The People, Power, Politics podcast

00:00:01 Intro Jingle

Welcome to the People Power Politics Podcast, brought to you by CEDAR, the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham.

00:00:14 Petra Alderman

Hi, this is Petra Alderman, a research fellow at CEDAR. I'm here with another episode of the People, Power, Politics podcast. This time I am talking to my departmental colleague, Sameen Ali. Sameen is an assistant professor of International Development at the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham. She works in the fields of comparative politics, development studies and political economy, and her specialisation is very much on the bureaucratic politics in Pakistan. She's also the author of many great works on this topic, and I should also mention that Sameen is one of the co-editors of the Politics of Development book that was published earlier this year and that we have featured on one of our previous episodes. So if you haven't listened to that one, I would recommend that you do. It's a great book and a fantastic episode. But enough about this, it's great to have you on the podcast, Sameen, so welcome.

00:01:09 Sameen Ali

Thank you very much, Petra.

00:01:11 Petra Alderman

OK Sameen, so before we delve deeper into talking about your research and the current project that you're working on. I would really like to ask you what interested you or how did you actually get around to studying bureaucratic politics? I think in a lot of people's mind, you know, bureaucracy is something that they don't want to be dealing with, especially in their day-to-day lives. So how did you actually end up being interested in this topic and why are you focusing on this in the context of Pakistan?

00:01:37 Sameen Ali

I'm so glad you asked this question because I do like telling this story. I was working with a mentor of mine on a research project, actually on Pakistan's political parties where we were going around the country interviewing members of political parties, leaders of political parties, and we would ask them about, you know, what it's like to govern. You know, if they were to come into office or if they had been in office in the past, what was it like to actually deliver services or administer a department and so on? And we would ask them, obviously it would come up you know what, what about things like patronage? What about things like corruption? How do you deal with that? What is that like?

00:02:15 Sameen Ali

And until we kept asking those questions until one particular bureaucrat, one particular politician, got particularly frustrated with us and said, why are you asking me these questions? It's the bureaucrats that you should be asking, and they're really the ones who are making those kinds of decisions who are actually bending the rules or breaking the rules in those ways. And so I I kind of squirreled that away in my mind, and I thought, oh, that's really interesting because I had not thought of the bureaucracy in that way because at that point in time, Pakistan was going through a period where it was either the politics or the military side of things that you talked about and originally I wanted to do a PhD on conflict studies because my Masters was in conflict studies, so I was interested in, you know, at that time it was just after 2010, Pakistan had gone through a period of experiencing a lot of terrorism. I had lived through some of that. And so, you know, there was a natural, perhaps interest in looking at conflict.

00:03:09 Sameen Ali

But I soon realised, I got to this stage of contacting a supervisor and saying this is what I want to do and they were like yes, we're interested, and I changed my mind because I thought, I don't have the right connections to do this work. I don't have the right contacts to do this work and so I shifted gear completely into looking at the bureaucracy. And to be honest, I didn't have the contacts for that, either. So let me, let me also say that and that's actually, I think you're kind of in that intellectual interest phase where you're like, oh, this is fascinating. I can do this. But I in hindsight, I I didn't have the contacts needed to to do this work in a certain way. So I think I've done it my way. I think someone who had contacts with the bureaucracy might have done it differently or might have found different things. So it's it's been an interesting journey. Having done the PhD thinking about it post, you know that kind of phase where you're just writing it up and focused on it to thinking about also my positionality and reflecting on my project. So it's it's yeah, it's been a bit of a journey basically.

00:04:09 Petra Alderman

That's fantastic. And I know that from your work and you've published widely on this topic in you know journal format. And I know that you are currently working on a book project on this very topic and we will talk about it in much greater detail very soon. But if we sort of dig a little bit deeper in terms of the exact areas of of your interest when it comes to bureaucratic politics. What are the kind of key questions that you know, were the ones that really brought you into this and motivated the the further pursuit of research. I know that you've been talking about politicisation, patronage. So you know, what are the key questions that motivate you?

00:04:47 Sameen Ali

So I was originally interested in something that is fairly elementary, so I was kind of looking at how do politicians and bureaucrats interact with each other. What is their relationship like, so whether they're in office or outside of office, how do politicians deal with bureaucrats? So is it as simple as what the literature was portraying at the time, which is sort of like a delegation model, right? Where the politician is telling the bureaucrat to do certain things, and the bureaucrat has a certain degree of power in in different kinds of ways to either do what they're being asked or not do it, or do it part way and and so on. So and but, but I was also interested because I could see that that delegation model didn't capture things that I was seeing in Pakistan even before I started my PhD field work. I could see that it wasn't playing out the way that the literature described it because it wasn't as clean as just ohh, this is being delegated and the politician is directing policy in certain ways, and the bureaucrat is implementing that policy.

00:05:42 Sameen Ali

And that was especially because, and I have this language now post PhD where I can say that was because of the embeddedness of the bureaucrat in the relationships in society, in relationships with the politician which were outside of the workplace. So they could have been from training schools where the bureaucrats are training together. They could have been because they went to similar universities and became politicians and bureaucrats or even though they came from the same family. So it's entirely possible that the bureaucrat and the politician are, you know, siblings, for example. So all of these relationships were really, really complex. And I didn't think that the literature was fully capturing them.

00:06:15 Sameen Ali

And so I started looking at, you know, trying to tease out what those relationships were like. And that's where it really started. And then I soon realised that what was very interesting to me and and and I'll talk about this a bit later as well, which is that the way that these relationships were working was also very specific to the regime, was very specific to the way that power was distributed at the time and and so that became a huge part of the story that I wanted to tell. And even during the PhD, it took a lot of refinement to arrive at the point where I was able to say, you know, there is something interesting to say about these relationships, which is not just ohh it's very complex.

00:06:50 Sameen Ali

But I think it it started with that it started with trying to understand how those relationships worked, what they were to begin with, how they were established and and what was the purpose of those relationships. So what were people trying to achieve by interacting with bureaucrats in particular ways? Was it as simple as, you know, when we speak about people are appointed here or there, we typically think of that in terms of electoral gains, so we think that people are being appointed because you want them to get you elected. You want them to deliver to your constituents. So we think of it in in very almost narrow terms politically, and I found that that wasn't necessarily the case. I found that there were much broader set of reasons for which these people were interacting with each other, and that was not, to my mind, sufficiently reflected in the literature.

00:07:33 Petra Alderman

That is really fascinating and I think Pakistan is a very interesting context to be looking at in that relation because I mean, I know that you originally mentioned that the maybe initial interest was looking at the relation between the politicians and the bureaucrats on the one hand, but also Pakistan does have a very interventionist military. And I think that also adds an additional layer of complexity to these relations, and I think makes it very interesting case to study and and look into. So in all of this that you just said, where does your book project sit and what does your book project do?

00:08:11 Sameen Ali

So my book project is a reworking of my PhD, so I I did the PhD and and as you mentioned very kindly, I published some papers out of that work. I also used that work to sort of branch out a little bit and do some other things which have really contributed to my thinking on these issues and so then I went back at one point and said maybe I should rework this thesis because it was always intended to be a book, and maybe I should think about it a bit more and I'm very grateful to people who have, you know, at various stages given me feedback at conferences and and through e-mail and so on and countless individuals really, to to arrive at a point where I feel confident in in saying that it's a departure from my PhD work in the sense that I'm more interested now in thinking through how these relationships that I've looked at for my PhD, how that form of staffing the state in particular ways contributes to the regime, right. So how does it sustain the hybrid regime and that that's sustaining the hybrid regime part was not something I looked at in the in the PhD thesis.

00:09:09 Sameen Ali

And there’s a very simple and it will sound really naive reason for that, which is that when I did the PhD, we were Pakistan was in a stage of democratic transition, it turned out to be a failed democratic transition. But I think it's interesting that when you're a citizen of that country and you're kind of living in that moment, I think you're kind of hopeful. And when you're hopeful you don't, you know, you don't think about it maybe as as critically as you as you would in that moment. And I found myself sort of being like, well, you know, maybe this will take hold and maybe things will remain in this sort of trying to transition to democracy for a little while, and so I wrote the PhD thesis with that kind of limbo stage, almost of of being in trying to attempt a democratic transition. But now I'm I'm I'm a few years out from the PhD now and I can say that it was definitely a failed democratic transition and things have regressed massively in the last few years.

00:10:00 Sameen Ali

And and so I'm now in a position to be able to make an argument where I think that there's something about bureaucratic staffing that is contributing to the persistence of the hybrid regime in Pakistan. And I think that that's where I where I hope that this book's contribution will lie.

00:10:15 Petra Alderman

That’s super, super fascinating. And as somebody working on a country that's not that different in some ways from Pakistan, you know where you have quite a large bureaucratic apparatus. You've got also a role of interventionist military. I kind of wonder how you make that connection between the bureaucracy and the regime and how you actually examine this, and I remember it was this theory back in the day that was quite influential within the Thai politics where this idea and I think it resonated with what you were saying, you know, the transition to democracy. And there was a lot of, you know, optimism as well. But Thailand was called a bureaucratic polity at one time, and it was a very dominant idea about, you know, it was basically the the military officials and the the bureaucrats or the the civil servants as well sort of running the Thai state. And I mean, since then the scholarship has moved on and there there have been other explanations. But if I was to push you, you know, how much maybe that kind of idea of bureaucratic polity would be relevant to Pakistan today and how can you actually perhaps figure out what impact or effects bureaucracies have in that kind of wider regime context, how can we make the leap from maybe just looking at the relationship to to really saying, well, actually this really has some kind of regime effects?

00:11:32 Sameen Ali

No, thank you that, I mean I I I do think there's a separate discussion here which is about comparing Thailand and Pakistan because I'm always fascinated by that by that comparison. I think what's interesting about Pakistan is that unlike Thailand, the the military has had periods of dominance, but there have also been periods where the political parties have pushed back and pushed back strongly and both sides have used the bureaucracy to their own ends. So it's not a bureaucratic polity in that the bureaucracy is not controlling any aspect of of the state sufficiently for it to be a bureaucratic policy. So you have periods where the military is dominant completely and utterly, and you have periods where the political parties manage to make some inroads. They're never in complete dominance, but they still manage to push back a little bit and and and get some room and they use the bureaucracy during those periods to to to make use of that room. And that's a lot of what the book is about actually.

00:12:22 Sameen Ali

I think that for me, the sort of the light bulb for the idea for this actually went on when I was listening to Marlies Glasius speak here at the department. And actually it was CEDAR who invited her to speak about her new book. And she talked about something that suddenly sort of, you know, got my brain going, which is about the practice of authoritarianism. So you can have authoritarian parties, you can have authoritarian politics. But she was talking about how those practices can permeate beyond politics, into society at large. And there were specific examples that she was giving. And I was sitting there thinking that, hang on a second. Why can't they also permeate other aspects of the state and and to into the bureaucracy as well? And so for me, that that in sense of what is the bureaucratic practice in hybrid regimes became really important.

00:13:05 Sameen Ali

The other thing that was important for me, and this is where I started, I think I spent like six months doing a deep dive into the literature because I was so, so confused because I thought that surely someone must have written extensively on bureaucracies in authoritarian systems, and secondly on bureaucracies in hybrid systems. And actually they haven't. So one of the things that's flagged about bureaucracy, work on bureaucracies is that there's not a sufficient work on this in terms of authoritarian systems, and there's definitely not enough work on this in hybrid systems, and I think hybrid systems is obviously hybrid regimes are are, shall we say, complicated and changeable. And so it's quite difficult to study these things. And I think Pakistan is a is a really interesting case for that reason because it's never fully managed, there's very limited periods where it's fully managed to swing authoritarian, and it doesn't last very long. And then it's kind of landed in this middle of the way where there's contestation and that's a word I'm borrowing from the Politics of Development textbook. But it's never quite going towards democracy either.

00:14:05 Sameen Ali

So I think that that sense of what does bureaucratic practice look like in a hybrid regime, and how might that kind of practice embed the hybridity or or that kind of changeability into the state itself? And how might that actually influence political decision making? So can you end up in a situation where you're trying to manage the uncertainty of a hybrid regime and you're doing it using the bureaucracy, but because you're trying to balance the little room that you have to maneuver as a political party and as a politician does that actually entrench that uncertainty into the state itself? Because you're you're you're you're trying to get what you can out of the time that you have, but you're not making any sustainable moves towards democracy because you don't know if you will win.

00:14:50 Sameen Ali

So it it becomes this really sort of vicious cycle effectively. And and for me, what was also important, and this is important across all of my work, even beyond the book project, is to look at the agency of the bureaucrat in all of this. So a lot of this work tends to prioritise the thinking of the political elite, but bureaucrats, not just elite bureaucrats but all bureaucrats, I think, have a really big stake in this, and they are just as involved as politicians in managing uncertainty in particular ways. And there's a lot. And I I really felt heartened in recent years because people like you and you and Yuen Ang have talked about this in the Chinese context, that we think of bureaucracies within the constraints of a Weberian ideal way of thinking about bureaucracies, right, and that comes from a view of the global north and global north states and global north bureaucracies. But not all bureaucracies look like that or act like that, and they don't need to. And so nuancing how bureaucracies work in a place like Pakistan is, I think something that is understudied, and I think we can actually learn a lot from it, not just for the study of public administration, but also for the study of democratisation and authoritarianism, because there's something about the way that politicians and bureaucrats are interacting in these spaces, which is perpetuating hybridity rather than allowing or making the space for democratic transition even when you have elections.

00:16:06 Petra Alderman

This is so fascinating and I could ask you so many questions just based on what you said now, but I will, I will try to keep it limited to a manageable number. But what I find very fascinating and I think is very important what you're trying to do in your work is the fact that you are giving these bureaucrats more agency than oftentimes, as you said, you know, we do tend to give them in the scholarship, and I find that as well, you know, when you look at particular areas of of bureaucratic work, whether that's election or implementing of some some kind of policies, we tend to think think of them as these kind of technocratic actors, right? So that, as you said, they, they they are delegated some kind of task and they just carry that task to the best of their abilities. And if there is a problem, typically we then talk about the capacity, you know, do they have enough capacity or does the state have enough capacity, but we rarely tend to think about them as political actors in their own right, who can also make a difference, and especially as you say, who could also influence and impact the trajectory of any kind of regime, whether that's, you know, authoritarian regime or hybrid regime, or even a democratic regime itself.

00:17:06 Petra Alderman

So if I was to ask you, you were talking about bureaucratic practices. Could you maybe illustrate some of these practices? What is it that you see as bureaucratic practices and how in the kind of real case scenario, for example in the context of Pakistan, are these practices actually then influencing the regime outcomes? I I know you mentioned the uncertainty, but can you give us some more examples?

00:17:28 Sameen Ali

So I'll take an example from the period in which I was working, which is that you had a period of, you know, attempted democratic transition, elections were held, parties came to power and it was the first time in Pakistan's history that parties alternated power at the end of a term, right? So so this was a really significant moment in Pakistan's history. Now, during this time, to my mind, was very important to think about what the bureaucracy was doing and what I found was that a few things were really, really key.

00:17:55 Sameen Ali

The first was how precisely bureaucratic appointments were being made, and I saw that there were three ways that they were being made. One was legal appointments, absolutely clean you you you can't nitpick about them. You can't say, oh, this person didn't deserve it. They deserved it. They met all the requirements. They were in the right seniority bracket, everything was fine. And and the second was where you were doing something completely illegal. So you beat someone up or you forged a document and and these were, you know, you might think people wouldn't talk about this stuff, but they did talk about it. So they did tell me that I bribed someone or, you know, these are all fake documents. So this is how people do these things. So there there's, you know, when you when you start asking these questions, people start telling you about all of the illegality that goes into these these processes.

00:18:38 Sameen Ali

The third one is when you bend the rules, and Rosita Armitage has also written about this in the context of Pakistan writing about extra-legality. So there are things you can do which are not legal, but they're also not illegal. So you're kind of bending the rules, but you're not breaking the rules. So you're you're, you know, you're sort of fudging things a little bit because you want a specific person to be in a specific role. Now the next question you would ask is, but why do you want that right? Why? Why do you need this person to be in this role at this particular point in time?

00:19:06 Sameen Ali

Now in some cases it's a really straightforward answer, especially when you have illegal appointments like, you know, violence and stuff, which is that I need someone to deliver money to my constituents. I need them to have all of the services that they need, and I need it done when I want it done. This person will do it for me because we have this kind of relationship because of the appointment that I've made for them, that's a, you know, very straightforward way of thinking about it. There's also obviously electoral gain, so you want someone who can, you know, win you votes. So you work on electoral commissions, you you perhaps speak to this better than I can, where you want someone who's really gonna stuff the ballot box for you. And those are obviously bureaucrats who are counting those votes so, so that can be quite influential, especially around elections. But there's also other reasons. So one of them is, aside from personal gain, there's like, protection. You want someone in a role who's going to protect you from the consequences of your own actions, right? Those could be disciplinary actions. Those could be accountability cases. Those could be court cases. All of those are potential outcomes.

00:20:06 Sameen Ali

But there's also some times where an appointment is made simply because you want to get a job done. So you want to get a project completed, you want to have a road built or you want you've you've got a donor who's giving you some money to institute some particular kinds of reforms. And all you want is for the benchmarks to be met for that project to make the donor happy and keep the money flowing. All you need is a nice guy who will come in, do the job and that's it, right? And then not give you any trouble. Or sometimes you want someone who's really harsh and really abrasive because you want them to come in and discipline other people in the department, right? So there's very specific needs that can that can come up along the way. So that's the the second thing I looked at.

00:20:47 Sameen Ali

The third thing I looked at. OK, but who is making these appointments right? So not everyone has the right to just make arbitrary appointments of bureaucrats. Now, in a presidential system it it it's it's a little I'm, I'm sure it's also complex but it becomes a little simpler because you have a president who is elected and therefore is able to make appointments so Mehdi Hasan writing about Kenya, for example, is talking about how the President there is able to manage threats to his power by making ethnically biased appointments in specific areas and not in others. The US is another case, so one of the big fears with Donald Trump would be that he would back the bureaucracy in particular ways, right?

00:21:24 Sameen Ali

But in parliamentary systems, there is no president with those kinds of powers, so there's not that kind of way of making appointments. So. So then how is it taking place? And so for me it was about, OK, which politicians are able to exercise the kind of power that is required to bend the rules and place people in particular roles. Which bureaucrats have those powers between different levels of the bureaucracy, which politicians and bureaucrats have the power to visit violence on people or forge documents? Or do all of that sort of thing, and which ones have the power to decide where legal appointments should be made? Which projects should be prioritised? And so for me, this became, you know, when I, when I operationalised it to Pakistan, it became a story of centralisation.

00:22:05 Sameen Ali

So what I saw was power being more and more centralised in the hands of the elected politicians, the leaders of the political party that had been elected to power, who control all of these strings and were able to manipulate not just appointments, but also who was able to make those appointments. So even for something as you know, low level, shall we say, as teaching staff, not every politician was able to make appointments to teaching staff roles that they wanted, even that was being controlled centrally at the provincial level. Now this is not how it used to be in the past. In the past you were one of the one of the things that Pakistan was known for, for example, during the 1990s is that politicians would just issue lists for their constituents to get these kinds of jobs for teaching staff for example.

00:22:50 Sameen Ali

But when I did my field work this was I was told that this was no longer the case and part of the reason for that was this uncertainty that had to be managed and you wanted to manage that because because you didn't want, you know, things to spiral out of control and corruption charges and so on. So you centralised all of it at the provincial level, where the where the ruling party was like we will decide who gets to intervene on these kinds of appointments, and this was particularly interesting to me at that time because the school education department was one of my particular cases and I would go into the department and they kept telling me that ohh, we've got these new reforms which are funded by, you know, all of these different donors. And we're introducing merit based teacher reform. And I was like, oh, I'm very impressed. Show me how this is working.

00:23:31 Sameen Ali

And when you started, you know, teasing out the details, you realised that while they were implementing the reform for merit based appointments of teachers, they were simultaneously also undermining that reform by going against it and appointing people for for specific politicians and specific bureaucrats who were favored by the party elite. So it was this process of sort of managing uncertainty, but also making sure that the people that you needed to be on your side remained on your side and and as a consequence of that, if you had, you know, done the legal thing and made the legal appointments and made the merit based appointments, no one could have charged you with anything, you might have lost the election, but you would have created a system, a bureaucratic system, which is driven by merit, which is driven by a process that is defined in the law. But they didn't do that. They built hybridity into the system because they had this two stage thing where some people have to abide by the rules, but other people really don't have to abide by those rules, and that actually used to play out in front of me when I would sit in these people's offices and it was absolutely fascinating. And I think really changed the way that I looked at government.

00:24:34 Petra Alderman

It is incredibly fascinating, when you were talking, I was just thinking, obviously you were talking about these different ways of appointments and and from what you were talking about, I I I thought, OK, so when you have any kind of regime, you have this amalgamation of these bureaucrats and the different ways in which they have been appointed and the essentially the different roles that they have, you know, vis-a-vis whoever has appointed them, but also vis-a-vis you know their either constituents or whoever they are delivering that public service for and I kind of feel like that creates a massive web of complexity and massive web of these complex relations. How does that contribute overall to the regime trajectory? Cause you mentioned that obviously you know there are, you know, these people would be operating in an area of uncertainty because you maybe never know how long. This kind of transitional period is going to last if there is a little bit more opening. The parties have managed to wrangle some more power away from the military.

00:25:30 Petra Alderman

But when is the next time that the military is going to try and pounce back and get that power? So how does this really affect the overall regime trajectory, but perhaps also stability, does it have any effect on how stable and maybe how capable these regimes are to deliver some of these public services?

00:25:46 Sameen Ali

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that's a great question. And I think it hugely impacts stability because when I, when I did my research, I was speaking to, I mean I was actually speaking to pretty much whoever I could get hold of which was a big issue because access is always an issue, but a lot of people I spoke to were Members of Parliament at the provincial level, so these were not necessarily very elite politicians. Some had a lot of experience, so they've been around for a very long time and they knew sort of some of the ruling elites and and so on and so forth. But some of them are also new entrants to politics.

00:26:16 Sameen Ali

And so when I would speak to them, they persistently had these complaints and they would say, you know, the party leadership doesn't listen to us. The party leadership is not giving us the things that we need in order to keep our constituents happy, whether that was, you know, jobs because, you know, the economy in Pakistan has been perma crisis effectively. And jobs are in huge demand, especially because the the balance of the population is that there's a lot of young people who need jobs and and the slowing economy and slowing manufacturing. So. So there's there's nothing really that can offer you the kind of stability that a public sector job can. So the hugely in demand, even if it's something like the job of a of a guard or or staff in an office or something like that. So if the ruling elite is saying no, you're not important enough for us to give you access to those jobs or to make those kinds of appointments, then you have deeply unhappy members of Parliament, right? And and they might not be all very, you know, sort of new players or or or something. But some of them might be quite established. Some of them might have very strong roots in their own constituencies. They might have a lot of loyalties in their own constituencies. And so they're bringing that loyalty to the party. But is the party actually appreciating that loyalty?

00:27:23 Sameen Ali

Sometimes not, right? So for for Pakistan's parties, it's a game of who they need on their side in order to win a particular seat. These are not particularly ideological parties, and I don't mean that in the sense of policy ideology. I mean that in the sense of how the loyalties are constructed within the party, right. These are not people who believe in a party programmme. They believe in a party programmme as long as it gets them into office. And so the instability comes not just from the fact that the military might decide at any moment to to push for a court case that removes the government. Or may, you know, make accusations of corruption or or things like that. But it also comes from the fact that they can tempt these politicians, individual politicians, away from the party. Right. And that's something that the Pakistani military has done in the past. Where they've created these forward blocks within political parties which cause those parties to fall apart, which which leads to their majority to fall apart, so it is creating instability in in a huge way.

00:28:14 Sameen Ali

And so that's that's why this manipulation of bureaucratic appointments becomes really important, because it feeds into the strength of the party and the ability of the party to hold it together for as long as possible, right, which is really what it wants to do. But it's actually undermining itself as it goes along, so its instability is kind of built into this whole process.

00:28:33 Petra Alderman

So would it be fair to say that part of this bureaucratic politics in Pakistan is about, I mean from the point of view of politicians is to try and ensure maybe more stable party organisation by including these bureaucrats into their structures and making sure that they can somehow withstand the period of political instability but in so doing, they actually make themselves at the end of the day much more unstable, because these people are appointed not based on the beliefs, but you know, it's like some patronage networks. Maybe pork-barrel politics style, you know, things going on. So at the end of the day they're actually kind of undermining themselves in a way, right?

00:29:14 Sameen Ali

Yeah, that is exactly it. And it's it's, I think what makes it particularly egregious is that it's not just that there's, you know, sort of bureaucrats which are being given either importance or primacy over political players within their own parties, it's also that they're they're actively turning away from their membership as party leaders. And taking the side of the bureaucracy, and I think it's important here to to say a bit about the colonial roots of Pakistan's bureaucracy. So British colonial era bureaucracies and and the way that they are embedded into societies. That hasn't changed. Right. So they're still regarded as, you know, these people are sitting on top of us to rule us and and they are, you know, sort of imposed on us. They are and. And literally the, you know, the the term in South Asia being ‘Babu’, that this person is a paternalistic figure who is telling us what to do all the time, you know? So the by no one is the bureaucracy regarded as being a team player, shall we say in in the political system. But the minute the political leadership is actively taking the side of the bureaucrat over its own politicians, that's where they start to undermine their own party. And so you're ending up in a situation where you already have a weak party.

00:30:25 Sameen Ali

You are already in a precarious position because you don't know when your rule will be interrupted and you're undermining the only thing that is actually going to keep you know, hold you together, which is your party membership. And I did see this in in some cases that I was looking at where, for example, bureaucrats were sometimes appointed and chosen specifically because they were able to refuse requests from politicians, constituency politicians. So you know, if a politician went to a particular bureaucrat and said I want to have a road constructed because this village in my constituency is really isolated. The ability of that bureaucrat to say no was privileged over and above the request of the politician, right? So the politician was obviously understandably upset. There were a few cases I noticed where that would lead to a change in the bureaucrats appointment. So, you know, in some cases it blew up so badly that there were protests against the bureaucrat in the streets.

00:31:18 Sameen Ali

And they were led by the same political party that was ruling the province, which was, you know, bit ridiculous and and what the, what the leadership would then do was that they would remove that bureaucrat from there. But it was never a punishment, so there would always be given a nicer posting, a better posting so you know the message was very clear that, yeah, OK. We need to sort of, you know, listen to you because you're our party members and you're making such a huge fuss and it's, you know, creating unrest within the within the district. But we also don't want to punish this, this person who's who's, who's our, who's our person. Right, because they do the things that we want them to do and they do it by upsetting the people that need to be upset and and so, you know, the the bureaucrat is not losing out there. The only people who are really losing out over the long term are actually the members of the of the ruling party.

00:32:04 Petra Alderman

It's absolutely fascinating and we sort of edging towards the end of the recording for this episode, but I I will squeeze one more question in because this is just far too fascinating topic to finish now. With the role of military, I mean we talked about it as being, you know, powerful and interventionist force, that it can sort of infiltrate parties and maybe fragment them from from the inside, but how about its reach when it comes to the bureaucracy? Is there some kind of struggle between the politicians and the, let's say, the senior military brass to try and take control of certain bureaucrats in certain areas? Is there that kind of, you know, wrangling over these, these people going on at all times, or can you really see maybe on the bureaucracy, which side has more power and when?

00:32:50 Sameen Ali

And so I'm gonna caveat my answer a little bit is in that it's it's quite hard to answer this in a straightforward way simply because especially at least for me, I don't have the kind of access to the military to be able to answer in a in a great deal of detail because I don't know, I have colleagues who who have worked on this, or not on this per se, but on sort of the the role of the military and Pakistan, who I think might be able to speak to this better, and there's some good books by Shahrukh Rafi Khan and Asam Sujatha on Pakistan's military. There's also Maya Rashid who talks about affect in the Pakistani military in terms of Shahadat or martyrdom in the in the service of the state. So there's there's people who've written about this and know more about this than I do and Aisha Siddiqa famously has written about the military as corporation.

00:33:34 Sameen Ali

So and and those of those of your listeners who follow Egypt will think that this is familiar because it is familiar, right. So it's very similar to the Egypt model. Pakistan's military is a is a corporation. It has housing societies. It has factories, it has interventions in cement industries, in of all things, cornflakes, you know, all sorts of things. And it owns, owns or manages quite a lot of land in Pakistan. Now, where the bureaucracy is concerned in historically speaking there was, you know in early years and Ayesha Jalal has written about this. After partition, the only institutions that were functioning were the military and to some degree the bureaucracy, right because of because of the Indian Administrative Service and the way that the military had been set up by the British. Those were the institutional remnants that Pakistan did have in in any solid form. And the problem over the subsequent years was that because of military intervention in politics, parties have remained weak.

00:34:26 Sameen Ali

Parties have not consolidated. They don't have roots in society, and so there's only two institutions that are actually to some degree functioning with the level of consistency, and that is the military and the bureaucracy. Now, over time, the military has dominated over the bureaucracy. So in the early years, the the bureaucracy was able to hold its own to a huge degree, and that was largely due to its colonial roots where it was able to make decisions in particular ways which overruled everything else right, but with politicisation and with, you know, sort of politicians trying to make space for themselves over time, they also eroded the bureaucracy. So you've ended up in a situation where the bureaucracy is also compromised internally.

00:35:03 Sameen Ali

Now the military, that's not true. Right? And because the military has had periods of straight out military rule where it's declared martial law, suspended the constitution, arrested political leadership, or exiled them, it has managed to, in some cases, make inroads into the civilian side where, for example, during, especially during periods of military rule military officials are placed in control of civilian authorities right. Now obviously that has an effect. This is not something I've looked at in any degree, but you know it, it does come up sometimes where people will say things like, well, you know, during that time it was the military that was making those decisions from how bureaucrats were trained to how they operated and how decision making was done in the different departments. And I think that obviously does have consequences. There's also, you know, periods of time where the bureaucracy where the military has taken a step back a little bit, right. So they've not been as interventionist, but there's also times where they have been very, very much in control of a lot of different aspects of governance in Pakistan. Foreign policy is one space, so bureaucrats in the foreign policy section, are they they do the work of any bureaucrat. But the decision making is often coming from beyond the political realm, right?

00:36:16 Sameen Ali

Then there's in in recent in, in, in the recent past. What has happened is, for example, the military, because of the economic crisis, has a role in economic decision making and investment. Foreign direct investment. Now what role they are playing in those meetings, I don't know. And I'm not in I don't think anyone really is in a position to know until some time has passed, and how they interact with the bureaucracy in those meetings, or how even they interact with, let's say, the Prime Minister or other politicians in those meetings, I think it's absolutely fascinating, but I don't have a very good answer for that. I do think it's it's, you know, one of those situations where Pakistan is not a country where the military is so interwoven into the civilian side that there's no distinction between them. There is, there is a distinction between them, and there's often cases, especially as you go lower through the ranks of the bureaucracy where there's a lot of discontent with the military. So people will say things like, well, they threaten us and stuff like that for their own ends. So it it it, it depends is is the is the answer I guess.

00:37:16 Petra Alderman

Fantastic. Unfortunately, we ran out of time, but it it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast Sameen, thank you so much for for joining the People Power Politics Podcast and for for talking to us about your research on bureaucratic politics in Pakistan. It's been fascinating to listen to you, and I wish you all the best with your book project.

00:37:37 Sameen Ali

Thank you so much, Petra. Thank you for the excellent questions. And you know, I hope we can continue these conversations.

00:37:42 Petra Alderman

For sure. I'm Petra Alderman research fellow at CEDAR and the host of these People Power Politics Podcast episode. I have been talking to Sameen Ali, assistant professor of International Development at the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham.

00:37:57 Outro Jingle

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