Pakistan: A Hard Country (4 page)

By helping to enforce on the elites a certain degree of responsibility for their fol owers, and circulating patronage downwards, kinship also plays a role in softening – to a limited extent – class domination.

Kinship is therefore partial y responsible for Pakistan’s surprisingly low rating of social inequality according to the Gini Co-efficient, which I wil discuss further in Chapter 6.4 In both these ways, kinship is a critical anti-revolutionary force, whether the revolution is of a socialist or Islamist variety.

The importance of kinship is rooted in a sense (which runs along a spectrum from very strong to very weak depending on circumstance and degree of kinship) of col ective solidarity for interest and defence.

This interest involves not just the pursuit of concrete advantage, but is also inextricably bound up with powerful feelings of col ective honour or prestige (izzat) and shame; and, indeed, a kinship group which is seen as ‘dishonoured’ wil find its interests decline in every other way. A sense of col ective honour among kin is thus reflected most dramatical y in preventing or punishing any il icit sexual behaviour by the kinship group’s women, but also in working to advance the political and economic power and public status of the group.

This is a cultural system so strong that it can persuade a father to kil a much-loved daughter, not even for having an affair or becoming pregnant, but for marrying outside her kinship group without permission. You don’t get stronger than that. As Alison Shaw and others have noted, the immense strength and flexibility of the kinship system in Pakistan (and most of India too) are shown, among other things, by the way in which it has survived more than half a century of transplantation to the very different climes of Britain. Shaw writes: Families in Oxford are therefore best seen as outposts of families in Pakistan whose members have been dispersed by labour migration ... [In Britain] a distinctive pattern of living near close kin has emerged, echoing that of earlier migrations within the Indian subcontinent.5

Defence of the honour and the interests of the kinship group usual y outweighs loyalty to a party, to the state, or to any code of professional ethics, not only for ordinary Pakistanis, but for most politicians and officials. It is important to understand therefore that much Pakistani corruption is the result not of a lack of values (as it is usual y seen in the West) but of the positive and ancient value of loyalty to family and clan.

Since the kinship group is the most important force in society, the power of kinship is inevitably reflected in the political system. Just as in much of the rest of South Asia, a majority of Pakistan’s political parties are dynastic. The PPP is the party of the Bhutto family; the PML(N) is that of the Sharif family; and the Awami National Party (ANP) in the Frontier is the party of the Wali Khan family.

The local political groupings which are the building blocks of these parties are themselves based on local dynasties. Hence the phenomenon of a woman such as Benazir Bhutto rising to the top of the political system in an extremely conservative male-dominated society. This was power by inheritance, and says not much more about ordinary women’s rights in modern Pakistani society than the inheritance of the throne by Queens Mary and Elizabeth from their father said about ordinary women’s rights in sixteenth-century English society.

The only institution which has succeeded to some extent in resisting this in the name of state loyalty and professional meritocracy is the army – and you could say that it has managed this in part only through turning itself into a kind of giant clan, serving its members’ col ective interests at the expense of the state and society, and underpinned to some extent by ancient local kinship groups among the north-western Punjabis and Pathans.

If the importance of kinship links has survived transplantation to the cities of Britain, it is not surprising that it has survived migration to the cities of Pakistan, especial y because in both cases (the British through marriage with people from home vil ages in Pakistan) the urban populations are continual y being swel ed and replenished by new migration from the countryside. The continued importance of kinship is a key reason why Pakistan’s tremendous rate of urbanization in recent years has not yet led to radical changes in political culture, except – for reasons I wil explain – in Karachi.

Largely because of the strength of kinship loyalty, Pakistani society is probably strong enough to prevent any attempt to change it radical y through Islamist revolution, which is al to the good; but this is only the other face of something which is not so good, which is society’s ability to frustrate even the best-designed and best-intentioned attempts at reform and positive development. Key factors in this regard are the gentry in the countryside and the intertwined clans of business, political and criminal bosses in the towns, al of them maintaining continuity over the years through intermarriage, often within the extended family, almost always (except among the highest elites) within the wider kinship group.

Marriage with members of the same kinship group, and when possible of the same extended family, is explicitly intended to maintain the strength, solidarity and reliability of these groups against dilution by outsiders. Shaw writes of the Pakistanis of Oxford that in the year 2000, almost fifty years after they first started arriving in Britain, there had been barely any increase in the proportion of marriages with non-kin, and that over the previous fifteen years 59 per cent – 59 per cent!

– of marriages had been with first cousins; and the proportion in strongly Pakistani cities such as Bradford is even higher: Greater wealth was perceived not solely in terms of individual social mobility, although it provides opportunities for this, but in terms of raising the status of a group of kin in relation to their wider biradiri and neighbours in Pakistan ... Status derives not only from wealth, mainly in terms of property and business, but also from respectability (primarily expressed by an ashraf [‘noble’] lifestyle). One element of being considered a man worthy of respect derives from having a reputation as being someone who honours his obligations to kin. Cousin marriage is one of the most important expressions of this obligation. The majority of east Oxford families have not achieved social mobility and status though massive accumulation of property and business. For them, the marriages of their children to the children of siblings in Pakistan is an important symbol of honour and respectability, a public statement that even families separated by continents recognize their mutual obligations.6

It is above al thanks to local y dominant kinship groups that over the years, beneath the froth and spray of Pakistani politics, the underlying currents of Pakistani political life have until recently been so remarkably stable. Civilian governments have come and gone with bewildering rapidity, whether overthrown by military coups or stranded by the constantly shifting al egiances of their political supporters. Yet the same people have gone on running these parties, and leading the same people or kinds of people at local level. The same has been true under military governments. None of these changes of government or regime has produced any real change to the deeper structures of Pakistani politics, because these are rooted in groups and al egiances which so far have changed with glacial slowness.

‘FEUDALS’

In the countryside, and to a great extent in the towns as wel , the most powerful elements are not individuals – though they are led by individuals – or even families in the Western sense. From this point of view, as from many others, the description of the rural landowners as ‘feudals’ is false, in so far as it suggests any close comparison with their medieval European equivalents. If this were so, the Pakistani ‘feudals’ would long since have been swept away by pressure from below and reform from above.

Each individual ‘feudal’ is quite a smal landowner by traditional European standards (500 acres is a big estate in Pakistan), and most of his (or sometimes her) wealth may wel now come from urban property. In Punjab at least, the real y big landowners lost most of their land in the land reforms of Ayub in the late 1950s and Bhutto in the early 1970s.

In fact, I thought of arguing that there is in fact no such thing as a feudal in Pakistan; but then I remembered wild-boar hunting with the noble landowners of Sindh – a remarkably ‘feudal’ experience, described in Chapter 8. So what I’l say instead is that while there certainly are ‘feudals’ in Pakistan in the loose Pakistani sense of that term, there are no feudals in the European historical sense.

A great many leading ‘feudal’ families, especial y in northern Punjab, are not old landowning families at al , but emerged quite recently, often on the basis of urban property or successful corruption when in state service. However, they adopt the same manners and behave political y in the same ways as the old families. Above al , they appeal for support in their own kinship groups, and do so on the basis of the same old politics of patronage and protection.

Indeed, the most powerful remaining ‘feudals’ in Pakistan owe their power not to the extent of their personal landholdings but to the fact that they are the chiefs of large tribes; and the importance of leadership roles in kinship groups extends down to the lesser gentry as wel . It is the way in which individual landowners are embedded in landowning clans (like the Guj ars of Attock, the subject of a classic study by Stephen Lyon) which gives them their tremendous strength and resilience, and al ows them to go on control ing the politics of the countryside, and dominating those of the country as a whole.7

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. As one landowner-politician in Sindh told me, in words which were echoed by many other people and provide the title for this book, This is a hard country. You need family or tribal links to protect you, so that there are people who wil stick with you and sacrifice for you whatever happens. That way you wil not be abandoned even when out of government. The tribal people gives even ordinary tribesmen some strength and protection against attack, whether by dacoits, the police, the courts – your tribesmen wil get you out of jail, lie for you to the court, avenge you if necessary.

Since British days, outside the Baloch and Pathan areas this has rarely been a matter of the whole clan taking up arms against a rival clan. Rather, in a violent society in which none of the institutions of the state can be relied on to act in accordance with their formal rules, close relations with kinsfolk are essential for help against rivals, against the predatory and violent police, in the courts, in politics, and in the extraction of political patronage – al areas of activity which overlap and depend on each other.

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. Rather than a new urban population emerging, what we have mainly 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.

And of course 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. As one informed description of the state legal system has it: Below the level of the High Courts al is corruption. Neither the facts nor the law in the case have real bearing on the outcome.

It al depends on who you know, who has influence and where you put your money.8

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 essential to the nature of each party.

The problem about al this is that while in one way the power of kinship, underpinning the rule of the elites, has so far maintained the basic stability and even the existence of Pakistan, in other ways the plundering of state resources for patronage which this politics breeds has been extremely bad for the development of the country.

It is striking that the most economical y and social y dynamic sections of the Pakistani population are those which have to a greater or lesser extent been shaken loose from their traditional cultural patterns and kinship al egiances by mass migration. This is most obviously true of the Mohajirs of Karachi, who emigrated from India after 1947; but even more important are the Punjabis who fled from east Punjab in the dreadful summer of 1947, and now form the backbone of the Punjabi economy. A much smal er, but in some ways even more striking, group are the Hazaras of Balochistan who fled from Afghanistan in the late nineteenth century, and whose educated middle-class society forms a remarkable contrast to the stagnation that surrounds them.