Pakistan: A Hard Country (40 page)

Part of this is an even more intensive version of the obligation incumbent on many Pakistanis (and especial y Pathans) to attend al the births, marriages and funerals even of distant relatives – al of which have a ‘political’ aspect within the family, and therefore potential y at least in wider politics as wel . As numerous friends have complained, this is crushingly exhausting and time-consuming even for people with no political ambitions; but a failure to turn up to the marriages or funerals even of very distant cousins wil be taken as an insult which wil severely affect future relations.

Then there is the time consumed by the workings of the patronage system. Iqbal Akhund, a bureaucratic observer of the creation of the PPP-led government in 1988, remarked that: Ministers were besieged in their homes from morning til night by petitioners, job-hunters, favour-seekers and al and sundry. It was the same inside the National Assembly, where every minister’s seat was a little beehive with members and backbenchers hovering around and going back and forth with little chits of paper. How the ministers got any work done is a mystery, but in any case policy took a back seat to attending to the importunities of relatives, friends and constituents.16

Twenty years later, in the summer of 2009, a businessman from Multan described to me a recent dinner given by the Multan Chamber of Commerce in honour of the Foreign Minister, Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi, who is a member of a leading pir family from Multan:

As soon as the speeches were over and people went to the buffet, Shah Mehmood was besieged by people wanting things: ‘Oh, Qureishi Sahib, my nephew has been arrested on a false murder charge, you are such a great man, it wil take one phone cal from you only.’

‘Oh, Minister Sahib, you remember that business about a loan, stil they are making trouble.’

‘Oh, Makhdoom Sahib, you promised to help my brother with promotion in his department, but he has been passed over. The minister, he is your good friend. Please cal him, my family wil be so grateful.’

And you know, if these are important local people who have helped him in the past, or close relatives, then he wil have to help them – or he wil have no political future in Multan. And if it is a difficult case with other influential interests involved, or an important position, then he won’t be able to depute it to his staff.

In order to show respect al round and get the result, he wil have to make the cal himself. And so here we are in the middle of a real y dreadful international crisis for Pakistan, and our Foreign Minister wil be spending half his time dealing with things which in a properly run country wouldn’t be his business at al , instead of doing his real job for Pakistan.

Being a politician in Pakistan therefore has its particular strains; yet, on the other hand, since every major landowner needs to attract and keep fol owers, deter rivals and maintain influence over the administration, in many ways every landowner is a politician. To be successful at this requires particular qualities, as described to me by a banker from the great Soomro landowning family in Sindh in 1990: You need a strong family or tribe behind you, and you also need to play a role in politics, so as to gain influence over the government, the police and the courts. When you grow up, you decide or it is decided for you whether you wil go into politics.

There is no fixed rule in the great families which son or cousin should go into politics. Junaid is my youngest brother. It depends on who seems best suited to it. But someone always has to.

Me, I’m not suited to it. I like a regular life as a banker, getting up at eight to go to the office, coming back at six. Junaid can be woken up at 1 a.m. any night by one of our tenants or fol owers: ‘Sir, I have a problem with the police’ – and of course every one wants precedence. You have to be always on cal , and you have to judge person by person who to help, and how much to help, and how quickly. Some friends wil wait and stay your friends, others not. It’s a disorganized kind of game, and everything depends on circumstances. You also have to be patient and careful. Many are not suited to it. You need to have the right temperament and like the game to succeed at it and if, like me, you give it up, sometimes you miss it, like a drug.

And the power of single lords or landowning families is now fading. You also need to attach yourself to a party, with some kind of ideology. Then even when you are in opposition you wil stil have friends in the bureaucracy, and your enemies wil remember that you may be in government again, and wil be more careful with you.

But going into party politics also makes the game even more dangerous, because when the government changes you can be imprisoned, or even kil ed. The brothers in my family are a surgeon, a banker, a lawyer and a politician, and we’ve al gone to jail. You have to be motivated to do this – standing in chains before a military judge, for fifteen straight days. The people of our class are not usual y tortured, but a selected few are. More common is murder, which can be blamed on criminals. And then there is mental torture – fake executions, waking you up repeatedly at night. But there is this to be said for it: it hardens you. And life in this country is difficult whatever you do, so there is no room for weaklings.17

So while Pakistani politicians in general get a pretty bad press, and deservedly so, it is sometimes possible to feel sorry for them. They are often not saints, but they often need the patience of saints, as wel as the courage of wolves, the memory of elephants and the digestion of crocodiles. 18 This last requirement was brought back to me by my last political journey with a Pakistani politician, in Sindh in the spring of 2009.

My host was one of the Bhuttos – in fact the hereditary chief of the Bhutto tribe, Sardar Mumtaz Ali Bhutto. He is a cousin of the late Benazir, but no love is lost between the two branches of the family.

Mumtaz Ali was chief minister of Sindh in the first years of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s administration but, in a familiar pattern, was forced to resign when it seemed that he might become a rival. Since then, he has headed his own smal and moderately Sindhi nationalist political party, and was only briefly Chief Minister again in the caretaker government of 1996 – 7.

Yet his lands and wealth, his name, his status, his personal prestige and the faint possibility – even at the age of seventy-six – that he might once again hold senior office mean that he is stil a force to be taken into account by other local politicians. Also of importance is the fact that he has an able and energetic eldest son, so that it is clear that the dynasty is not going to fade, and that by helping him people are stockpiling potential reciprocal benefits for the future.

Smal though his party is, my travels with him had something of the air of a minor triumphal procession, with delegations coming to meet his convoy in towns and vil ages, throwing rose petals over his landcruiser, chanting his slogans and bowing to kiss his hand, and children running out for the free tamasha (show). For a while we were accompanied by an escort of young men on motorbikes and scooters waving the party flag. This took me back to the great motorized cavalcades of past election campaigns in Pakistan that I had covered; and, looking even further back, one could almost glimpse through the clouds of dust turbaned and helmeted riders on horseback, with pennants waving from their lances.

A rather macabre, but absolutely typical aspect of our progress to the Sardar’s ancestral estate was that it was repeatedly interrupted by condolences. Three times we cal ed on local landowning and political families whose patriarchs had just died. In Europe, for an uninvited guest like me to intrude on private grief in this way would seem grossly insensitive, but these events are anything but private. They are in fact a central part not just of social life but also of political life, an occasion to demonstrate political loyalty or at least connections, to see and be seen. Not, however, to talk. It took me a long time during my first stay in Pakistan to get used to gatherings of men sitting in dead silence, broken only by the occasional murmurs of the eldest son and the chief guest. The movement of jaws is not for speech, but for food – and such food! As Mumtaz Ali Bhutto told me: If you want to keep wel fed in the countryside here, just keep going to condole with people; and if you are a politician you have no choice anyway. This is supposed to be a purely private journey not a political one, but you see how it is. If this were an election campaign, we’d have been offered twelve meals a day.

The trick is to nibble just a little bit everywhere.

Meanwhile, I studied the decor of the houses we visited, an amazing mixture of exquisite old-style local taste, appal ing Western taste and what might best be described as contemporary Bol ywood Neo-Moghul stage-set taste. With summer fast approaching, al the curtains were drawn against the heat and glare outside, so that the rooms were lit only by glaring strip-lights. Throughout Pakistan, this gives most homes – even some of the most luxurious ones – the curious impression of third-class cabins in the bowels of a cruise ship.

Some of the decor was not conducive to maintaining gravity. One of my favourite items was an enormous toy tiger sitting on a table in the middle of a drawing-room where we had gathered to condole. Its eyes looked directly into mine – glassily, but not much more so than those of the other guests, who also gave a strong impression of having been stuffed. As the respectful silence wore on and on, I was seized by an almost irresistible desire to offer the creature some kebab and try to strike up a conversation.

Even more impressive was the bedroom of the eldest son and political heir of another mournful house, where the guests of honour were ushered to use his toilet. The room contained only two furnishings: an enormous neo-rococo bed decorated with huge bunches of flowers, fruit and ostrich feathers, al painted in imitation gold leaf; and, hanging over the bed, an equal y enormous photograph of the young politician himself. This too was obviously a room for official entertainment, a local version of Louis XIV; but who on earth, I wondered, could possibly be the local version of Madame de Maintenon?

It would be a grave mistake, however, to laugh at the waderos of Sindh. As the chapter on Sindh wil demonstrate, they are very much in control of their own society, and look like remaining so for the foreseeable future. The secret of their success is a mixture of wealth and the deference ensured by their status as clan chiefs, local hereditary religious figures, or a mixture of the two. One local landowner we visited seemed barely above the level of the larger peasants in terms of wealth, living in a bleak concrete house with bare concrete wal s and floors; yet he turned out to be a pir, and a significant political influence in the local Shia community.

THE MEDIA

In the twenty years between my stay in Pakistan in the late 1980s and the writing of this book, by far the most important change on the Pakistani political scene (other than the rebel ion of the Pakistani Taleban) has been the proliferation of television and radio stations during Musharraf’s period in power. By 2009 there were around eighty Pakistani TV channels, twelve exclusively for news and current affairs.

Indeed, several middle-class people said to me that ‘news has become our entertainment’, though they admitted that this was probably the effect of novelty and would sooner or later wear off. Five channels were devoted to religion.

In the 1980s, Pakistani television was completely state-control ed and was of a quite excruciating dul ness (as indeed was state TV in India). Newspapers and magazines were the main sources of news and analysis, but, although they had occasional lively discussions and sometimes exposed scandals, their journalists were hopeless at fol owing up and researching stories.

Musharraf had good cause to curse the media he had al owed to form. In the later years of his rule it was above al due to the support of some of these channels – notably Geo, a branch of the Jang media group – that the Lawyers’ Movement gathered public support and even briefly became something like a mass movement. This al iance of journalists and lawyers gave many people the idea that a new middle-class political force that might transform the political system had been forged in Pakistan; or, at the very least, that the media would play a critical role in making and breaking governments, reducing the traditional role of kinship and patronage.

In 2008 – 9, however, liberal intel ectuals and their English-language media outlets (like the Friday Times and Daily Times of Lahore) turned against much of the rest of the new media, accusing them of sympathy for the Taleban and bias against the PPP administration of President Zardari. There was much muttering among liberals of my acquaintance about establishment conspiracies to manipulate the media, and about the way in which Musharraf had created a ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’.

The error of the liberals and many Western analysts was to forget that, in the words of Dr Mosharraf Zaidi, ‘Pakistan’s media is guilty of being a microcosm of the society that it reports on, reports for and reports to. It is a reflection and an extension of Pakistan at large.’19

Liberals had assumed that a new media, dominated by educated middle-class people, would inevitably therefore reflect liberal and (by implication) pro-PPP and pro-Western positions.