Dr Mudassar Munir - The state through intermediaries: Dhara Bandi, mediation,and the politics of survival in Punjab, Pakistan
Across rural Punjab, formal state institutions are often experienced as distant, opaque, and unreliable. In this context, intermediaries occupy central roles in the everyday political and social life of villages. This article examines how their authority is built and sustained through dhara bandi (a Punjabi term for factional loyalty and social-political alliances, maintained through everyday acts of mediation, presence, and performance). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Bhi Nagar, a pseudonym for a central Punjab village, I show how intermediaries’ practices – hosting gatherings in baithaks, mediating disputes, navigating bureaucracies, and cultivating digital visibility – both bind villagers in durable networks of allegiance and render the state locally intelligible. These actors are not merely brokers who facilitate access to resources; their performative labour enacts authority, sustains factional cohesion, and materializes the state in everyday life. By linking local practices of factionalism to the symbolic authority of national leaders, intermediaries also translate national charisma into tangible forms of engagement that reinforce the perception of state responsiveness. This analysis situates intermediaries at the heart of rural governance in Punjab, contributing to broader debates on hybrid governance, the endurance of weak states, and the everyday production of political order.
