State, society, and the prism of “community development”

Neo-Gramscian accounts of the Indian postcolonial state have shown how projects of state-led planning for industrialization were instrumental in garnering consent among the traditional (agrarian) ruling classes (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee1986, chapter 5; Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee and Terence1993a; cf. Sanyal Reference Sanyal2007: 27–41). Reconceptualizing the notion of “passive revolution” in terms of the complexities of rural class politics, this line of argumentation goes as follows.Footnote ⁸ Postcolonial modernizers and nationalizing bourgeoisies relied on rural class, caste, and gendered hierarchies for realizing planning priorities geared toward rapid capitalist industrialization. The relative neglect of the agrarian question of food was reflected in the mid-twentieth century rationale for national economic planning, which marginalized the political (and economic) rights of various segments of the peasantry in favor of facilitating industrial growth based on migrant labor, cheap wage goods, and capital-intensive manufacturing. As an instrument of the “passive revolution of capital,” development planning thus constituted “a realm of rational expertise [seemingly] outside the political process … where subjects of power were constructed as objects of knowledge” (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee and Terence1993a: 62–70; Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee1993b, chapter 10; Prakash Reference Prakash1999: 179–99; cf. Immerwahr Reference Immerwahr2015: 217–8).

The political theorist Timothy Mitchell premises this theoretical history of planning through what he calls the “state effect.” Simply put, the modern separation of the state from “society” (and the economy) turns on reproducing a distinction in political practice. This apparently commonsensical distinction becomes an “abstraction [which] is the effect of the state – a nonmaterial totality that seems to exist apart from the material world of [political] society” (Mitchell Reference Mitchell1999: 91) It is this register of de-historicizing and naturalizing the historicity of the relation between the state and (political) society that is foregrounded in Mitchell’s framing, as a function of modern “systems of disciplinary power and techniques of production” (ibid.). The “state effect” is conceived as analogous to the abstraction of exchange value through which “the mundane objects and processes from which [exchange value] is created” appears as such, via aggregate statistical indices of market prices, investment, employment, and so on – i.e., the practices that constitute the “economy” as a substantive object of the modern capitalist organization of labor (Mitchell Reference Mitchell1999: 91–5). At this register, planning for “community development” renders contending social (class) interests as part of a naturalized order, to be reproduced, reformed, or even radically transformed in the time of decolonization. Consequently, the neo-Gramscian focus on class interests is not abandoned but de-emphasized in foregrounding their socio-historical conditions of possibility in political practice.

Questions of what the idea of “community development” entailed, why specific projects took the political form(s) that they did, and how its practices inflected complex negotiations characterizing the politics of interests among social actors have been the subject of recent historiographic inquiries. Historians of US diplomacy and the politics of international development have pushed back against arguments that attribute to “community development” a narrow Cold War instrumentality, entrenching social hierarchies and anti-democratic practices within (ex-) colonial contexts. Some, like the historian Daniel Immerwahr, argue that community development proponents during the 1950s were often sincere in their enthusiasm for “agrarian democracy,” attuned to the anti-colonial zeitgeist and hopes of expanding political rights from below. For Immerwahr, the neo-Gramscian register, emphasizing the reproduction of social hierarchical relations associated with colonial capitalist practices, underplays the contingencies characterizing the contested historical trajectories of “community development” projects in India, the Philippines, and the US, respectively (Immerwahr Reference Immerwahr2015: 217–8; also, see Engerman Reference Engerman2018; cf. Schrader Reference Schrader2016).

Others contend that such projects were integral to nationalizing bourgeoisies and progressive-liberal intellectuals in decolonizing societies, where the presumed reimposition of a (neo)imperial will by the US and its western European allies during the early years of the Cold War was complicated by the former’s political demands (Miller Reference Miller2013; cf. Puente Reference Puente2023; Soliz Reference Soliz2021). Yet others broadly emphasize the transnational field of “nation-building” as the US-centric consolidation of social scientific knowledge through the object of “development” transformed the political-societal underpinnings of statecraft across the global North-South divide following the demise of European empires (Goldstein Reference Goldstein2012; Offner Reference Offner2019; cf. Roy and Crane Reference Roy and Shaw Crane2015; also, Ekbladh Reference Ekbladh2010; Gilman Reference Gilman2007; Lorenzini Reference Lorenzini2019; Solovey and Daye Reference Solovey and Daye2021).

Community development projects thus inflected a political process, insofar as traditional rural power brokers, including segments of the peasantry and rural middle classes, laid claims on economic redistribution and political power-sharing with nationalizing publics and transnational actors during the early Cold War conjuncture of decolonization. The evidence from 1950s East Pakistan corroborates this point. As disinvestment, administrative highhandedness, and “benign neglect” of agrarian-peasant economies continued to characterize postcolonial state-making vis-à-vis the priorities of urban-centric industrialization, failures to realize agrarian expectations for social betterment and mobility led to discontent. “Community development” proposed to redress the political-societal consequences of this widening gap between rising expectations and lived realities in the countryside amid growing economic precarity and the uncertainties of rural social life (Sinha Reference Sinha2008; cf. Sackley Reference Sackley2011; Reference Sackley2013; also, Raper Reference Raper1970; Thorner Reference Thorner1981).

The prism of community development thus enables a political conjunctural analysis of mid-twentieth century decolonization and the Cold War in the “periphery” (see McMahon Reference McMahon1994). The symptoms of growing socioeconomic inequality and political exclusions in the immediate postcolonial conjuncture strengthened the appeal of alternatives associated with both communist movements and anti-colonial statist projects, including collectivization, the radicalization of land reforms, and other measures upending rural tenancy and debt relations. Community development projects allowed US officials and postcolonial elites to respond to such appeals on their own terrain. Hence, their “state effect,” in Mitchell’s terms, sought to turn market conditions in favor of localized peasant-rural economies, even as the latter were (formally) subsumed by the priorities of planned industrialization. This contradictory motif internal to “community development” was reflected in its contending ideas, practices, and substantive outcomes. Hence, such projects were not simply instruments of reproducing (post)colonial class rule, nor were they unmediated in their consolidation of US hegemony “from below.” Rather, their changing practices and outcomes were contingent on what the social theorist William Sewell called the “conjuncture of structures” (Sewell Jr. 2005: 82–114; Sahlins Reference Sahlins1985; cf. Koselleck Reference Koselleck and Tribe2004).

Such an analytical prism enables a methodological procedure for foregrounding the transnational field of postcolonial state formations in characterizing the “Cold War” in global conjunctural terms, structured by the entwined political-societal and geopolitical inflections of world-historical processes – i.e., of decolonization and postcolonial development (Kapoor Reference Kapoor2008; F. Cooper and Packard Reference Cooper and Packard1997; cf. McMichael Reference McMichael1990; Tomich Reference Tomich1994). Political subjects understood and used the idea(s) of “community development” in adapting, legitimizing, and even abandoning colonial state practices. Its changing meanings and political consequences are traceable in the records of projects like V-AID in (East) Pakistan. The transnational field of operations involving the circulation of ideas, personnel, and finances, mediated by official US agencies, research institutions, and wealthy philanthropic organizations like the Ford Foundation, constitutes the political geography of the project’s archives. More importantly, these archives register what the historical anthropologist Ann Stoler called “negative prints,” where official anxieties and experiences also document contending interests and expectations “from below” (Stoler Reference Stoler2009: 9–22). A contrapuntal reading of these archives implies reflecting on the substantive-historical conditions of archiving itself, and the narrative form(s) and sites of history-writing that they facilitate beyond the telos of methodological nationalisms, or the US/North Atlantic-centric chronicling of (neo)realist international relations (e.g., Magubane Reference Magubane, Clemens and Orloff2005; Rosenberg Reference Rosenberg1994; also, see Trouillot Reference Trouillot1995). Genres of documentation include budgetary records, evaluation reports, official memos, field accounts, mimeographed interviews, and the personal reflections of those associated with V-AID, including key US and Pakistani officials, researchers, farmers, rural middle-class youth, and Ford Foundation staff.

The approach here can be surmised in terms of undoing a double mischaracterization regarding the socio-historical outcomes of community development projects. To consider such projects as harbingers of a monolithic “philanthropic capitalism” or to regard the contested ideas and practices of development planning as simply the advancing of an “imperial or hegemonic planning mentality that excludes the necessary role of local knowledge” poses the following problems (Scott, quoted in Parmar Reference Parmar2012: 280; also, see Ziai Reference Ziai2016; cf. Ferguson Reference Ferguson2013; Kapoor Reference Kapoor2008). First, from a social-historiographic standpoint, the contingencies enabling the appropriation of “local knowledge” for legitimizing such projects, as well as the specific conditions under which such appropriation came to be reinforced and challenged, are elided. Second, from the neo-Gramscian vantage, both “philanthropic capitalism” and the “imperial or hegemonic planning mentality” require specification in (class) relational terms, which in turn alludes to the contending interests surrounding agrarian modernization across political-societal and geopolitical registers.Footnote ⁹

Take for instance a recent (and only) historiographical study of V-AID, which argues that the project was crucial to the entrenching of a “development discourse” in East Pakistan (Bhuiyan et al. Reference Bhuiyan, Haque Faraizi and McAllister2005). Without illuminating its colonial genealogies or its contingent effects, the authors fail to account for the specific conjunctural conditions inflected by the project’s discursive instrumentality. Rather, V-AID is conceived as a timeless extension of the (post)colonial state’s “surveillance gaze” in the disciplining of insurgent peasantries. The result is an ahistorical account which impedes a more accurate understanding of what happened. For example, early V-AID training centers in Gaibandha and Daulatpur were strongholds of the tebhaga movement among sharecroppers since the mid-1940s (Cooper Reference Cooper1988; Umar Reference Umar2004). While the choice of location appears to substantiate a surveillance motive, the evidence suggests otherwise. When the centers were opened in 1953, organized peasant agitation against landlordism and taxation regimes had dissipated in these areas due to the brutal campaign of repression unleashed by the provincial Muslim League government (Umar Reference Umar2004: 144–9). Moreover, within a few months of their establishment, V-AID proponents admitted “bleak prospects” regarding the training centers, not due to peasant intransigence but the lack of enthusiasm among middle-class V-AID recruits.Footnote ¹⁰ Hence, questions of state surveillance, counterinsurgent measures, and the (mis)uses of “local knowledge” in community development projects cannot be assumed but explained. The prism of community development enables examining such historically entwineddynamics of the (geo)politics of Cold War agrarian modernization and political-societal tensions “from below,” through a contrapuntal reading of the archive. The result is an alternate account pace both nationalist and (neo)colonial narratives of developmentalism and Cold War triumphalism, respectively (cf. Eschen Reference Eschen2022).

From “rural reconstruction” to community development in Eastern Bengal

The idea of state-led planning for rural development had lost its legitimacy long before the 1943 famine in colonial Bengal. “Rural reconstruction” had become the mantra of the colonial state’s Agriculture Department. Systematizing cadastral surveys for regulating revenue arrangements and government-owned lands, the department was dominated by large landowning and British planter interests since its founding in the late nineteenth century. Its aim was to improve productivity as the means to secure greater revenue extraction from peasant-agrarians and to explore prospects for new cash crops. The department ran several research stations or “demonstration farms.”Footnote ¹¹ Activities included improving land use, soil conservation, and irrigation techniques alongside plant-breeding experiments and the establishing of rural cooperatives, organized by state officials and experts (see Hodge Reference Hodge2007). By the turn of the century, such efforts were both contested and appropriated by peasant-cultivators and landless workers for securing their means of subsistence (e.g., Windel Reference Windel2022; also, see Besky Reference Besky2021 and Iqbal Reference Iqbal2017 on eastern Himalayan/British Bengal; Lewis Reference Lewis2001 and Milford and McCann Reference Milford and McCann2022 on British Kenyan contexts).

The requirements of cheap food for Calcutta’s growing industrial metropolis as well as the political salience of peasant agriculture in eastern Bengal strengthened the case for reorienting the department along the lines of “welfare and development.” This came at a moment when many jute-belt districts were net importers of food grain due to longstanding colonial policies supporting peasant cultivation of the cash crop. The process was driven by the long boom in the world market for jute, following its substitution of Russian flax in the mid-nineteenth century (Ali Reference Ali2018; also, Bagchi Reference Bagchi2010). However, such reorienting of state practices via the Agriculture Department’s rural reconstruction initiatives was cut short with the outbreak of World War II. Trade blockades and austerity measures combined with the Japanese invasion had halted Burmese rice imports, disrupted distribution networks, and subjected “non-priority populations,” including landless workers and peasants to famine across large parts of eastern Bengal’s jute belt. Widespread public criticism of colonial policies and disillusionment among the peasantries followed. Belated campaigns among political elites and colonial authorities to “Grow More Food” rang hollow, even as the latter failed to acknowledge, let alone address, longstanding inequalities and market-driven vulnerabilities that had aggravated the crisis (Mukherjee Reference Mukherjee2015; Sherman Reference Sherman2013; cf. Khan Reference Khan1983b: 193–217). After Pakistan’s independence, any reference to the colonial vestiges of agricultural policy, including prewar “rural reconstruction,” lacked legitimacy and was avoided by the proponents of community development.

Such a context inflected the longue durée dynamics of uneven and combined development vis-à-vis the conjunctural shifts in eastern Bengal’s agrarian political society. The fortunes of the jute-belt peasantries were bound to the vicissitudes of the world-economy since the mid-nineteenth century (Ali Reference Ali2018; also, Bose Reference Bose1986; Iqbal Reference Iqbal2010). The disruption of flax production following the Crimean War (1854–56) led to growing world demand for jute, a substitute crop. Incentivized by the British colonial state, the crop was profitably grown across large parts of eastern Bengal, expanding trade and credit networks centered on hinterland towns and riparian junctions. The long jute boom supplemented paddy-based subsistence economies till the World War I. World market conditions deteriorated further during the global depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s (Ali Reference Ali2018: 37–66).

This wider confluence of geopolitical and world-economic dynamics shaped the emergence of a distinctive, Bengali Muslim vernacular public in the region (N. Bose Reference Bose2014; K. Ahmad Reference Ahmad1967; Sofa Reference Sofa and Anwar2018). Cultural-political idioms of “self-fashioning” through private consumption had organized the collective identity of the agrarian middle classes and their subsequent claims on (colonial) state power. The instruments for realizing such an identity included new forms of everyday consumerism, modern education, the use of colonial courts for litigation, and involvement in local administration alongside participation in party politics and social movements (Ali Reference Ali2018: 37–93; also, Sartori Reference Sartori2014).

An emerging anti-colonial movement (Swadeshi) during the early twentieth century, led by the Calcutta-centric Hindu bhadralok or middle classes, bore a fraught relationship to the sensibilities of this Bengali Muslim public. While the Swadeshi movement captured middle-class aspirations for political power, its demands for boycotting (British) imports, reuniting a partitioned Bengal (1905–11) centered on Calcutta, and the subjugation of peasant economies and trade toward urban-industrial priorities divided the Bengali middle classes along both rural-urban and religious-communal lines (Ali Reference Ali2018: 37–66; cf. Sarkar Reference Sarkar1973). Swadeshi’s autarkic measures threatened to undermine jute-boom dividends, including import-driven consumerism and trading opportunities in Bengal’s eastern hinterlands. With the subsiding of Swadeshi politics and worsening socio-economic conditions during the Great Depression, earlier idioms of “self-fashioning” gave way to an Islamic discourse of frugality and work ethic. The vernacular, religious-communal identity constituted among Bengali Muslim agrarian (middle) classes persisted amid new forms of organizing around what the historian Tariq Omar Ali calls the “politics of immiseration” (Ali Reference Ali2018: 108–36; also, N. Bose Reference Bose2014; cf. S. Bose Reference Bose1986).

By the mid-1930s, a shifting political subjectivity accompanied downwardly mobile agrarians and the urbanizing middle-class milieu in eastern Bengal. Varying interests converged around issues of economic precarity, failing expectations for mobility, and nostalgia for agrarian futures past around the commodified sign of jute, the “golden fiber.” The electoral potency of an emerging Bengali Muslim coalition was established in the provincial elections held under the 1935 Government of India Act. The meteoric rise of A.K. Fazlul Haque’s Krishak Praja Party in the 1936–37 elections was based on agrarian demands for better jute prices against the interests of Calcutta-based traders and jute mill-owners (Ali Reference Ali2018: 137–67). The campaign had successfully drawn the organizational energies of longstanding peasant (Krishak) movements (ibid., see Bose Reference Bose1986, chapter 6). A new politics of aggrievement was being articulated in class terms, pitting a coalition of landed agrarians, sharecropping tenants, and urbanizing middle classes against jute mill-owners, landlords, traders, and high colonial officials. Eschewing the socio-economic needs of individual agrarians and foregrounding the political-societal aspirations of “rural communities,” the egalitarian ethos implicit in the coalition’s politics questioned the existing meanings of (non-)cooperation within the anti-colonial repertoire of mobilization. In other words, the Gandhian popularization of non-cooperation with the British government during the early 1920s was inflected by the possibilities of a horizontal form of cooperation, between peasant-agrarians and urbanizing middle classes, pursuing contingent claims on the colonial state for collective upliftment, as Bengali Muslims (N. Bose Reference Bose2014; also, Murshid Reference Murshid1995; cf. Sen Reference Sen1976).

This moment of political effervescence accompanied an active interest among educated Bengali Muslims on agrarian issues, including urban professionals, politicians, state officials, and even trade union leaders. This was reflected in the enthusiastic reception of a treatise describing the experiences of a “rural experiment” organized by a colonial civil servant, stationed at the jute-belt hinterland town of Sirajganj (Ishaque Reference Ishaque1938). HSM Ishaque embodied the spirit of social reform prominent among the English-educated, Bengali middle classes (Iqbal Reference Iqbal2010: 99–115; cf. Sarkar Reference Sarkar1997: 82–108; Bannerji Reference Bannerji2020). Ishaque had spent several years in Sirajganj organizing rural cooperatives and “self-help” projects among landed and tenant farmers. These addressed various local concerns – curtailing the power of usurious moneylenders, alleviating indebtedness through alternate savings and credit associations, canal maintenance, crop experimentation, and land use changes for improving productivity. Ishaque also initiated an adult literacy program encouraging the participation of rural women. His reflections in the treatise outlined an early prefiguration of participatory action research.

Ishaque’s case for rural cooperatives found an enthusiastic audience among segments of the Bengali Muslim public, carving out a space of mass politics outside the Indian National Congress and the elitism of the Muslim League’s old guard. This meant mobilizing around rural-agrarian concerns, including problems of landlordism, moneylending practices, the unfairness of revenue regimes and market pricing mechanisms, and disinvestment from rural infrastructures like waterways and canals. Premised on reconfiguring rural power structures in favor of middling and smallholding peasants, Ishaque’s treatise offered a political blueprint for laying claims on the colonial state, even though the practices it described bore an ambiguous relationship to the Krishak movements organized around anti-landlordism and sharecroppers’ demands for occupancy rights and better revenue arrangements. Consequently, the treatise drew praise from the Calcutta-centric leadership of the Haque-era coalition, including the provincial minister for commerce and labor Husseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy who wrote a glowing foreword to its English edition (Ishaque Reference Ishaque1938: i–v).

The Krishak Praja-Muslim League coalition of the late 1930s was a force of expediency that gave segments of the Bengali Muslim public a sought-after albeit precarious stake in administering the colonial state. Internal tensions, combined with pressures from Calcutta traders and jute mill-owner, ensured the failure of the Haque-led government in realizing favorable jute prices for cultivators. While the provincial ministry succeeded in passing amendments to existing laws favoring tenants, including provisions for debt relief and occupancy rights, the outbreak of war prevented their implementation. Political energies dissipated as leading figures of the government were co-opted in the administering of wartime policies. Following the disastrous famine, enthusiasm for “self-help” projects had become a distant memory. The war years marked a move away from the politics of aggrievement, accompanied by escalating religious-communal tensions and the popularity of the Pakistan movement (Ali Reference Ali2018: 137–93). The movement’s call for a postcolonial homeland for “Indian Muslims” carried a peculiar appeal in this conjuncture. While the agrarian majority in eastern Bengal were mainly Muslim peasants, landless workers, and sharecroppers, a disproportionate segment of the “traditional” ruling classes – i.e., zamindari landlords, merchants, and mill-owners as well as higher ranking administrators, professionals, and urban-educated middle classes were mainly upper-caste Hindus (N. Bose Reference Bose2014; cf. Sen Reference Sen1976; also, Hashmi Reference Hashmi1992). The anti-colonial zeitgeist had thus taken on a religious-communal character by the mid-1940s, despite longstanding and widespread practices of delegating political authority to the rural Muslim middle classes under the zamindari system, as well as the immanently class-based demands of anti-landlordism (Bhattacharya Reference Bhattacharya and Jaffrelot2002; Fazal Reference Fazal and Bandyopadhyay2016).

The establishment of Pakistan did not result in the immediate abolishing of landlordism, or resolve the claims of tenant cultivators against existing taxation regimes. By mid-1948, peasant mobilizations turned insurgent in some places with the organizational support of Krishak Samity activists. Counterinsurgency measures by better-armed police and paramilitary forces brutally suppressed these movements over several months (Umar Reference Umar2004: 112–51). Meanwhile, official corruption followed the postcolonial state’s harsh food procurement policies, further entrenching agrarian inequalities (Kamal Reference Kamal2009: 11–70). State violence (dis)abused the idea of Pakistan as a ‘peasant utopia’ for the region’s Bengali Muslim agrarian majority, popularized only a few years earlier by both the Muslim League and the Communist Party in their expedient alliance against landlordism (Ali Reference Ali2018: 168–93; see Hashmi Reference Hashmi1992). The perfect storm of “communal strife, administrative mismanagement, and the authoritarian approach of the government and the ruling party [the provincial Muslim League]” aggravated an acute food crisis in the province (Kamal Reference Kamal2009: 72–5; Umar Reference Umar2004).

Agrarian discontent was compounded by protests in Dacca when Bengali students, political activists, and segments of the progressive intelligentsia rallied against the new state’s official language policy (Umar Reference Umar2000). Religious-communal tensions surged in the countryside, as the Muslim League base constituted by jotedars (petty landlords), traders, union council leaders, and smalltown officials mobilized around a chauvinistic discourse of Islamic Pakistanism (e.g., Bandyopadhyay and Chaudhury Reference Bandyopadhyay and Chaudhury2022). This discourse was anti-minority, anti-communist, and anti-Indian in equal measure, emphasizing the ethno-racialized superiority of Urdu/Indo-Persian Islamic culture as the legitimate basis for Pakistani nationalism (Fazal Reference Fazal and Bandyopadhyay2016; Toor Reference Toor2011: 18–51). Meanwhile, political opponents of the Muslim League government, including those organized by the newly formed Awami (Muslim) League and its left-leaning student cadres, mobilized around demands for ethnolinguistic recognition and regional autonomy. Many among them were also critical of the US-Pakistan alliance, recognizing its instrumentality for the Pakistani center’s assault on democratic rights and redistributive agendas “from below” (Umar Reference Umar2004: 338–44; cf. M. Ahmad Reference Ahmad2016).

It was in this context of unrest that the V-AID project was proposed by the Pakistani center, with financial-technical support from the Ford Foundation and US agencies. “To give a welfare bias to the entire administrative structure of the Government,” proclaimed the five-year plan for the V-AID project.Footnote ¹² ‘Community development’ appeared as the panacea to unrest, emphasizing a civic duty in nation-building through agrarian modernization and the transformation of state practices, from the maintenance of law and order to the securing of ‘welfare and development’ (cf. Sutton Reference Sutton and Fukuyama2005). During this time, HSM Ishaque had risen to one of the highest positions in Pakistan’s postcolonial bureaucracy. As chief secretary of the provincial government of East Bengal, Ishaque was asked to formulate the long-run objectives of V-AID. His experiences in Sirajganj made him an obvious choice for US and Pakistani officials. However, Ishaque was careful not to mention these early projects in his proposals, officially circulated in 1953.Footnote ¹³ As we have seen, the agrarian-populist coalition that had propelled such efforts into the public imagination was already marginalized by the mid-1940s. ‘Rural reconstruction’ efforts were relegated to the dustbin of history following the wartime famine of 1943–44. It was therefore expedient to forget the actuality of colonial-era projects while resuscitating their ideas via ‘community development.’

Expectations of decolonization had eroded the paternalistic authority with which earlier ideas of rural reconstruction were advanced, i.e., without explicitly considering the subsistence of the agrarian poor and the dispossessed. Moreover, many experts and official representatives of US agencies and philanthropic foundations had experiences that attuned them to the importance of local agroecological and political-societal conditions in implementing state-led modernization initiatives. Many genuinely sympathized with the plight of the poor agrarian. Yet, the Manichean lenses of Cold War competition had made towing the official line difficult to infringe without serious repercussions, especially following the rise of McCarthyism in the US. Consequently, most experts and officials submitted to geostrategic imperatives where advancing an agrarian democracy from below was undercut, even as the support of third-world administrations and political elites was sought in suppressing restive rural constituencies.

In a frank admission to Pakistani officials, the American agronomist Horace Holmes claimed that the “innate intelligence of the peasant … [in deploying] local implements and seed varieties … adapted through generations of actual practice and experimentation through trial and error … work better with both the ecological conditions and “habits” of farmers.”Footnote ¹⁴ Holmes argued that peasant-cultivators did not really need the technical assistance being offered to them, given that such assistance was based on models and practices developed under different socio-cultural, technological, and ecological conditions in North American contexts.Footnote ¹⁵ However, as V-AID advisor John Southern told fellow staff at the US Technical Cooperation Administration’s office in Karachi, the real concern was the “social mode” of technical assistance and aid delivery, i.e., to secure the support of those with political authority and economic power in the countryside.Footnote ¹⁶ “Felt needs,” including aspirations for agrarian democracy, did not sit comfortably with the reproduction of colonial-era state practices and hierarchical power relations which Southern’s prerogative had called for. Yet, the reigning geopolitical rationality among US officials and policymakers had deemed such reproduction necessary. Community development was soon pitted as antithetical to the reconfiguration of property and thereby rural power relations in the name of preventing “anarchy” and “[communist] subversion.”Footnote ¹⁷

For US strategists, it was not the remote threat of a communist takeover in Pakistan that rationalized such interventions (see K. A. Ali Reference Ali2015; Umar Reference Umar2004). Rather, it was the political instability threatening an allied government that concerned them amid growing unrest in the new state’s most populous, territorially non-contiguous province. Securing a stable postcolonial regime in Pakistan had become a foreign policy prerogative for the US at a moment when the non-aligned movement was gaining traction (McMahon Reference McMahon1994: 123–88; Miskovic et al. Reference Miskovic, Fischer-Tiné and Boskovska2014). As the Eisenhower administration emphasized, Pakistan’s “security” meant more than military support and diplomatic cover for the latter’s center. It required creating the conditions for economic development via trade and aid (ibid., also, Kaufman Reference Kaufman1982).

Antinomies and afterlives of the V-AID Project in East Pakistan

The partition of British India in 1947 ensured that the administrative, industrial, financial, and military capacities were concentrated in the western wing of the Pakistani state. The agrarian east was severed from its socio-economic links to both metropolitan Calcutta, which became a part of the Indian state of West Bengal, and the northeastern Indian states. Together, these factors had diminished eastern Bengal’s political economic prospects for reducing dependence on primary commodities production and exports (Jahan Reference Jahan1972; see Jalal Reference Jalal1995: 9–28). By the mid-1950s, Pakistan’s central government was firmly in the hands of an ex-colonial, civilian-military bureaucracy backed by Punjabi and Pathan landed elites, muhajir (migrant) and Sindhi trading interests, and segments of the indigenous industrial as well as metropolitan bourgeoisies centered in western Pakistan (Jaffrelot Reference Jaffrelot2015: 97–126; cf. Alavi Reference Alavi1972). These powerbrokers at the center were unwilling to consider aspirations for a democratic federalism in Pakistan (Kabir Reference Kabir2022; Maniruzzaman Reference Maniruzzaman1988). Given East Pakistan’s larger voting-age population, such a federalist arrangement would have favored its Bengali Muslim middle classes and agrarian interests. Persistent inter-regional disparities combined with the racialized attitudes shaped by a dominant Islamic Pakistanism fueled political friction (Fazal Reference Fazal and Bandyopadhyay2016; Toor Reference Toor2011: 18–51; Umar Reference Umar2004: 8–17). Demands for ethnolinguistic recognition and regional autonomy set the coordinates for both popular agitation and parliamentary democracy in eastern Bengal, mobilizing the middle classes alongside landed agrarians, peasants, and workers excluded from economic and political power-sharing. The mobilization proved successful in the 1954 provincial elections, when the provincial Muslim League government allied to the center was ousted by a United Front coalition of communists, left-progressives, and Awami League centrists in East Pakistan (see Kamal Reference Kamal2009; cf. Kabir Reference Kabir2022; Umar Reference Umar2004).

While the ascendancy of the United Front was propelled by issues of cultural-political recognition, its composition soon foregrounded redistributive demands. These emphasized the question of regional imbalances, including the distribution of state investments and foreign aid, rural developmental expenditures, the expansion of vernacular public education, the repeal of oppressive colonial-era policing laws and practices, and constitutional federalism (Umar Reference Umar2004: 259–61). Tensions within the coalition emerged over the means of realizing these demands, especially regarding their position on Pakistan’s foreign policy. Many among the coalition’s left-leaning leaders and activists, including the peasant-populist leader Maulana Bhashani, recognized that US-Pakistan ties through Cold War military pacts were instrumental to the political power of the civilian-military bureaucracy at the center (Kabir Reference Kabir2012; L. Uddin Reference Uddin, Hoek and Sunderason2022; also, Kabir Reference Kabir2022).

The V-AID project was among the overt means for ameliorating inter-regional tensions and securing an allied regime. It was imagined as a potential instrument for assuaging internal dissent, while showcasing the purported dividends of aligning with the US bloc, i.e., of the apparent complementarity of capitalist development and liberal democratic institutions (Sutton Reference Sutton and Fukuyama2005; cf. Moyn Reference Moyn2023). In political-practical terms, the idea settled on the training of “village level workers“ (VLWs). The project was expected to generate employment among restive rural middle-class youth while enhancing the income-generating capacities of peasant constituencies in the Bengali countryside. Rural cooperatives ensuring favorable terms of access to credit, market subsidies, and infrastructure investments were central to its vision. So were productivity-enhancing techniques and new irrigation practices, which were to be disseminated and organized, respectively, by the VLWs under official supervision and expert guidance.Footnote ¹⁸ Consequently, VLWs were seen as the “catalytic agents” of agrarian modernization (Khan Reference Khan1983a: 28). Unlike technical experts and agriculture department officials, their “expertise lay in group dynamics, in eliciting the “felt needs” of the people through communal deliberation” (Albert Mayer, quoted in Immerwahr Reference Immerwahr2015: 73). By 1956, the Ford Foundation had earmarked USD 1.25 million for establishing training centers in eight “village development areas” across the two wings of Pakistan.Footnote ¹⁹

Tensions on the ground characterized V-AID from its inception. There was friction between local state officials and the new recruits. The latter complained about their relative lack of status and the official disparaging of rural social life.Footnote ²⁰ These attitudes were honed by years of colonial service and a paternalistic official culture, between fledgling patronage and frequent indifference. Rationalizing the need for community development, a senior Pakistani official could thus claim that the life of an ordinary villager was “drab, colourless, and monotonous,” that there was “limitless squalor” due to “idle man-power,” and that such projects were needed “to bring colour into the life of the people.”Footnote ²¹ Meanwhile, large landowners and rural powerbrokers often saw VLWs, development officials, and experts with their external resources and ideas of cooperation as potential threats to their political and economic influence.Footnote ²²

The social (class) characteristics of the VLW recruits followed from the implicit objectives of securing political support among the restive middle-class youth. They were to be “matriculates,” willing to engage in “manual agricultural work” and not act like “bosses,” guided by a missionary zeal to take on the arduous but self-fulfilling task of nation-building.Footnote ²³ However, it was the push and pull of socio-economic precarity and personal ambitions rather than enthusiasm for the project that motivated members of this middle-class milieu to join. Concerns about pay, status, economic security, and promotions mattered most to the recruits. They were often young men in their twenties and thirties, and some were employed alongside their wives. Their fathers, uncles, and extended families were usually engaged in farming and worked on increasingly fragmented landholdings. Others were involved in shopkeeping, preaching, and clerical or low-level supervision at mills and offices – i.e., the lumpen bourgeois milieu of the mofussil or hinterland towns. Many of the recruits were ambitious, driven by the possibilities of mobility, and given to frugality and hard work. Some were motivated by status and desired recognition as state officials. Others sought experience with new agricultural practices and rural cottage industries before starting their own coir factories or pisciculture farms. Still others were aspiring immigrants and hoped that their participation might lead to new migration opportunities. Some were simply there to improve their tertiary educational credentials.Footnote ²⁴

The varied motivations and profiles of the VLWs reflected a shared tension between rising aspirations for middle-class mobility and the limited means for realizing them. There were few compelling reasons for VLWs to stay on in their training and prioritize nation-building efforts in the absence of material advantages, ideological commitments, or brute compulsion. Consequently, the Ford Foundation’s representative, Randall Klemme, called for a “total reexamination” of the project on account of “low morale” among VLWs, following his field trip to East Pakistan in 1954.Footnote ²⁵ The unsuitability of the “wholesale import” of American farming technologies placed second among his concerns, pace the so-called Green Revolution enthusiasts who would soon take his place.Footnote ²⁶ Such bleak prospects, however, did not deter financial and logistical support for the project. By 1960, a total of 5176 VLWs were trained across Pakistan in 14 training centers, covering 214 development areas where over 24 million inhabitants resided, in roughly 35, 000 villages.Footnote ²⁷ A senior Pakistani civil servant touted the project’s success, claiming that “… [V-AID] brought together villagers of different group structures and factions onto a common platform working for the common good of the village community,” and that its “councils and functional sub-committees prepared the villagers to undertake longer democratic responsibilities.”Footnote ²⁸

However, such grandiose claims drawing on statistical pronouncements and an apparently democratic ethos were not substantiated through studies of V-AID’s impacts on the ground. Randal Klemme’s observation that V-AID was more an “achievement in public administration … rather than village development” indicated its limited effects in transforming rural social life.Footnote ²⁹ Yet, even this was only partly true. The competing motivations and varied experiences of the VLWs indicated the project’s failure to sustain the interests of the very catalytic agent” tasked with transforming administrative institutions and initiating rural cooperative practices. Project expenditures remained small relative to overall development spending, with marginal impact on employment generation among rural middle-class youth.Footnote ³⁰ Moreover, the suggestion that V-AID was facilitating “agrarian democracy from below” was particularly disingenuous when, in fact, the popularly elected United Front government was ousted by civilian-military bureaucrats within a couple of months of its election as a result of both internal frictions and external pressures. It set the stage for escalating political tensions within and between East and West Pakistan over the next four years. Although the United Front returned to power soon after, the coalition was increasingly disunited over leadership and policy issues amid the unwarranted interference of US and Pakistani officials (Kabir Reference Kabir2022: 187–211).

Klemme’s enthusiasm for unelected officials as kingmakers, like General Iskander Mirza and his lieutenant in Bengal, the province’s chief secretary N.M. Khan, reflected this political conjunctural shift. Incipient concerns with addressing agrarian inequalities and extending political rights were stymied by geopolitical and “national economic” considerations, with Klemme praising Mirza as a staunch US ally capable of dealing with the Pakistani state’s “development problems.”Footnote ³¹ He expressed no qualms regarding Mirza’s usurpation of power: “[Mirza] is generally recognized as one of the most able and competent administrators in the government, an implacable foe of politicians and an ardent friend of the United States.”Footnote ³² V-AID’s expansion thus offered the proverbial crumbs in an effort to assuage inter-provincial dissent amid growing political-economic tensions. It also inflected the Manichean views shaped by the fear of communist threats, legitimizing authoritarian power grabs facilitated by strengthening ties between the US and Pakistan. Ahsan-Uddin, a senior civilian bureaucrat, had intimated the indispensability of US-Ford Foundation funding for ameliorating an “administrative crisis,” emphasizing the need for attracting “quality” VLW trainees and development officials through “desired” levels of compensation.Footnote ³³ However, the widening gap between (middle-class) aspirations and planning priorities was reflected in the discontent among the VLWs, and the eventual closing of the training programs by 1958.

The fact that V-AID training programs accompanied the growing traction of demands for constitutional federalism and regional redistribution in East Pakistan reflected the mutual shaping of the political-societal and geopolitical coordinates of the early Cold War. Consequently, changing ideas and practices of “community development” indicated the entrenching of Cold War Manicheanism and considerations of realpolitik. Such change also illuminated the conditions for autocratic rule in Pakistan and the reproduction of dominant rural-agrarian interests in political society. The 1958 military coup was a culmination of this broader conjunctural shift. Led by a key Pakistani negotiator of the US-Pakistan military pacts, General Ayub Khan, the new regime sought to expand the networks created by V-AID training centers, redeploying them for transferring state and foreign aid largesse towards loyalists among the rural middle classes and landed agrarians. Private subcontracting for public works projects, politically-vetted import licensing, and undemocratic control over taxes and tariffs by chairmen and officials of local governing bodies were among the means of such transfer (Kabir Reference Kabir2022; Umar Reference Umar2020; cf. Alavi Reference Alavi1972). While recognizing the anti-democratic and inequality-enhancing effects of such measures, Akhter Hameed Khan and his Comilla colleagues were nevertheless enlisted in this shift. Colonial-era slogans of “Grow More Food” were resuscitated as the regime narrowed “rural development” to the twin nodes of food production and population control, even as the promises of agrarian democracy and redistribution among landless and land-poor peasant-cultivators receded to the margins of development thinking (Sherman Reference Sherman2013; also, Ajl and Sharma Reference Ajl and Sharma2022; see Cullather Reference Cullather2010).