SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

State power, military rule, and land reforms in West Pakistan, 1958-1969

What part have land redistribution programmes played in the politics of Pakistan, a country better known for ethno-religious tensions and turbulent foreign relations? This paper examines land reforms initiated by Field Marshall Ayub Khan, Pakistan's first military ruler, in 1958 in order to show how questions of state authority and legitimacy have arisen from the tensions between big rural landlords and the central government. Coming to authoritarian power through a coup that promised to sweep out the corruption of the landed political classes after a decade of troubled democracy, Ayub used land reforms to demonstrate its commitment to improving the lot of ordinary Pakistanis. This paper argues that the reforms were an important part of the administration’s bid for both political legitimacy and practical power in West Pakistan; in doing so, the administration drew on long traditions of state authority and rhetoric in South Asia, and simultaneously on changing ideas about the meaning of good governance. Historians of Pakistan have tended to view Ayub's land reforms as impotent, but this paper contends that in fact the reforms in fact represented a delicate balancing act, through which the administration consolidated its support amongst rural and small-town middles classes while allowing big landlords to retain enough wealth and power to keep their discontentment below the level of active revolt. By focussing on land ownership and redistribution - from the point of view of the administration and of landlords in Sind, a region famed for its powerful rural magnates - this paper will shed light on the wider processes by which political power was made and broken in mid-twentieth century Pakistan.