Often, when analysts and 0 journalists stationed in Punjab and Islamabad air their views on the politics of Sindh, the one word they like to use repeatedly is `feudalism`. This word is also used by many Mohajirs residing in Sindh`s cosmopolitan capital, Karachi.

Sindhi intellectuals see this portrayal as a political construct to project the Sindhis as mindless beings dominated by landlords.

Indeed, at the time of Pakistan`s creation, feudal elites in Sindh were politically influential. But what often gets missed is the fact that some members of the landed elites and an, albeit small, Sindhi middle class, worked together to vanquish feudalism.

When the erstwhile West Pakistan was clubbed together as a single province (`One Unit`) in the mid-1950s, this accelerated the development of Sindhi, Pakhtun and Baloch nationalisms. According to Dr Asma Faiz in her book /n Search of Glory, as Sindh`s landed elites clashed among themselves over the issue of One Unit, the main push against One Unit came from middle class Sindhi youth.

However, some of these came under the tutelage of GM Syed, an intellectual and politician who belonged to a landed family and was revered as a spiritual guide of sorts. Dr Asma wrote that, in the late 1960s, this pairing took a `cultural turn`, producing literature and narratives of Sindhi nationalism as we know it today.

During the rise of Z.A. Bhutto and his Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in the late 1960s, the middle class faction of Sindhi nationalism collided with Syed`s `spiritual` strand. Bhutto, a member of Sindh`s landed elite, rhetorically disowned his own class.

Even though he wanted to attract the rising popularity of Sindhi nationalism to his side, he consciously diluted his party`s views on Sindhi nationalism`s main `enemy`, the Punjabis, because he had developed an impressive vote bank in Punjab.

Whenever he faced crowds in Sindh chanting the slogan `Jeeay Sindh` [Long Live Sindh], he encouraged his supporters to quickly follow it up with a `Jeeay Pakistan` [Long Live Pakistan] slogan. In 1975, Sindhi intellectuals were invited by the Bhutto regime to a conference on Sindh in Karachi.

This conference went a long way in aiding the PPP to usurp the narrative of Sindhi nationalism and put it in the context of Pakistani federalism.

During a violent 1983 protest movement in Sindh against the Ziaul Haq dictatorship, G.M. Syed sided with the dictatorship. Syed`s critics claimed he did this to spite the PPP and safeguard the interests of landed elites in Sindh. Syed responded by saying that the PPP and Zia were two sides of the same coin.

Due to the mass exodus of Sindhi Hindus from Sindh during Partition, the development of (Muslim) Sindhi speaking middle classes was slow.

Political parties needed to get `electables` from the landed elites. But this began to change.

In 2012, the Sindh historian Hamida Khuhro declared that `feudalism does not exist in Sindh anymore.` The same year, Dr Muzaffar A. Isani wrote in Dawn, `Let me state categorically that feudalism as a system of organising production and defining production relations does not exist in Sindh anymore...Already in 2000, the political economist S. Akbar Zaidi had questioned the manner in which the word feudalism is used in Pakistan.

He wrote, `In the media, the term `feudalism` is used for every sort of injustice, excess and misuse of power that takes place in the country...` He then concluded that it was time to dispense with this label because a new moneyed class had risen, replacing the influence of the archetypal `wadera` [feudal lord]. The new moneyed class in Sindh includes industrialists, entrepreneurs, traders and white-collar professionals etc.

In a 2024 essay, the economic journalist Farooq Tirmizi wrote that, in the mid-2OOOs, the value of agricultural land began to stagnate.

This means that landed elites are losing their influence because the value of agricultural land hasn`t kept up with the rising value of other assets.

In Sindh, for example, on the one hand, people outside the landed elites are exploring more `urbane`/nonagricultural economic avenues and, on the other hand, the landed elitesare diversifying by investing in urban realestate,industry etc.

So where is the PPP in all this? Its vote-bank has witnessed a manifold increase ever since 2008 and it is heading its fourth consecutive government in the province. Reports by FAFEN (Free and Fair Election Network) on the 2018 and 2024 general elections show that the party in Sindh received votes from across classes. In fact, in 2018, 51 percent of the total votes that the PPP received in Sindh were cast by Sindhi-speaking women from the middle classes and the peasant classes.

According to the researcher Sartaj Khan, the PPP manoeuvred Sindh`s rural elite and the emerging Sindhi middle classes to formulate a voting bloc which has sustained the party as Sindh`s ruling party from 2008. Sartaj wrote that, as the emerging professional and middle classes came in a position to assert political influence, the PPP recognised this shift and sidelined the traditional landed aristocracy. The party began promoting members of the rising middle classes to key positions.

The traditional Sindhi feudal elites are now mostly accommodated by the anti-PPP Grand Democratic Alliance (GDA).

The image in non-Sindhi imagination of a wadera holding a gun over the heads of poor peasants and forcing them to vote for him is silly and outdated. There is now a vibrant Sindhi middle class and a nouveauriche class that has increasingly accumulated economic and political influence.

Recently, I came across a photo of an eatery in Khairpur that is mostly frequented by middle class Sindhis. On the walls of the eatery were paintings of Z.A. Bhutto and his daughter Benazir, alongside a portrait of G.M.

Syed. To me, this reflected the fact that the Sindhi middle classes may have sympathies with the current lot of Sindhi nationalists, but their votes are largely cast for the PPP because their economic interests are linked to the political fate of the party.

Sindhi nationalists claim tore present middle class Sindhis, yet they end up allying with the last bastion of old school feudalism, the GDA. They also try to pitch a Bhutto against a Bhutto.

But the late-Murtaza Bhutto failed in electoral politics, his daughter Fatima stepped away after becoming a critic of her aunt Benazir, and now there is Murtaza`s son, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Jr who has declared he is not joining the GDA after voicing support for its struggle against the canals project.

Exhibited as `true Sindhis`, they eventually turn into nothing but props paraded for a media that is more interested in certain Sindhi personalities than in exploring why so many learned scholars are declaring feudalism`s death in Sindh and why the PPP continues to win there.