At the district headquarters power once arrived on horseback. The collector dismounted before a whitewashed bungalow and entered a room with a high ceiling, slow fans and clerks bent over thick registers. Outside, peasants waited with tax demands, land disputes and complaints against local landlords. Inside, a young British officer governed territory larger than an English county. He collected revenue, commanded the police, dispensed executive justice and reported to a government thousands of miles away.

He answered upward. Everyone else looked up.

Pakistan inherited that room.

The faces changed after 1947. The architecture of power endured. When a politician pockets a commission or a bureaucrat turns public office into a private property portfolio, we call it corruption. The word is accurate, yet incomplete. It exposes the hand entering the till while obscuring the machinery that placed it there. Elite capture is something larger: the power of a small, interlocking class to shape laws, markets and institutions in its own favour, then present the result as public policy.

Its origins lie in the colonial state. The British built India to extract revenue and preserve order. Equal citizenship had little place in that design. A narrow administration ruled an immense population through intermediaries: landlords who delivered taxes and tribal chiefs who controlled territory. Land grants, titles and patronage turned loyalty into property. Property produced influence. Influence secured more property. Within a generation, privilege had begun to look like pedigree.

Punjab was transformed by this bargain. The canal colonies brought water to the soil and fortune to the families granted........

© The Express Tribune