 per cent in 2024. Provincial Finance Commission awards are stale or irregular in much of the country.
The result is neither genuine federalism nor genuine local democracy. An MPA becomes the broker of roads, drains, jobs, postings and schemes because an empowered mayor or council would compete for resources and political credit. Family name, land, biradari, shrine, business wealth and access to party tickets become valuable forms of political capital. Not every dynasty was rewarded by the Raj: some came from anti-colonial movements; others were manufactured after Partition. The system reproduces families because constituency brokerage is more valuable than policy performance.
Meanwhile, Pakistan’s Human Development Index rose from 0.396 in 1990 to 0.544 in 2023. That is progress. But Bangladesh moved from almost exactly the same starting point, 0.397, to 0.685. A Pakistani child today can expect to realise only about 41 per cent of potential productivity under complete education and health. The 2023 census counted about 241.5 million people after growth accelerated to 2.55 per cent a year between censuses – nearly two-thirds were 26 years of age or younger.
This is not simply a youth bulge; it is an institutional lag. Authority, assets and party gates remain concentrated in systems designed by and for a much smaller, hierarchical and analogue society. Age alone explains little; class, gender and geography may explain more. But young Pakistanis are connected, politically active and far less willing to accept inherited narratives without material citizenship.
Minerals are now the next test. Reko Diq is a genuine copper-gold project; rare-earth occurrences and promotional estimates are not yet equivalent to verified, bankable reserves. The sequence matters: occurrence, exploration, measured resource, recoverable reserve, financed mine, processing chain and finally shared development. If contracts, owners, environmental liabilities and provincial-community shares remain opaque, we will allocate the rent before establishing the right.
Pakistan’s history is not a tale of having no assets. It is a tale of repeatedly distributing new value before building the institutions that could convert it into citizenship. Before we dig deeper into the earth, we should ask a simpler question: who owns the state above it?
The writer is a development professional working on intersectional issues in society, economics and climate. A former World Bank staff member, he is currently running his own social impact advisory, Reenergia.
Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed in this piece are the writer’s own and don’t necessarily reflect Geo.tv’s editorial policy.
Originally published in The News
