Pakistan: A Hard Country (38 page)
Rather than being eaten by a pride of lions, or even torn apart by a flock of vultures, the fate of Pakistan’s national resources more closely resembles being nibbled away by a horde of mice (and the occasional large rat). The effects on the resources, and on the state’s ability to do things, are just the same, but more of the results are ploughed back into the society, rather than making their way straight to bank accounts in the West. This is an important difference between Pakistan and Nigeria, for example.
As this paral el suggests, part of the reason is the nature of the resources concerned. Unless you are right at the top of the system and in a position to milk the state as a whole (like Zardari in the PPP
governments of the 1990s), to make real y large individual fortunes in the poorer parts of the world today requires the ability to make, extract or steal something which can then be sold in the economic metropolises of the world – in Nigeria’s case, oil.
Pakistan exports textiles and agricultural products, together with limited amounts of steel and copper – not the kind of goods or raw materials that can generate this kind of fortune. Even its most successful legitimate businessmen do not have real y large fortunes by international standards because the things they make and export do not generate that kind of profit. Nor can even the biggest Pakistani landowners hope to make huge fortunes from their lands. Urban landowners enjoy large rents – but rents which are stil limited by the overal poverty of the country; as witness the fact that even Karachi has hardly any skyscrapers worth the name.
In fact, very often to make a fortune in Pakistan means finding some way to milk the state – including of course international aid flowing to the state, which is one of the principal ways in which the Pakistani elites make money from the West. What is more, given the lawless nature of Pakistani society, you usual y also need influence over the state (especial y the police and the courts) to defend what you have from predatory neighbours or the forces of the state themselves.
This has a whole set of crucial y important consequences. First of al , it usual y sets a limit on how much you can take. Most politicians are not in power for very long, and partly for the same reason (because their political patrons lose office) most officials are not left for long in the most lucrative positions. Furthermore, an individual minister or official who steals an outrageous amount for himself wil attract the envy of col eagues, who wil try to replace him so that they can share.
Thus the great majority of senior politicians of my acquaintance have some sort of property in a posh part of London, which in most cases was certainly not paid for out of legitimate earnings. Most have flats in Knightsbridge or Kensington, or houses further out; and so have good reason not to condemn other people with flats in Knightsbridge.
However, families like the Bhuttos, who buy whole country estates in Britain on the strength of their profits from government, wil attract unfavourable notice, and earn a bad reputation which can have a serious effect on their political fortunes.
Even more importantly, if to make a lot of money general y means gaining influence over the state, to gain influence over the state general y means procuring some kind of political power. Political power requires supporters – individuals and families with power of their own, gunmen to protect you, and ordinary people to vote for you; and fol owers have to be rewarded. In other words, a very large proportion of the money made from corruption has to be recycled downwards through patronage or straight gifts – because otherwise the ability to extract corruption would itself dry up. The patronage system therefore has a strongly cyclical aspect, which once again strengthens its anti-revolutionary character.
If the political power of the kinship group in Pakistan depended only on the distribution of patronage, then this power might wel have declined over time, given that patronage wil always be limited; but it is also rooted in the oldest of social compulsions: col ective defence. But while the power of kinship is necessary to defend against the predatory state, it is also one of the key factors in making the state predatory, as kinship groups use the state to achieve their goals of power, wealth and triumph over other kinship groups. So the ancient Pakistani kinship groups and the modern Pakistani state dance along together down the years, trapped in a marriage that ought to be antagonistic, but has in fact become natural to each.
This system has a critical effect on Pakistan’s remarkably low inequality rating according to the Gini Co-efficient, measuring the ratio of the income of the poorest group in society relative to the richest. In 2002, according to UN statistics, the figure for Pakistan was 30.6, compared to 36.8 for India, 40.8 for the US, and 43.7 for Nigeria. Part of the reason is obvious if you sit down with someone from a Pakistani political family and work out their income and expenditure. By the time you have accounted for payments to servants, gunmen and supporters (in the biggest families, sometimes even permanently hired musicians, to sing their praises), for political transport (including constant travel to weddings and funerals) and political hospitality, and shared the rest among several relatives, even in some very powerful families what is left does not usual y amount to a large income by world standards, unless the family has a member who is actual y in senior office at the time.
Al this can also be il ustrated visual y by the houses of leading Pakistani political families. Of course, these are very luxurious indeed by the standards of the vast mass of the population. However, when it comes to size, at least, the grandeur of these houses can sometimes be exaggerated – because they contain far more people than initial y meets the eye: political workers, servants and family members themselves.
Take an unusual y large but otherwise typical example: the rural home of Makhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat, a leading politician from a Shia pir family in Jhang, who started with the PPP before switching to the PML(Q) in order to join the Musharraf administration, and as of 2010 is back in opposition. At first sight, the frontage of this vaguely neo-classical monstrosity is on the approximate scale of Buckingham Palace, a resemblance strengthened by the glaring floodlights by which it is il uminated at night.
A closer look reveals something closer to Sandhurst or West Point.
It is in fact a giant political barracks, and the great majority of the rooms are bleak, barely furnished sleeping cel s for political workers and visiting supporters, and bleak hal s for political consultations.
Similarly, as with most of the houses of politicians, the lawn in front is not part of a private garden, but is an arena for political ral ies and entertainments.
Then there are the servants. Every big ‘feudal’ family I have visited has far more of them than it actual y needs. It doesn’t pay them much – but then again, according to strict free market capitalist rules, it doesn’t need to employ most of them at al . One reason is of course to display wealth and power through the number of one’s entourage. The other was summed up for me by a lady in Lahore: Oh, what I wouldn’t give for one hard-working servant with a vacuum-cleaner instead of having to pay and keep an eye on ten who sit around eating and staring into space and getting into al kinds of trouble which we have to get them out of again.
But of course it’s impossible. They al come from my husband’s vil age, and some of their families have been in our family’s service for generations. If we sacked them, the whole vil age would start saying how mean and treacherous we are.10
Her husband was not a politician – but his brother was, which comes to the same thing; and he needed to be elected from his vil age and district, in the face of rival politicians from his own kinship group appealing to inhabitants of ‘his vil age’ for their support.
One can, however, be too cynical about this. This lady’s old nursemaid, to whom the family was devoted, was now looking after her own children. There was thus a commitment to look after the nursemaid’s family, which was emotional and indeed familial, and not just political. During my stays with Pakistani elite families, I have seen servants treated with appal ing arrogance; but I have also seen those elite families paying for their servants’ children to be sent to school, making sure that they go to the doctor when they are il , that the daughters have at least modest dowries, and so on.
Final y, there are the families themselves. According to the cultural ideal prevalent across most of Pakistan, the ideal family is the joint extended family of patriarch, sons and sons’ families resident together in the same house (albeit often with separate cooking-spaces). As so often, this cultural value also has a practical political underpinning in col ective familial solidarity and self-defence against rivals and enemies. This is connected to the fact that among rural landowning families a mixture of land reform and the subdivision of land by inheritance means that many estates are the col ective property of several brothers and other relatives, but are administered jointly for the sake of economic efficiency and political weight.
Joint families are by no means an aspect only of rural society. Even many very wealthy and powerful urban families, for example the three sons of the late General Akhtar Abdur Rehman (chief of the ISI under Zia-ul-Haq) and their children in Lahore, stil live together; and obviously the size of any house has to be divided by the number of people in it.
Thus in conservative joint families, the hidden presence of large numbers of women and children may be revealed by muffled howls of joy, sorrow or imprecation from behind closed doors. In more liberal ones, those doors may open to disgorge a seemingly endless flow of relatives – and it is remarkable how even a very large room may suddenly seem quite smal when fil ed with two or three mothers, a grandmother, sometimes a great-grandmother, a couple of nursemaids, a horde of children and an entire assembly line of aunts – al of whom have to be fed and clothed, and, in the case of the children, educated, and jobs found for the boys and dowries for the girls.
In grander and more liberal families, this increasingly also means jobs for the girls – including elected positions. This change was given a tremendous push by Musharraf’s requirement that members of the national and provincial assemblies possess col ege degrees.
Musharraf’s educational requirement eliminated a good many male politicians, but, since the law was cancel ed by the new PPP
government in 2008, the effects may not prove long-lasting.
On the other hand, the move of women into politics reflects other factors. Even more than elsewhere, being a politician in Pakistan requires a particular set of qualities of which the women in a given family may have more than the men. Their choice by the family is also an extension of the fact that in Pakistani ‘feudal’ families the political representative of the family was never necessarily the eldest son, but whichever son seemed fittest to be a politician. Thus, while the younger brother or even wife may stand for election, the elder brother or husband may keep a more secure and equal y lucrative job as a civil servant, policeman or whatever.
In 2002, a senior customs officer from a big landowning family from Sarghoda sketched for me what this meant for ‘feudal’ politics, in the context of his family’s general political strategy. There was obviously no question of his giving up his own job to run for election, since customs is not only among the most lucrative areas of state service, but one where it is possible to do a great many political favours: There are three branches of my family, and we rotate the seats in our area between us. My uncle has held one seat for the Jamaat, but the Jamaat is now in al iance with the PPP, so my wife is now standing for the PPP. She was chosen because I am a civil servant and can’t run and my brother is working abroad. Our sister doesn’t have a degree, so it had to be my wife.
The ideal Pakistani political family thus has its members in a range of influential occupations: a civil servant, a policeman, a lawyer, a businessman and, if possible, representatives in several different political parties. As a member of a rival family said admiringly of a great political ‘feudal’ family in Sindh, ‘the Soomros have been everyone else’s teachers at keeping one member of the family in power whatever happens. They have someone in each party, but they are also al loyal to each other.’ The Saiful ahs, a leading business family of Peshawar, probably hold the record for this, placing different brothers, sons and nephews in mutual y hostile political parties, while retaining an inexorable commitment to family solidarity and family col ective advantage.
It would be a mistake, however, to focus too heavily on the top elites when it comes to understanding how Pakistan’s political system works, and how it has proved so remarkably stable. As subsequent chapters on Pakistan’s provinces wil explore, different parts of Pakistan vary greatly when it comes to the autocratic power of great landowners – and where they possess quasi-autocratic power, as in Balochistan, Sindh and parts of southern Punjab, this is due above al to their role as tribal chiefs or hereditary pirs. Even in these regions, the chieftains – if they are wise – wil pay a great deal of attention to the opinions, the interests and the izzat of the second-tier tribal leadership, and wil be careful to show them public respect.