'Soft state'

In their recent op-ed for Business Recorder, Huzaima Bukhari and Dr Ikramul Haq have described Pakistan a 'soft state'. According to them, "Pakistan aptly fits in the concept of a "soft state" - famously articulated by the Nobel laureate, Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in his 1968 three-volume work, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations. It is a broad-based assessment of the degree to which the state, and its machinery, is equipped to deal with its responsibilities of governance. The more soft a state is, the greater the likelihood that there is an unholy nexus between the lawmaker, the law keeper, and the law breaker. Pakistan is a classic case of this unholy nexus where since 1958 numerous tax amnesties failed to achieve the desired results rather encouraged rent-seeking and tax evasion."

I wish to add a key point to the whole argument. Myrdal had compared South Asian countries, particularly India, with European countries. This was, in my view, not a fair comparison; he was in fact comparing oranges and apples. In those days (and even today), levels of socio-economic developments in Europe, particularly in its western part, were vastly different from those in South Asia. Unlike South Asia, Europe had not suffered from colonialism.