This book shows how Pakistan’s inability to collect taxes reflects a broader disconnection between the state and its citizens, which translates into growing fiscal deficits, poor service delivery, increasing socio economic inequalities and low democratic accountability. Through extensive primary fieldwork, which included original interviews with tax bureaucrats and policymakers, detailed archival work and analysis of tax collection, Mujtaba Piracha truly shows how property taxation is a grudging political bargain, a permanent dispute or a strategic collusion between local wealthy taxpayers, intermediate tax collectors, and tax authorities, to minimize their duties and raid the fiscal commons.