Politics of Development in Pakistan: From the Post-Independence Modernization Project to ‘Vision 2025’

This article critically analyses Pakistan’s development project since its independence in 1947 up till Vision 2025 of 2014. Vision 2025 aspires to ‘inclusive growth’ through the expansion of the market as the basis for a ‘people-centric’ approach to development. Based on a critical evaluation of Pakistan’s development trajectory, I argue that a reliance on economic growth via liberal capitalism to address poverty has failed in Pakistan. Post-independence aspirations of decent livelihoods became disrupted by the development project, which evolved through Cold War politics. Premised upon the privileging of liberal capitalism, this modernization project was executed by authoritarian regimes that initiated new processes of dispossession and accentuated existent inequalities. Moreover, a critical analysis of Pakistan’s development crises must consider how poverty intersects with social inequality justified through zat or caste to reproduce entrenched positions of privilege and disadvantage. Mainstream Pakistani society comprises an efficacious trope of inequality normalized through the ‘othering’ of poor families, resistance to which is misrepresented as a lack of character and industry. Impoverished communities bear disproportionate costs of development, which compel them to find shelter in segregated communities in slums and earn a living as servants, vendors and through begging, including children on the streets. In the wake of neo-liberal policy reforms, the Benazir Income Support Programme provides temporary monetary relief to some but leaves intact the underlying causes of worsening inequality. A critical discussion of Pakistan’s development trajectory challenges the ideological premises of Vision 2025 and its promise of universal wellbeing.