‘Weak’ governmentality and ‘raw’ sovereignty

The topic of at least three of Foucault's lecture cycles in the late 1970sFootnote ⁵ was how state power has changed in Western Europe since the middle ages, and how this change has entailed different ways of controlling people. Foucault sketched three broad modes of control and linked them to distinct phases in history: first, there is juridical or sovereign power, to prescribe through law and punish through violence. Second, disciplinary power, based on distinctions between normal and abnormal that aims at the continuous regulation of all aspects of daily life. Finally there is ‘security’ (later renamed ‘governmentality’Footnote ⁶). This last form of power takes perceived ill-effects as naturally ‘given’—rather than as deviations to be punished or quarantined—and manages them with scientific ‘techniques [that] are at once enlightened, reflected, analytical, calculated and calculating’.Footnote ⁷ Its object is ‘population’, which is not ‘transparent’ to sovereign action. Unlike the objects of sovereign and disciplinary power, the sinner, rebel or deviant, ‘population’ must be allowed to behave according to its own volition (‘desire’), and can neither be comprehensively surveyed nor commandeered from above.Footnote ⁸

Foucault was always at pains to point out that, at least from the nineteenth century onwards, the three modes of power reinforced rather than succeeded each other. But there is still a larger historical storyline at play that poses the problem of the state as a paradox: Why is it that the exercise of state power through modern and non-interventionist methods of ‘security’ (or ‘governmentality’) can be more effective than the much more directly coercive and interventionist methods of older regimes? This question offers an immediate point of connection for those interested in the nature of colonial states as they are facing the corresponding question of how a small number of Europeans, with limited means of coercion, managed to rule over millions of potentially hostile ‘others’. In a reading that often falsely conflates ‘governmentality’ with ‘disciplinary’ power,Footnote ⁹ South Asianist ‘Foucauldians’ have identified a whole range of institutions such as prisons, schools, mental asylums, medical knowledge, and the census and statistics more generally to find an explanation of how the colonialists could rule, without having to consider any form of active consent on behalf of the ruled.Footnote ¹⁰ But it was also clear that such an argument would not work easily. Although many institutions of disciplinary and ‘security’ power could be found in colonial India, they were often under-funded with insufficient means to cover more than a small proportion of the subject population. Statistics were left to accumulate dust on official shelves, while ‘sciences of government’ were often not fully internalized and used ornamentally.Footnote ¹¹

This ‘weakness’ connects the governmentality problematic with neo-Schmittian readings of political power that have come to the debate from the opposite direction. Recent interventions in political anthropology have shown not only that ‘sovereign’ power—the power to maim and kill—remains fundamental to South Asian statehood, but also that the exercise of this kind of power is by no means a ‘state’ monopoly.Footnote ¹² Contested hierarchies of many ‘sovereign bodies’ continued to survive into the colonial and even post-colonial era in the behaviour of local strongmen, bureaucrats, religious notables and mobilized crowds. British colonial rule aspired to monopoly sovereignty according to European norms and sought to impose it in theatrical acts of violence—the 1857 ‘mutineers’ being blown off canons, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, or the aerial bombardment of troublesome Pathans in Malakand. But increasingly effective ways of symbolically or actually ‘transferring’ power away from the Raj to local challengers remained ever present.Footnote ¹³ All political mass movements of the late colonial period used techniques like civil disobedience, hartals or ultimatums, which were always less about the achievement of concrete political aims than about attacking and undermining the colonial claim to rule itself. In the case of the Pakistan movement, a ‘naked’ politics of counter-sovereignty had become especially dominant—virtually at the exclusion of all else—because such a politics could hide the many contradictions that a more coherent focus on positive political content would have brought out into the open.Footnote ¹⁴

This inheritance posed a stark problem after independence. The nationalist regimes hoped and demanded that politics would now turn into the issue-based, conversational and ‘orderly’ mode prevalent in legitimate democracies; a mode in which the theatrical excess and dispersal of sovereign power had been tamed and constitutionally monopolized in a rhetoric of ‘people's sovereignty’. For Foucault, such containment became possible in nineteenth⁻century Europe only through the emergence of ‘society’—a web of disciplinary powers, which turned people into governable entities.Footnote ¹⁵ But such a project was never successful in South Asia. Even after states like India and Pakistan had ostensibly become fully ‘self-determined’, their people continued to stage sovereignty contests in which state sovereignty as such was put into question, for instance in ‘communalist’ attacks, in a politics of religious outrage and other violent traditions of ‘political society’, or in the self-consciously ‘regal’ antics of neighbourhood bosses and provincial strongmen.Footnote ¹⁶ It was this combination of ‘raw’ sovereignty and a persistent weakness of ‘governmentality’ that gave the ultimate source of state sovereignty—the declaration of a ‘state of exception’ or ‘national emergency’—a recurring role in South Asian cultures of power.Footnote ¹⁷ When General Ayub Khan staged a coup d’état in 1958, for instance, his regime attempted to trump the alternative ‘sovereign bodies’ that had constituted themselves in political action all around Pakistan with a more permanent sovereignty of a higher order. As the following discussion will show, the Korangi project was intimately connected to the act of the coup d’état itself and, for this reason alone, deserves an important place within the problematic of a post-colonial governmentality.

The fact that Korangi was a project in urban reconstruction is not coincidental here, because it relates directly to another one of Foucault's observations about the nature of sovereign power: its primary focus on territory, which it acquired with the emergence of the modern state in the Renaissance. ‘Sovereignty capitalizes a territory’, Foucault observed more specifically, after discussing the building of a new capital city as the quintessential manifestation of sovereign power in the field of urban planning.Footnote ¹⁸ This has immediate and important resonances for the present discussion, as the Korangi project was closely linked—both in terms of politics and in terms of planning discourse—with ‘capitalization’ par excellence, the design of a new Pakistani capital city in Islamabad. Taken together, both projects marked a crucial step to transform ‘Pakistan’ from a state of sovereignty that existed only in a mobilized community to a sovereign State within internationally recognized territorial borders. The problem of territory was particularly poignant, as up to the very moment of state foundation itself, Pakistani nationalism had in many ways been strongly de-territorialized. While the precise geographic shape and location of ‘Pakistan’ was much contested and often fanciful, a sense of national community was powerfully and clearly instantiated in experiences which were not clearly bound in space—in communal aggression, in collective self-empowerment and in mass violence.Footnote ¹⁹ The people who had to pay the highest price for this ‘de-territorialized’ quality of the nation were the millions of refugees who suddenly found their homes to be in the wrong place after Pakistan had been thrown into a defined geographic existence. The Korangi township was first and foremost dedicated to them, and was, therefore, an initiative of re-territorialization of fundamental importance for the very existence of the new state.Footnote ²⁰

Potemkin comes to Pakistan

The Korangi project—the construction of a satellite town for several hundred thousands of residents southeast of Karachi—was the largest slum clearance and urban rehabilitation measure in Asia of its time, and the most spectacular single ‘development’ initiative by a Pakistani government since the country's foundation in 1947. Within weeks after General Ayub Khan's military take-over in October 1958, a site was selected, funding secured from US AID and the Ford Foundation, and a foreign consultancy firm contracted. By the summer of 1959 the first batch of 15,000 housing units was complete, and by the winter of the same year General Ayub ceremoniously handed over the keys to the first residents.Footnote ²¹ Heralded as the showpiece of a new commitment to ‘modernisation’, Korangi was immediately put on the itinerary of foreign dignitaries and journalists visiting Pakistan, including Ayub's most powerful foreign patron, US President Eisenhower, who visited in late 1959.Footnote ²²

In the first instance, Korangi was designed as the corner stone of a massive refugee rehabilitation scheme. The vast majority of Urdu-speaking Muslims leaving the Indian Union for Pakistan over the decade following Partition chose to settle in the urban areas of Sind. Their arrival transformed Karachi, formerly a trading centre of modest size, into a metropolis of one and a half million inhabitants, triggering an unprecedented housing crisis.Footnote ²³ The creation of designated refugee colonies by various Pakistani state agencies prior to Ayub's coup d'etat had largely remained a failure, particularly with respect to the economically weak. Virtually all of the first 50,000 families to occupy Korangi had eked out a precarious existence in refugee camps, in slum clusters in the very heart of Karachi, and in derelict housing properties left behind by Hindu refugees migrating in the opposite direction.Footnote ²⁴ But the new township was meant to be more than just another colony for the urban poor. Designed to provide all civic facilities and readily available places of employment in a designated industrial area, the new development was expected to attract middle-class and professional families of mixed backgrounds to grow in due course into a ‘balanced’ and relatively self-contained urban community.Footnote ²⁵

The record-time in which the first housing units—in fact, mass manufactured ‘shells’—were shown off to the world concealed the fact that the provision of even the most basic amenities lagged far behind settlement. Both Ayub's government and international consultants were clearly aware of this basic flaw right from the start,Footnote ²⁶ but decided to ignore it for the sake of short-term propaganda value. Behind the impressive prospect of row upon row of neat and tidy concrete houses, there was an absence or shortage of all basic necessities of life. Water was only available from improvised community taps.Footnote ²⁷ For years to come there was no sewage system, and until the very end of the project no electricity supply.Footnote ²⁸ Several fully occupied houses got badly damaged in the first monsoon because storm water drainage had not been completed.Footnote ²⁹ Most importantly, transport connections to Karachi remained hopelessly inadequate. Teachers, doctors and businessmen could not be persuaded to take up their work in what was increasingly seen as an urban wasteland miles from the city. Although the local industrial area did turn out to be a long-term success, it could only grow at a time-lag of several years after the first residents had arrived. Faced with immediate unemployment or with having to spend a much higher proportion of their meagre income on commuting to Karachi, many local residents decided to sell their allotted houses on the black market and move back to city-centre slums. The vision of attracting middle-class and upper-class residents never found any takers at all.Footnote ³⁰ The planned lease-purchase system of houses collapsed within the first two years of the new township's existence, when the collection of instalments from dissatisfied residents dropped close to zero. One of the guiding ideas behind the project, that it would be self-funding, had turned out to be unrealistic.Footnote ³¹ Despite its great enthusiasm for the project at the start, Ayub's government made no serious financial or policy commitment to save Korangi. Despite its professed enthusiasm for physical and economic planning, the regime never dedicated more than a single officer on partial loan from the Karachi Development Authority to the project. The grand-sounding National Housing and Settlements Agency that was formally in charge of Korangi was essentially a paper institution, set up solely for the purpose of attracting Ford Foundation funding. Instead, the foreign contractor, who had designed the township and accounted for almost all real planning activity on the ground, was shouldered with the responsibility for failure. When designated aid from foreign sources finally ran out in 1964, all further government commitment was terminated.Footnote ³² Korangi did not cease to exist as a place of urban habitation—as we shall see, it cannot even easily be described as a long-term failure—but its remaining and future inhabitants were largely left to fend for themselves.

Although designed to be a long-term development project in line with the large-scale urban reconstruction efforts carried out by many governments after the Second World War, Korangi was never more than of short-term importance to the major players involved in its creation. The project was conceived when both the new military government in Pakistan and its sponsors in Washington felt under immense pressure to demonstrate their ability to act whilst otherwise occupying weak positions on the ground.

By the time of Ayub's take-over, US-aid policy had come under intense domestic pressure. A Democrat-dominated legislature aggressively questioned whether development aid in general, and largess towards Pakistan in particular, was in the national interest. Some suggested an increase in aid to India at Pakistan's expense, others were doubtful about supporting military dictatorships. Moreover, the United States agencies directly involved in the dispensation of aid in Pakistan came under intense scrutiny and had to defend themselves against charges of inefficiency, corruption and misuse of funds.Footnote ³³ If the Eisenhower administration was to continue its financial commitment to Pakistan, Ayub would have to demonstrate that he was capable of delivering. The Korangi project was a perfect opportunity, not only because visible results could be achieved in a relatively short time, but also because the field of urban reconstruction transcended objections from powerful lobbyists on Capitol Hill. Other flagship development projects had attracted opposition in the past. Agricultural modernization was advocated by development experts, but blocked by the farming lobby as an increase in Pakistani food grain production would eventually undercut US export profits.Footnote ³⁴ Similarly, Pakistani initiatives in prestige heavy industries, such as shipbuilding and steel, had faltered under the opposition of sceptical geo-strategists and disgruntled US industrialists who feared that most of the lucrative contracts would go to European suppliers.Footnote ³⁵ The ‘rehabilitation’ of the urban poor, in contrast, fitted well into an established international discourse of post-war planning and could be tied in effortlessly with Cold War horror scenarios of Soviet encroachment.

If Korangi could be seen as the right project at the right time for the US administration, it was also an excellent short-term gap-filler in terms of domestic Pakistani politics. Pakistan had been in economic meltdown for some time. Ever since the collapse of world market prices for agricultural commodities after the Korean War boom in the early 1950s, the country had faced an ever-increasing problem of dwindling foreign exchange reserves. Successive governments responded to the crisis by the drastic curtailment of imports. As a result, industry was crippled because of its inability to get raw materials, spare parts or new investment goods. Urban unemployment rose, while the ordinary consumer found it impossible to procure even basic imported commodities such as toothpaste and soap on the market.Footnote ³⁶ The only serious foreign exchange earner for Pakistan proved to be its geo-strategic position. In a process that directly facilitated a predominant political role for the armed forces, the Pakistani elite traded membership in anti-communist military alliances for expanding US development aid, which by the second half of the decade directly or indirectly paid for a large part of the country's imports of consumer goods.Footnote ³⁷

Ayub's regime had assumed power under widespread popular approval with the promise that ‘non-political’ military men were more capable than civilians of solving Pakistan's economic problems. In reality, Ayub's regime had no such capability. The Pakistani state in the early Ayub period remained essentially a theatrical edifice. While the newspaper pages filled up with accounts of almost continuous travel by key ministers and their proclamations of far-reaching policy changes, basic constraints remained as intractable as ever. Like any other Pakistani government before or after, Ayub's regime was unable to significantly increase the very limited tax-raising powers of the state, or affect meaningful land reform to boost agricultural output. Being equally unable to address the immediate problems of high inflation and shortage of basic consumer goods, Ayub embarked on a highly publicized ‘moral economy’ crusade. All economic problems were blamed on the character flaws of scrupulous speculators, smugglers and black-marketers who could be publicly punished, while soldiers patrolled the markets and criminalized the sale of commodities above hastily imposed price ceilings.Footnote ³⁸

Ready-made ‘governmentality’, façon grecque

The foreign consultancy firm behind the Korangi project was Athens-based Doxiadis Associates (DA), founded and run by the urban theorist, architect and international salesman, Constantinos A. Doxiadis, who retained hands-on control. His many activities in Pakistan included not only the Korangi project, but also his lifetime magnum opus—the design of the new capital, Islamabad, which was also contracted shortly after Ayub's coup d'etat. Doxiadis was amongst the very first development consultants to operate on a commercial basis and on a global scale. His firm was active in more than 20 countries, with significant commissions awarded in Ghana, the US, Greece, Pakistan and Iraq.Footnote ³⁹ Doxiadis owed his success largely to his closeness to the Ford Foundation, which funded even his more fanciful projects without asking too many questions,Footnote ⁴⁰ and his contacts in Washington, DC, going back to his time as Deputy Minister of Reconstruction in Greece during the civil war with the communists. His planning discourse was developed in careful contradistinction to other forms of urbanism at the time—particularly to Le Corbusier's uncompromising (and often seen as left-leaning) espousal of the values of modernization—but also to attempts that advocated a return to vernacular traditions. As Doxiadis himself was only too aware, he was competing in a market place of development packages, and what was to make his own designs attractive to Third World governments and their metropolitan sponsors, was precisely that he promised to give due space and importance to both ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’.Footnote ⁴¹

Doxiadis began with the assumption that any planning practice had to take a comprehensive view of all aspects of human activity (which he called ‘Ekistics’). This gave his discourse a strong interdisciplinary and developmentalist character.Footnote ⁴² An important aspect of this approach was an exercise in surveying which would have to take into account not only geography, demographics, economics and architecture, but also—and extensively so—history, cultural traditions and religious life. In the case of Iraq, for instance, where DA was to draw up master plans for virtually all towns of moderate and large size, a veritable archive of facts had been carefully put together.Footnote ⁴³ Although somewhat less effort had gone into this activity in Pakistan, Doxiadis and his staff had also prepared extensive notes and photograph collections during several fact-finding trips to the country, which not only covered local and historical architectural styles, but also philosophical ruminations about the folk culture and national character of Pakistanis in the different regions of the country. Statistical analysis and textual engagement aside, it was through a careful reading of physical clues that the natural behaviour of local people could be established. The way local residents colonized the roadside or back-lanes, the traces of an unauthorized path trodden across designated green spaces, the colour of washing hung out to dry, the splash-puddles next to the communal water tap, and so on—all of this represented evidence to be photographed and decoded.Footnote ⁴⁴

Both the nature of this data and Doxiadis's attitude to its use conformed to Foucault's notion of ‘population’—the designated object of ‘security’ which is managed rather than controlled. The overriding aim was precisely to capture the ‘natural’ characteristics of the target constituency as closely as possible. Doxiadis emphasized above all else that all meaningful planning activity had to work with the natural ‘desires’—climatic, cultural, religious—of the people it was meant to serve. If the blueprint of the planner failed to calculate and anticipate such needs, a project would fail. Although often in favour of mass production and big interventions in practice, Doxiadis was intellectually indebted to the Edinburgh polymath and founding father of regional planning, Patrick Geddes.Footnote ⁴⁵ In his work on and in British India, the latter had always been very scathing of slum clearance and instead advocated a minimalist approach that gently directed local initiatives where absolutely necessary.Footnote ⁴⁶ Similarly for Doxiadis, mass housing in poor countries could only be successful—both from a practical and a financial point of view—if it was restricted to the bare minimum. He did not advocate the provision of complete dwellings to the poor, only of ‘shells’—basic mass-produced enclosures that would be open to alterations and extensions as the local residents deemed fit.Footnote ⁴⁷ It was precisely this non-interventionist tone, always at pains to stress the importance of self-help and local activism, that made Doxiadis a trusted name amongst his conservative-liberal sponsors in the United States. As he put it primarily for their benefit in the propaganda material that he delivered ready-made to the Pakistani authorities:

The second fundamental dictum in Doxiadis's planning discourse was that ongoing modernization entailed ongoing urbanization, which, if left unchecked, would lead to civilizational crisis. Not only would the growth of cities eventually make them choke to death on their own traffic, increasing exposure to the glittering world of the motorcar and the aeroplane would bring about the destruction of all those spaces where human beings could feel safe and rooted in a traditional life. These negative tendencies could be tamed and made humanly bearable through urban planning based on a careful separation of spatial ‘scales’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The latter were defined by their most appropriate mode of transportation: houses were to be grouped into small clusters around shared community facilities such as water taps, shops and primary schools which even the feeble-bodied such as the elderly and small children could reach on foot—a ‘human scale’; several such neighbourhoods could then be grouped around civic centres providing a higher order of amenities such as bazaars, tea-houses, mosques and secondary schools, again to be accessible without motorized transport.Footnote ⁵⁰ Several such ‘sectors’ could finally connect via the major roads running around them to form townships and cities, the ‘scale of the machine’. In order to prevent the latter from choking to death on their own car traffic—as would happen in consequence of concentric expansion seen in most ‘natural’ cities—Doxiadis advocated a new type of city growing linearly along a predetermined axis—a ‘dynapolis’.Footnote ⁵¹ Finally, in the scale of the railways and of air transportation, the correct management of international traffic in goods and people would eventually lead to the establishment of a single urban zone spanning the globe, ‘ecumenopolis’.Footnote ⁵²

Doxiadis's main objective and concern, then, was to devise categories to effectively channel and control ‘traffic’, mapping precisely onto what Foucault referred to as the very mechanism of ‘governmentality’ in the context of urban planning—the management of ‘circulation’Footnote ⁵³; that gentle steering of flows of people, capital, goods, and ideas. The very different disciplinary power (one that ‘isolates a space, determines a segment’; or put differently, one that ‘concentrates, focuses and encloses’Footnote ⁵⁴) was, of course, still necessary in this urban arrangement, but only as a secondary consideration. Both in Korangi and Islamabad—the first and only ‘dynapolis’ to make it from the drawing board to reality—certain separations had to be enforced. For instance, zoning regulations that kept places of work away from places of residence in order to increase control over the labour force, stipulations that commercial activities were not allowed in individual houses but were to be carried out in the bazaar areas of each neighbourhood, or a certain amount of policing of encroachments of roads and green spaces. But all these instances of a disciplinary mode were ultimately meant to enhance ‘circulation’ at strategically important points. At least in conception, Islamabad and Korangi were spaces of ‘governmentality’ before and above being spaces of discipline and sovereignty.

Discipline without security

Doxiadis's Pakistani clients operated with very different notions of ‘the city’ and its relationship to state power. With regard to both Korangi and Islamabad, Doxiadis envisioned integrated communities bringing together different social categories and different economic functions. In other words, cities were conceived as spaces of interaction and circulation, and as civic entities dominated by shared community spaces.Footnote ⁵⁵ For the Pakistani regime, in contrast, both settlements were primarily machines of disciplinary power, spaces where problem categories could be corralled into one place, and where circulation could be prevented rather than be facilitated.

The way in which slum clearance was experienced by its supposed beneficiaries combined a demonstration of arbitrary power with a façade of bureaucratic regularity. ‘Surveys’ of the number of destitute refugees were conducted at impossible speed by military officers. After the key areas of action had been identified, civil officers would appear in the slum colonies only a day or two before the actual movement of people was scheduled to begin. In an intricate system of checks and cross-checks amongst a hierarchy of scribes, officers and auditors, entitlement papers were drawn up and registered on numerous multicoloured proformas, before the local residents—quite deliberately without prior consultation or information—were loaded on trucks and driven to the new settlement site. Their numbers were carefully calculated and registered. The journey of the trucks was timed in advance in order to prevent the drivers from letting people off at locations other than the designated new township. Upon arrival the new housing units were to be allocated at random ostensibly in order to prevent black-marketeering or favouritism—often breaking up family units or other networks of kinship and solidarity that had grown up in response to slum life.Footnote ⁵⁶ At least according to the plans of those who settled them, people embedded in multiple webs of spatially mobile relationships were turned into stationary state subjects. In a move that immediately drew massive resistance,Footnote ⁵⁷ their social identity was to be reduced to the place of residence that the state had provided for them, to a territoriality rooted in sovereign power.

Although statistics as such are normally closely associated with the much less intrusive management of ‘natural’ desires in the mode of governmentality, the relevant surveys on slum dwelling refugees in Karachi operated entirely in a disciplinary mode. The clipboard and stopwatch of the settlement officers was—to use Foucault's own words—precisely designed to ‘allow nothing to escape’, to control even the ‘smallest infraction’ of the norm.Footnote ⁵⁸ The surveys stand out precisely because they identified and targeted ‘sovereign-subjects’ and not ‘population’. Ayub's surveys operated with a fixed social category—that of the ‘refugee slum dweller’—rather than a ‘series of variables’. The subject of urban planning was thereby directly informed by the normative discourses of both muhajir entitlement and of certain expectations of ‘proper’ urban living. The slum dwelling or homeless refugee directly contradicted the very mission of Pakistan itself, that of giving a permanent home to everybody who was ideologically committed to the new state. The problem of slums in Karachi was thus not the ‘natural’ outcrop of rapid urbanisation awaiting ‘management’, but a moral failing to be resolved in one sweep.

In consequence, these surveys at least had to aspire to capture the crisis in its entirety—rather than through probabilities, samples or case studies—listing, as far as possible, precise numbers of homeless refugees in relation to precise locations on the city map; a much invoked number of ‘537,525’ (or ‘119,402 families’) circulated through much of the material.Footnote ⁵⁹ Although the government was never able to fulfil its own ambitions, it aimed at a complete resettlement of all those identified. The solution was never a subtle and ‘analytical’ manipulation of ‘natural desire’. The new mass housing was constructed precisely where nobody wanted to go voluntarily. Compliance would not only have to be enforced, it would have to be enforced individually and directly. The prerogatives of territorial sovereignty were never far from the surface here. The objective behind this comprehensive disciplinary assault was, after all, the visible elimination of all irregular settlements from spaces of sovereignty in inner-city Karachi and their transfer to another equally visible space of sovereignty elsewhere. It is highly significant that amongst the first irregular slum colonies to be dismantled was Qaidabad, which existed in close proximity to one of the most important spaces of sovereignty of the new state, the mazar (mausoleum) of the State's Founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah.Footnote ⁶⁰

The fact that Korangi was located several miles outside the established city, and that the transport links between centre and suburb remained neglected for many years, was precisely the point, because it made the isolation of the malignant segment more effective. As Doxiadis had predicted right from the start, the project ‘failed’ because the government made no efforts to facilitate—to manage—the voluntary settlement of middle-class families in the area, as this would have involved financial stimuli and, of course, the provision of a functioning infrastructure. The case of Islamabad is immediately relevant because it acted as the necessary counterpart to Korangi. Here, it was ‘civil servants’ who had to be contained and disciplined in a remote location far away from the centres of urbanity. A secret cabinet White Paper on ‘Islamabad’ stated openly what every informed citizen of Karachi knew at the time, that the Ayub regime did not want to encourage interaction between intellectuals, business leaders, politicians and bureaucrats because this could only lead to ‘corruption’. Doxiadis was left to pencil an emphatic ‘no’ into his own private copy of the document but then proceeded with the project according to his patron's wishes.Footnote ⁶¹ The actual settlement in Islamabad, a widespread urban myth in Pakistan goes, was as involuntary as that in Korangi—with Ayub ‘punishing’ bothersome individuals with the poisoned chalice of a free housing plot in the middle of nowhere.

Sovereignty in concrete

For all its potential for more nuanced forms of social control, the Korangi project was first and foremost an enactment of sovereign power. Although the Karachi housing crisis had been longstanding and was widely covered in the Pakistani media, there had been no public discussion—or indeed as far as one can tell from the accessible records, even official deliberation—about the merits of the Korangi project itself. General Ayub Khan, in his capacity as Chief Martial Law Administrator, had simply delegated the power to resolve the refugee problem in any way he deemed fit to his second in command, General Azam Khan, who acted as Minister for Refugee Rehabilitation. A man with a known ‘go-getter’ attitude and some private interest in architecture and urban planning, Azam is reputed to have chosen the foreign consultancy company that was to plan and execute the Korangi project on the spot, simply because he was charmed when meeting C. A. Doxiadis for the first time. According to witnesses, the General was not even interested in discussing basic problems or resource constraints, and simply gave the order to proceed and left all else to the consultant.Footnote ⁶²

The military regime conceived and portrayed state power as something that rested fundamentally on decisiveness and will. Carl Schmitt's argument that the worst danger for the sovereign is not a wrong decision, but the inability to make any decision at all,Footnote ⁶³ applies equally well to the military commander who now happened to occupy the role of sovereign himself. Questions of technicalities and outcomes were secondary, and questions about legitimacy entirely excluded. The act of decision produced its own legitimacy.

What was emphasized in the official coverage of the Korangi project above all else was speed: contract to foundation stone, to completion of the first units—all accomplished within six months. Sovereign power relies on a form of temporality that is different from that of both disciplinary power and ‘security’. As Schmitt's critics have often pointed out when noticing the lack of positive content in his definition of the political, the act of decision does not have durationFootnote ⁶⁴; it is a punctuation mark inserted into the flow of time. Unlike a disciplinary regime that seeks to control behaviour minutely and continuously sovereign power is only present at the very moment of enactment—for instance, when a project is started or terminated in demonstrations of willpower, or in certain carefully choreographed moments of appropriation and bestowment. There is a basic incompatibility between a state conceived solely on the power to decide, and a long-term and ‘everyday’ project that over the course of its lifespan can only tie down and therefore limit future acts of decision. Really, ‘sovereign’ is only he who can destroy with the same absolute ease as he can build. The valorization of sovereign power over other sources of power may not only have directly contributed to the ‘failure’ of Korangi, it may—paradoxically—have turned failure into something like a desired outcome.

Korangi was, first and foremost, an occasion when the Pakistani state could stamp its power of decision in an emblematic form onto virgin land. The place where the new township was built was largely empty wasteland—a ‘terrible desert’ (‘khaufnak registan’) according to one early inhabitant unconnected to the projectFootnote ⁶⁵ —with existing settlements such as the madrasa Dar ul-Ulum of Maulana Mufti Muhammad Shafi and a few fishing facilities posing no serious obstacles to its appropriation.Footnote ⁶⁶ Once Korangi was built it was presented directly as the sovereign's territory on official occasions. General Ayub Khan and his most important ministers—as well as virtually every high-ranking foreign dignitary visiting Karachi—would travel by car on carefully demarcated routes across the new township, thus directly producing and consuming the space of the township itself. Their widely publicized visits usually ended with a climb onto the roof of the health centre in the ‘demonstration sector’ where building work was most advanced, and from where even the half-complete housing units in the distance combined with more finished rows of streets provided a powerful vista of territory-made-subject.Footnote ⁶⁷

Perhaps the most striking sovereign power of this kind was staged for Eisenhower's visit in late 1959. In addition to travelling through Karachi by official motorcade, the most powerful man in the world shared a helicopter with General Ayub to contemplate Korangi from the air. It was, of course, from a bird's eye perspective, when the built-up area of Korangi could be seen in stark contrast with the semi-desert surrounding it, that it really became an emblem of sovereignty. The people of Korangi were configured in ways that made them an integral part of this spatial and visual aesthetics; the following quote from Dawn described a particularly striking example: ‘From their areal [sic] vantage point the two Presidents had a fine view of school students in the compound forming themselves into an “I like Ike” arrangement. Another batch of school boys had formed themselves into a crescent and a star’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Although pushed to secondary importance by the spatial presence of mass architecture, sovereignty over people was never entirely excluded from such moments. It was either carefully staged—when Ayub handed over the keys to the first house to Haji Azmatullah, an artisan from Agra, for instanceFootnote ⁶⁹ —or offered entry points to subtle subversion, for example, when, true to style, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, broke loose from the official Queen's delegation and cornered one of the local shopkeepers into a ‘conversation’.Footnote ⁷⁰ A more significant contradiction existed between the strongly territorialized message of ‘bestriding’ Korangi and the much more people-centred discourse disseminated in the official souvenir brochures that were handed out on the same occasion. The impact of architecture and space is clearly acknowledged here, but it is framed with pictures of happy and smiling inhabitants who are also consistently moved centre-stage in the text.Footnote ⁷¹ As outlined earlier, the foreign consultant who produced this material clearly saw the power which operated in Korangi in ways different from the local regime.

Towards a post-colonial governmentality

The Korangi case study suggests that the Pakistani state under General Ayub had an overriding interest in the enactment of sovereign power and its continued territorialization, some concern for the possibilities of disciplinary power, but little appreciation of the calculated lightness of touch of ‘governmentality’. Just as the military regime believed (at least in public) that economic problems could be resolved by identifying categories of economic miscreants, so they also assumed that urban overcrowding was a one-off problem caused by the dislocation of Partition and fuelled by the immoral practices of land speculators and corrupt government officials. Government required above all else a decisive and ‘no-nonsense’ attitude that deliberately violated the course of ‘natural’ economic and social processes. But such disciplinary interventionism also had clear limits. Pakistan, under Ayub, never turned into a ‘police state’ in Foucault's senseFootnote ⁷² of a highly interventionist agency out to regulate most aspects of life for the benefit of its subjects. The kind of disciplinary power that was brought to bear on the unfortunate slum dwellers of Qaidabad as they were trucked out to thousands of neatly arranged concrete shells, was of course all too ‘real’; a problem category had indeed been removed from the realm of the ‘normal’ and been concentrated in a new confined location. But in the end this kind of disciplinary project was significant for a different reason—because it gave substance to a ‘dream’ of power.Footnote ⁷³ Disciplinary power functioned as the halo of sovereign power.

The clearance of inner city slums in Karachi and the settlement of refugees were of some importance for some time, but they did not command sustained commitment. Surprisingly little disciplinary power was brought to bear on the residents of Korangi after their forcible transportation. Many filtered back into the city, and, with regard to those who stayed, planning provisions were only enforced in a lacklustre fashion. Most importantly, the military regime never used the sovereign power at its disposal to enforce the payment of subscriptions amongst Korangi residents. When fewer and fewer of them made lease payments during the early 1960s, a hapless Karachi Development Authority attempted to play it tough by threatening eviction. The local response was angry and sustained, culminating in an all-out rent strike in 1963.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the end, the regime preferred to cut loose from the project rather than intervene. Similarly, local residents were highly successful in altering Doxiadis's Master Plan in several important ways through a politics of ‘everyday’ resistance. In order to escape the need to pay rents to the municipality, for instance, they never moved into the bazaar areas and commercial spaces designated for them, and preferred to run shops and small enterprises from their homes.Footnote ⁷⁵ To the great chagrin of the resident consultants, the sole Pakistani government official in charge of the project routinely capitulated to local demands because he wanted to avoid opposition. This was particularly noticeable when such demands were phrased in a religious language, for instance, in the widespread practice of colonizing empty spaces with illegally constructed mosques.Footnote ⁷⁶

It was due to similar local initiative without state backing that at least some parts of Korangi eventually came to flourish: contemporary aerial pictures show Doxiadis's overall layout largely realized, although few of the neighbourhoods and community facilities he built have survived. In some of his designated sectors erstwhile markets and schools are abandoned and partly overgrown with vegetation. But elsewhere—for instance, in the old ‘demonstration sector’ so admired by foreign visitors back in 1960—the original buildings have been entirely colonized by a multitude of much smaller structures. The overall impression is one of thriving lower middle-class shopping areas with surprisingly well-maintained roads and a good amount of vehicular traffic.Footnote ⁷⁷ The successful management of ‘circulation’ was achieved within the framework of a ‘governmentality’ of absence, it appears, that left everything to non-state agency.

However, let us not lose sight of Dr Doxiadis and his elaborate plans for ‘security’ power in new townships like Korangi. He deserves the space he was given in this discussion of Pakistani ‘governmentality’ for good reason. After all, he was—despite his many disagreements with and his final abandonment by Ayub's regime— himself a part of the Pakistani state. The local DA office had as much influence over the actual building work in Korangi as the understaffed ‘official’ state organs involved, and on many occasions decisions on local requests were sought from them directly.Footnote ⁷⁸ Doxiadis was not alone in this. Many foreign experts and development organisations similarly had become part of the ‘local’ state: from the Harvard Advisory Group drafting economic policy to the US engineers building the Karnaphuli Multipurpose Barrage in East Pakistan.

It is unlikely that Korangi would ever have come into existence if international connections had not played such an important role in the constitution of the Pakistani state. The highly uneven relationship between sovereign, disciplinary and ‘security’ power in the politics of the project was never a case of ‘local’ against ‘international’, however. Doxiadis, the foreign expert, may have personified the unrealized potentialities of ‘governmentality’, but in every other respect, the international connection actually amplified the sovereignty focus of the post-colonial Pakistani state.

Discounting the kind of vested interests that ‘development’ inevitably produced among metropolitan manufacturers, technocrats and international salesmen, there is no reason to assume too close a relationship between the interests of global capital and the sponsorship of ‘governmentality’. Pakistan occupied a position of some importance in the global economy by virtue of its near monopoly over the production and primary manufacture of jute (and to a lesser extent its emerging cotton industry in West Pakistan), and this undoubtedly did have some impact on the character of the state.Footnote ⁷⁹ But, crucially, it did not necessitate the deep involvement of the state in the organization of the relations of production which, at least on paper, the Korangi project with its workers’ housing and industrial zone represented. This is not to say that the Ayub regime did not play any role in economic management; it certainly did in its provision of state-backed loans and incentives and in the patronage of a new class of state-dependent industrialists; but it did not tactically deploy ‘security’ power to create a large, disciplined and spatially fixed formal labour force. On the contrary, the fact that the new mass housing was built in Karachi and not in the jute-producing East—as well as that the settlement of labour was deliberately out of sync with the development of industry—largely discredits the argument that a project like Korangi was some sort of ‘software’ to open up Pakistan to the kind of global capitalism as then existed under cold war conditions.Footnote ⁸⁰

It was perhaps Pakistan's more imaginary than real strategic importance for a ‘southern arch’ of anti-communist Muslim states that made it important to US foreign policy, and it was US financial and political assistance that allowed the Pakistani military to gain a predominant position in Pakistani society. What mattered was not that Pakistan would turn into a fully functioning welfare state of the kind suggested by the Korangi project, but that Pakistan would channel its meagre resources into an armed agency ready to defend US interests in the wider region. US official thinking made no secret of this and by the late 1950s, the attitude towards development aid per se was one of healthy scepticism, and whatever aid was given—including substantial financial assistance—was directly justified with reference to Pakistan's strategic role.Footnote ⁸¹ In short, the US administration wanted precisely the kind of martial state obsessed with sovereign power as had actually come into existence under General Ayub Khan. A more integrated edifice based on a self-disciplined ‘society’, enlightened management and consensual people's sovereignty could never have been monopolized as a global praetorian service provider.

In final analysis, the Korangi project reveals a fundamental paradox: the Pakistani state has gained and defended its existence and character through the enactment of its own failure. In theory, Korangi served as a representation of the kind of successful ‘triangulation’ of the three powers—to use Foucault once more—which had turned the welfare states of Western Europe into oases of consensual politics and stability. The new township helped to territorialize state sovereignty, endowed the latter with a disciplinary halo and, if Doxiadis’ visions had been duly realized, had at least the potential to become a space of security/governmentality. In practice, Korangi had to be abandoned because the martial state could not tolerate becoming a victim of its own success. Sovereign power had to destroy what it had created just to be sure that its own creature had not acquired a power of its own. It is after all only in a context of ‘raw’ sovereignty and ‘weak’ governmentality that a regime like Ayub's could justify the continuing maintenance of a state of ‘exception’. The Korangi township thus encapsulated the dual use of ‘development’ for postcolonial sovereignty—it demonstrated what an act of executive willpower could achieve, and through its very failure as a governmentality project, also that executive willpower would never become superfluous.