Pakistan: A Hard Country (39 page)

This is partly because, even in Balochistan, when it comes to leadership Pakistani tribalism is closer to ancient Irish tribalism than to Scottish tribalism. The latter, at least in the romanticized version, involved blind loyalty to a hereditary chief, invariably the eldest son. In Irish tribes, the leading men of the tribe elected as chief whichever male member of the royal family they thought most suitable – as in Pakistan, a fecund source of bloody family feuds. In consequence, a majority of Pakistani chieftains know very wel that dear old uncle Ahmed over there in the corner, so very nice and respectful, is al too ready to seize the leadership if the chance offers itself.

More important for Pakistan as a whole is the fact that politics in large areas of the Punjab and the NWFP are no longer dominated by great individual landowners. This is partly because of land reform and the subdivision through inheritance of formerly great estates, and partly because of social mobility due to economic change. The key rural politician in these areas is a relatively smal landowner (with perhaps 100 acres or so), deeply embedded in a powerful local landowning clan, with influence over the police and administration.

Such landowners are very often local urban politicians too, because they own urban property from which they derive most of their income, even while their prestige and ability to mobilize kinship links continue to come from rural landownership and their leading position in landowning clans. Sometimes, the enormous expansion of the towns means that the lands of local landowning lineages have been swal owed up, greatly increasing their wealth in the process but leaving their approach to politics and kinship unchanged. As Abida Husain told me: ‘Very little of our income actual y comes from land any more, but land is our essential link to the people and our voters.’11

The cultures of leading groups in northern Punjab and the NWFP

have also always had a more egalitarian and meritocratic tinge, as with the Pathans and the Jats. In these groups, it is often more accurate to talk of ‘big men’, risen through personal wealth and character, rather than hereditary chieftains. Thus back in 1988, I asked a Punjabi Jat member of parliament (for the PPP) to explain how exactly it was you became a Chaudhury like him (the name for a respected and influential figure among the Jats), since I had noticed that in many cases it was not by inheritance. ‘It’s very simple,’ he replied. ‘You become a Chaudhury among the Jats when you can cal yourself a Chaudhury without al the other Jats laughing at you!’ Very often, as he and many others told me, the decisive moment in a family’s rise was when they became sufficiently local y powerful to get into a political party as a candidate, and on that basis to get a government job – ‘after that, they can make their fortunes by corruption’.

In Sindh and southern Punjab, most of the important political families are old, with a minority of newcomers. In northern Punjab, it tends to be the other way round. However, in a great many ways these new families tend to merge into established ‘feudal’ patterns of power. Just as with the English aristocracy and gentry of the past, this is partly through intermarriage. Some of the greatest aristocratic families of Punjab turn out on examination to be intermarried with new business dynasties.

As in England, this is partly because of the immense social and cultural prestige attached to owning land – something which has defined the identity and self-image not only of the ‘feudal’ classes, but of the landowning tribes and clans from which they spring. Above al , however, the new families tend to become ‘feudal’ because the system requires them to fol ow the same kind of political strategies, based on strong kinship groups and the factions built around them, and the gathering and maintenance of support through patronage and protection.

On the other hand, urbanization and economic development have given ordinary people in much of northern and central Punjab greater opportunities to exploit the system for their advantage. The power of the real y big landowners and tribal chiefs has been much reduced, and has shifted to lower and much more numerous strata of rival landowners and local bosses. This gives people more chance to extract benefits by switching between them. Urbanization has also reduced the role of kinship, though not as greatly as standard models predict.

A combination of the weakness of the state and the power of kinship is one critical reason why urbanization has had a much smal er impact on political patterns and structures than one might otherwise have expected. For in the cities, albeit not as much as in the countryside, you also need protection from the police, the courts and political y linked urban gangs.

Moreover, rather than a new urban population emerging, what we have seen so far is huge numbers of peasants going to live in the cities while remaining cultural y peasants. They remain deeply attached to their kinship groups, and they stil need their kinship groups to help them for many of the same reasons they needed them in the countryside. Underlying al this is the fact that so much of the urban population remains semi-employed or informal y employed, rather than moving into modern sectors of the economy – because these usual y do not exist.

How kinship works political y in the cities was wel summed up by a young office worker whom I asked in 1988 how he intended to vote in the forthcoming elections. He was from central Karachi, but of Punjabi origin:

I voted PPP in the last elections because it was the wil of my uncle, the head of our family, though actual y I think the Muslim League has done a better job in government. In previous elections, sometimes he said to vote PPP, sometimes Muslim League, depending on what they promise him, whether they have fulfil ed promises in the past, and which of his friends or relatives is now important in that party. He owns a flour mil . He helps us find jobs, gives us the transport to take us to the pol ing booths, so it is natural that we give him our vote in return. He is respected because of his wealth and because his mother and aunt are the two eldest ladies in our family. Everyone listens to them on family matters. They arrange marriages and settle quarrels. They are very much respected, so uncle is too. But he decides in political matters. The women can’t do that because they don’t go out of the house. They can’t even remember which candidate is which. If you ask them the next day, they have forgotten which is which. That is why we have symbols for parties. They can’t read or write, so we tel them about politics.

But I must obey my mother in al personal things. If she had said I can’t take up this job, then I can’t.

It is also worth noting that, as this passage reflects, while women play no role in the outward political behaviour of the family or clan, they are central and can even be dominant when it comes to its internal politics and the balance of prestige and power between its members. If this appeared in public, it would be a matter of shame and ridicule; but as long as it remains within the extended family, family izzat (honour, or prestige) is not threatened.

Anecdotal evidence (which you would be il advised to ask about in detail) suggests that this can also sometimes be true of sexual relationships. In common with the traditions of the Jat caste from which many Punjabi Muslims were converted, an affair which, if it took place with an outsider, would be punished with death or mutilation, may be tacitly or even explicitly condoned if it is with a close relative by marriage. Or as a Punjabi saying has it, ‘the honour of the family remains within the family.’

As the above account brings out, kinship remains of immense importance even among educated people in Pakistan’s cities, if only because in the case of fairly recent migrants (i.e. most people), the ties to ancestral vil ages remain firm. For that matter, as described in the Introduction, these ties stay strong even when the migration was not to a Pakistani city but a British one, and took place fifty years earlier.

Some of the ways in which the political traditions of the countryside continue to pervade the cities, while also having been changed by them, were il ustrated for me by a series of interviews with ordinary people and political workers in the chief Potwari city of Rawalpindi in the summer of 2009. In the 1950s, Rawalpindi’s population was stil less than 200,000. The building of Islamabad nearby, however, together with the enormous growth of the Pakistani army, whose GHQ

is in Rawalpindi, meant that it grew even faster than other cities; according to the census of 2006 its population then was just over 3

mil ion. The overwhelming majority of its inhabitants therefore are migrants from the countryside or their children.

One of these recent migrants with whom I talked was Mudassar, a taxi driver from the nearby area of Guj ar Khan, belonging to the Alpial clan or biradiri of the Rajputs. He was il iterate, and gave his age as ‘about twenty-two, I think’, but he had a humorous thinker’s mouth under his big moustache. In the last elections, he had worked as a driver for the campaign of PPP politician Raja Pervez Ashraf – a smal piece of local kinship patronage. Pervez Ashraf is a leading local Rajput landlord, businessman and politician who became Minister for Water and Power in the new government. Because of its role in local patronage, this is one of the most political y important jobs in government. I asked Mudassar why he had supported Pervez Ashraf.

‘Because he paid me,’ he replied (very courteously stifling the obvious temptation to add ‘you idiot’):

And also because he is from the same Rajput biradiri as my family, and my family and most of my vil age voted for him. We stil support Raja Pervez Ashraf, though we are not happy with Zardari and the PPP government in general ... Because after the elections he has brought new roads to our area and laid the first gas pipelines, which we have never had before though we are so close to Islamabad. And he shows us respect. Every week he comes to our vil age or a neighbouring vil age to meet us and hear our complaints, and to give us moral support. If someone is facing a court case or has trouble with the police, he helps us.

I asked him whether Raja Pervez Ashraf being an Alpial Rajput meant that Mudassar’s family and vil age would always vote for him no matter what. ‘Of course not,’ he replied: If Raja Pervez Ashraf does not act justly towards us, and take care of the poor people of Guj ar Khan as he promised, and if he doesn’t come to us to show respect and listen to us, then we wil vote for someone else ... Yes, we wil always vote for a Rajput, but there are other Rajput leaders in Guj ar Khan.12

This reminded me of a famous remark by a Pakistani ‘feudal’

landowner summing up the changes in electoral politics since the 1950s: ‘Once, I used to send my manager to tel my tenants to vote the way I wanted. Then, I had to go myself to tel them to vote how I wanted.

Now, I have to go myself to ask them to give me their vote.’13 Or, in the words of Amir Baksh Bhutto, son of Mumtaz Ali Bhutto and cousin of Benazir: ‘We’re the biggest landowning family in Sindh’ (by most accounts it’s actual y the Jatois, but stil ). ‘If the waderos stil had absolute power do you think I’d be driving through this bloody desert, begging people to give me their vote? I’d sit at home, wouldn’t I, and wait for people to come and present themselves.’14

It would not necessarily be correct to see this as a whol y new phenomenon, reflecting growing ‘modernity’. To some extent, it may also be a new version of a very old pattern familiar from late-feudal Europe and many other systems, whereby great local families rise or decline according to fortune, the characters of their leaders, their choice of al egiances, and their ability to cement local al iances and retain local loyalties in the face of rival lords seeking to draw their fol owers away. As the British Gazetteer of 1930 for Attock District records of one great lineage which had failed to do this, Gradual y the great power of the Pindigheb family was frittered away. First the Langrial family was al owed to secede. Then the Khunda, Kamlial and Dandi families broke away ... During this troubled time the ruling family contained no men of power. The chiefs were lazy, licentious and incompetent and from a love of ease let great opportunities slip past. But they are stil the nobility of the tehsil.15

A POLITICIAN’S LIFE

As these remarks suggest, Pakistani politicians now have to work very hard for their votes. In many ways, they have to work much harder than their Western equivalents, because ‘here, everything is politics’, as I have often been told. This does not just mean court cases, bank loans, police and civil service appointments, contracts, and so on; but also most of social life – births and funerals are very important events for political deal-making and al iance-maintenance, and, as for the arrangement of marriages, this is of course inherently political. Al this is like enough to the existence of lords in the European Middle Ages – with the difference that Pakistani politicians also have to try to master much more complicated matters of administration and business; and usual y try unsuccessful y. Those rare ones who have the education to do so may not have the time. The sheer amount of time required to perform the necessary functions of a Pakistani politician – including those in office – may be one factor behind the poor quality of Pakistani government.