The Politics Of Common Sense
By Aasim Sajjad Akhtar

This book offers a refreshingly different perspective on Pakistan. It documents the evolution of the country’s structure of power over the past four decades and, in particular, how the military dictatorship headed by General Zia ul Haq (1977–88)—whose rule has been almost exclusively associated with a narrow agenda of Islamisation—transformed the political field through a combination of coercion and consent production.The Zia regime—and its successors—inculcated within society at large a ‘common sense’ that privileged the cultivation of patronage ties and the concurrent demeaning of counter-hegemonic political practices that had threatened the structure of power in the decade before the military coup in 1977.The book demonstrates how the politics of ‘common sense’ has been consolidated over the past three decades through the agency of emergent social forces such as traders and merchants, as well as the religio-political organisations that gained influence during the 1980s. While these constituencies thrived under the dictatorship, their rise was also organic, inasmuch as capital penetrated society at large, leading to (often unplanned) urbanisation and the proliferation of informal market networks, initially in the secondary and tertiary sectors of the agrarian economy, but increasingly extending into the manufacturing and service sectors.The rise of individuals and networks ‘from below’ has given the patronage-based system its resilience. The similarities in background and outlook between the mass of working people and the political and economic entrepreneurs who act as intermediaries in a vertically organised structure of power blunt counter-hegemonic impulses, with religion often serving as the final source of legitimacy in a world that revolves around the ruthless accumulation of power and capital.