Some of the crime patterns that show up in Pakistan’s countryside don’t show up anywhere else in the world, for the simple reason that they depend on an institution most countries dismantled generations ago: the feudal estate, still functioning as its own private legal system.
A System the British Built and Pakistan Kept
Feudal landholding in this form isn’t ancient. Under Mughal rule, a jagirdar held military and political authority over an estate for life, and the grant reverted to the crown on his death – it wasn’t hereditary. The British reworked the system for their own purposes: securing loyalty, maintaining order, raising war support, and recruiting soldiers, in exchange for grants that, unlike the Mughal version, generally passed down to heirs rather than reverting to the state. Balochistan and the old NWFP frontier developed a close cousin of the same arrangement in their tribal sardari system, where a chieftain’s authority passes to his son.
India dismantled its princely states’ jagirdari and zamindari systems after independence. Pakistan never did. As the historian Dr. Mubarak Ali has written, in Pakistan’s earliest years – with no constitution and no elections yet in place – political power sat almost entirely in the hands of the jagirdars who dominated the Muslim League, and as they entrenched themselves in politics with no real competitor for power, their families moved into senior bureaucratic and military positions as well.
The system evolved as agriculture did. In Sindh, the arrival of mechanized farming widened the gap between landlord and tenant even further, while growing links between villages and cities exposed sharecroppers and small farmers to competitive urban markets in a way that undercut their old bargaining position. Landlords responded, in some documented cases, with outright violence against the haris – the sharecroppers – working their land, which is part of why private detention on feudal estates became a specifically Sindh-associated phenomenon.
Judge, Jury, and Police, All in One
On his own estate, a jagirdar effectively runs his own legal system: he is the plaintiff when he wants to be, the lawyer, and the judge, all at once. He maintains his own police force, often drawn from the very thieves, dacoits, and killers operating in his area. He runs his own system of “discipline.” The hari working his land has, in practice, the legal status of a subject rather than a citizen – and some estates maintain private jails where basic human rights are violated in ways that rarely make it past local newspapers.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan’s magazine Jehd-e-Haq documented one such case in its December 1995 issue: a team searching for bonded laborers who had escaped a month earlier traveled to a village belonging to the landlord Mureed Khan Marri in Sanghar district. In the sugarcane fields there, they found workers laboring under rusted chains and locks, who told the team they had been working those same fields, in that condition, for months – in some cases, by their own account, effectively for generations.
When Feudal Lords and Dacoits Became Allies
Some bonded-labor families in Sindh trace their position back to a specific hereditary role: providing refuge to armed bandits, a role rooted in the dense forests that once covered parts of the province and gave dacoits somewhere to hide from police who couldn’t move against them without local cooperation. As those forests shrank under settlement and cultivation, and as police mobility and equipment improved, that traditional refuge shrank with it – and Sindh’s armed-robbery problem genuinely declined for a period as a result.
The dacoits didn’t disappear so much as relocate their patronage. A number of Sindh’s feudal landlords took them in, welcomed them, and began putting them to direct use: ordering robberies, arranging the kidnapping of women from rival families, sometimes ordering killings outright. The local police, in these areas, answered less to the state that paid their salaries than to whichever jagirdar or wadera controlled their station – whatever the landlord ordered, the police carried out.
During the movement to restore democracy in 1985, feudal patrons pushed these same armed men further into the campaign, and looting and destruction climbed with them, straining the army’s ability to respond. As kidnapping-for-ransom became routine, Karachi’s industrialists and traders started calling their own city a place people wanted to leave. Only when police action resumed in earnest did the pattern fade back into hiding – not permanently ended, just temporarily out of view.
The alliance itself isn’t much of a mystery. Both landlord and bandit operated outside the law, and mutual need did the rest: the dacoit got protection and a patron; the landlord got a private enforcement arm no court could touch and no ordinary policeman would move against.
The Criminals Sitting in Parliament
The jagirdars, sardars, khans, and landlords who run this system are, in large part, the same people sitting in the national and provincial assemblies, deciding public policy for everyone else. Their crimes never show up in official statistics, because no police officer puts handcuffs on them – if anything, the local police station works for them. Buffaloes for milk, feed, grain, ghee, and other livestock change hands as quiet payment for an officer’s willingness to carry out a landlord’s orders instead of the law. The same officers whose salary comes from the state, whose job is to be the state’s eyes and ears on the ground, answer to someone else entirely.
The same system that produces private police and private jails also produces outright bonded child labor: boys kidnapped or bought outright, held at earthwork sites – canals, wells, dam construction – inside barbed-wire camps, chained, under armed guard, fed poorly. That senior officials responsible for overseeing such sites apparently never notice these camps suggests one of two things: either genuine incompetence, or quiet complicity. On the rare occasion a boy manages to escape and tell police or the administration what he saw, any resulting action against the people responsible tends to be a formality – a show, and nothing more. Brick-kiln labor runs on the identical mechanism: an owner extends an interest-bearing loan to a laborer’s family, exactly as a jagirdar might to a hari, and the debt becomes a trap the family can neither pay off nor walk away from.
Taken together, this specific slice of Pakistan’s crime picture points to something larger than any single bad landlord or corrupt station house officer: a rural social order still operating, in meaningful ways, on medieval terms, even as the country around it prepares to enter the twenty-first century.
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