ZULFIKAR Ali Bhutto’s nationalisation programme is frequently brought up during arguments about Pakistan’s economic trajectory. A supportive minority cites it as the only real example of a state-led push towards industrialisation and redistribution. Those with different ideological and political preferences blame it for derailing private sector-led growth. Some even see it as the original sin that wrecked the capitalist class and consigned the country to its lacklustre economic fate.

The point here is neither to litigate the past nor to provide a blanket defence of nationalisation str­­­­ategies. Two things though are worth pointing out: that the strategy was very much ‘of its time’, given waves of nationalisations in the 1960s and 1970s across much of the developing and the developed world. And that many countries have since unlocked higher rates of economic growth alongside (and in some cases because of) a large public sector or after partial or complete privatisation.

The bigger question mark then is why did India’s nationalisation programme for example — whose scale and reach was arguably greater than Pakistan’s — not destroy the psyche of its domestic capitalist class and render it incapable of accumulating at much higher rates several decades into the future?

In focusing only on this one particular action, any story of Pakistani capitalism remains largely incomplete. The reasons for its slowdown in the 1990s, a partial, geopolitically aided recovery in the early 2000s, and broad stagnation since 2005 onwards, must be sought elsewhere.

The demands of newly empowered groups have been........

© Dawn