Bureaucratic control

A RECENTLY proposed bill around ‘anti-social’ behaviour in Punjab has received extensive scrutiny both within opposition political circles and media outlets. An excellent primer by lawyer Ali Javed Darugar on the online pages of this newspaper identifies a range of fundamental rights violations within the legislation and traces its core ethos to various colonial statutes, such as the Criminal Tribes Act and the Habitual Offenders Act from the late 19th and early 20th century respectively.

While much has already been said, it’s worth remembering that the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 was essential to the type of social engineering experiment colonial bureaucrats were undertaking in Punjab. Working towards the objective of irrigating and settling the lands between Punjab’s western rivers (what we call ‘bar’ in the vernacular), colonial administrators ran into the problem of dealing with pastoral populations that actually did inhabit this supposed ‘crown wasteland’.

Displacement of pastoral communities thus became central to the bureaucratic management of land in Punjab, with many communities being consequently classified as criminal tribes to facilitate punitive action against them. This was done in order to aid the mass societal transition from pastoral life to settled agrarian life around cash crop farming, as is well documented by a number of writers, notably Neeladri Bhattacharya and Bilal Zahoor.

The publicly stated rationale of the current legislation, 150 years on, is crime control and maintenance of public order. Control and use of land does not feature in its justification though one wouldn’t have to think very creatively to come up with scenarios in which this may aid land politics in various ways. And yet while these differences from statutes of past centuries are clear and notable, there is a common thread that runs through this piece of legislation along with several others from the past few years, going all the way back one hundred and fifty years. This common thread is the subordination of governance in Punjab to centralised executive control, specifically via the provincial bureaucracy.

A plethora of legislation is tightening or extending executive control over a range of social and governance aspects

The concept itself is not unique to the current administration. Incumbents prior to the current chief minister, notably the current prime minister also from the PML-N, practised something very similar in order to implement project-based development, usually in public works, communication/ road infrastructure, and to a lesser extent in the social sector (education and health).

Where there are qualitative and quantitative shifts this time around is that not only has project-based development remained centralised and discretionary, it is being accompanied by a plethora of legislation that tightens or extends executive control over a range of social and governance aspects, from speech (The Punjab Defamation Act) to use of public space (The Punjab High Security Zones Act) to market activity (The Punjab Price Control Act) to public governance via a parallel ‘field force’ (The Punjab Enforcement and Regulation Act) and to law and order/ judicial processes (the proposed habitual offenders legislation).

There is some method to these broader regulatory and statutory changes. Over the past two decades, the provincial bureaucracy has made its disapproval of the loss of executive magistracy well known. The exclusion of policing from district administration control under Police Order, 2002, is another issue that resurfaces repeatedly. While attempts have been made to undo both, they’ve proven to be futile. The judiciary opposes the first on grounds of judicial-executive separation of powers, and the police has worked hard to retain its own hierarchy at the operational level.

However, a series of new legislation and general bureaucratic control over the policy process provide backdoor ways, albeit imperfectly, of fusing policy, implementation, regulatory and now even punitive and judicial authority within the same civil administration.

Whether this is good or bad is a debate long settled by the literature on development, which argues that welfare goals for municipal and human capability functions are better served by decentralisation of administration and provision of accountability mechanisms. But one suspects that such centralised control is being prioritised not in service of some loftier obj­ective, but for the accumulation of status, resou­rces and power for the bureaucratic cadre itself.

Others, especially those with higher political stakes, will be far more direct in apportioning blame, but there is an uncomfortable admission that many ordinary residents of Punjab also need to make. The actions that are celebrated (often ri­­­ghtly) as efficiency and effective delivery, frequ­e­ntly in contrast to the failings of other provincial governments, follow the same logic as these pie­ces of legislation that seek to centralise control.

Granting powers to the bureaucracy (and the security forces) to monitor anti-social behaviour, or to regulate where fruit vendors can put their carts, or to regulate what is to be aired online, or to draft a piece of local government legislation that grants no effective powers to elected LGs can be justified on the same grounds as building un­­derpasses, flyovers and pedestrianised walkways via top-down discretion, or centralising control of solid waste management for a province of over 100 million, or arbitrarily deciding which areas require mass transit solutions and of what type.

Some of these steps are celebrated as good governance. Others are questioned. Yet both stem from the same understanding of governance that prioritises executive control and discretion, over accountability and participation. A truly effective critique will be one that challenges both and proposes newer ways of governing, especially ones that don’t rely on delegating and subordinating all authority to a handful of unelected officials.

The writer teaches politics and sociology at Lums.

X: @umairjav

Published in Dawn, July 6th, 2026

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