Counting the people

Karachi is in Madras and Lahore is in Bengal; when will they be in Pakistan, and Pakistan in Southasia? During the late 1840s, the troops of the Bengal Presidency invaded the Sikh empire and conquered Punjab. Earlier in the same decade, a British expeditionary force had fought the Talpur Mirs at Miani, and annexed Sindh to the Bombay Presidency. But colonisation was not merely a matter of military defeat. Punjab and Sindh had seen many defeats and victories in their times. It was the establishment of a political system around the 'settlement' of land revenues that marked the real shift. By then, the landlord-based Permanent Settlement in Bengal was already a half-century old, and in disrepute among British colonial officers. The Madras Presidency experimented with the cultivator-based ryotwari system, which was eventually adopted by Bombay and implemented in Sindh. The Bengal Presidency drew a different lesson from the failure of the Permanent Settlement, and in its later conquests settled land revenues with 'village estates', on a mahalwari basis. Hence, Karachi is in Madras and Lahore is in Bengal.

This is not just a 'checking whether you're awake' historical vignette. Although much has changed, much has also stayed the same. The village records of the late Bengal Presidency today remain the administrative base of Punjab, the NWFP (or Pashtunkhwa) and Balochistan. The NWFP was, after all, carved out of Punjab in 1901, and Balochistan was infiltrated and annexed by colonial officials from Punjab province. The basic administrative unit in these provinces is the mouza, and the lowest government functionary is the patwari. Sindh has the nomenclature of Bombay, with its deh and tappaydar respectively. In essence, Sindh and Punjab (and Balochistan and Pashtunkhwa) are still in presidencies of the British Indian empire.

This retention of colonial structures has enormous ramifications. The Punjab village might have been a useful unit of land-revenue administration during that time. But it was also the repository of caste-based social hierarchy, which the British formalised. Revenue administration continues to classify people into 'cultivator' and 'non-cultivator' castes – the former even if they have never touched the soil are the gentry, the latter even if all they know is farming are the menials. The concept of 'village proprietors' – who might be joint owners of uncultivated land in the village estate, as well as of the residential land within the settlement – has survived successive waves of partition, land reform, political enfranchisement, Islam and devolution.

The government-school admission form in the Punjab village still insists not only on recording the caste of a child, but also whether the student is a 'cultivator'. It is as though the Bengal Presidency village in Punjab is to this day simply a device for humiliating people, and keeping them in their places. In Sindh, the village does not know where the people are. Rural folk live in small hamlets called goths, and the goth has its own solidarity based on kinship relations. The administrative village, or the Bombay deh, is an arbitrary agglomeration, one that has no identity save  in the land-revenue records. There can be twenty large and small goths in a deh, each demanding attention and asserting itself as an authentic inhabitation whose needs must be met. The revenue-based system once tried to generate lists of these settlements, but soon gave up because it was not geared for the task. It is nightmarish to plan social-policy interventions when the state machinery has no coherent way of knowing where the people actually are.

A peopled universe
Lahore and Karachi cannot become part of Southasia if they fail to liberate themselves from the presidencies and become effective parts of Pakistan. People will be citizens when there is a social-policy framework that covers everyone as a citizen – not as cultivators and non-cultivators. And the social-policy universe cannot be defined without reference to locality. Every person must count, must be counted and accounted for in a particular place. Without a universe, how do you ensure immunisation, health coverage, total literacy, target anti-poverty programmes, or provide unemployment support? Without these interventions, the concept of citizenship is just an empty shell that allows you nothing more than the national identity card.

In Pakistan, government schoolteachers are only vaguely responsible for knowing the number of children in their school's catchment area, and the number among them that is actually in school. The so-called Lady Health Worker is supposed to know all married women and their children in the area under her charge, and a Basic Health Unit is meant to cover people in its undefined domain. A Union Council mayor can vouch for a person's address for certain purposes, but the Election Commission has registered less than two-thirds of all eligible voters, and a quarter of the adult population does not possess the mandatory national identity card. Census enumerators, bless them, are called upon every ten years to cover every single person in every single dwelling. All of these disparate activities, however, still do not make for a social-policy universe. Such a universe must be exhaustive in space and time – everyone must be accounted for, virtually, all of the time. The population census counts everyone once in a while, and other elements of social infrastructure count some of the people more frequently.

The British land settlement created a land-revenue universe, and followed the pre-colonial system of accounting for every plot of land – not just once in a while, but for every crop. Surely it is easier to keep an account of people than that of land, and Southasia is not a land but a people.

~ Haris Gazdar works with the Collective for Social Science Research in Karachi.