Legislation for ceilings on landholdings was badly conceived and the ceilings themselves circumvented. But Pakistan’s ‘land reforms’ of 1959, 19 never actually happened. Reform is necessary and land redistribution is the only way to do it. Often implicit in that justice is karo kari, watta satta, rape and ritual humiliation, but why root for law and order in our villages, if it is arbitrary and imposed by animals? We praise these benevolent men, with their panchayats and private prisons, for dispensing justice where the state fails to. And there are so many among us that applaud this regression.

Sharecroppers continue to cultivate the feudal family’s land, vote as it says and pray that they will not be evicted from their homesteads. By denying its tenants primary education, basic roads and luxuries, the feudal family thrives on a culture of dependency. It should come as no surprise then that Pakistan’s rural areas remain so primitive. And the reward for co-opting the colonialists - vast landholdings and generations of serfs - has outlasted the Raj itself.

It is a status acquired by men whose sole qualification was to have ingratiated themselves to British bureaucrats. It is a system that perpetuates itself through patronage, that forces illiteracy on adults that can vote and manual labour on children that cannot. To expect more is to not understand the inherent degeneracy that comes with this ethos. They are hereditary princes without pedigree, barons without class, capitalists without enterprise and - as their long romance with politics has now proven - statesmen without vision. They monopolise its agriculture, sit in its parliament and feed on its resources. Landowners have run the country since it was born.

It is a disease that very much afflicts us today. In Pakistan, though, feudalism cannot be viewed in retrospect simply because there is no historical distance to view it through. In much of the world, it is a system that is discussed only in the past tense, a warped social order that had to be cut down before individual human progress could be made. ‘Feudalism’, as a term, has evolved over the ages.

My feudal lord text pdf