Pakistan: A Hard Country (41 page)
This ignored the fact that a very considerable portion of the educated middle class is conservative and even Islamist by sympathy; as noted in the chapter on religion, the Jamaat Islami has long had a determined and rather successful strategy of targeting universities, partly precisely in order later to get its students into influential professions like the media. As Imran Aslam, head of Geo, told me: When in the ’90s I started The News as Pakistan’s first desktop publication, my print media col eagues and I didn’t have a clue about the technology involved. We had Apples sitting on the desks and we didn’t know what to do with them. We had to hire people to help. And you know what? The only people we could find were from the Jamaat Islami. They’d been trained in the ’80s with CIA and ISI help to support the Afghan Mujahidin with propaganda. So the people who the liberals see as Yahoos were explaining to the media elites what hotmail was.20
Even more importantly, the middle classes and the journalists among them are just as suffused with hostility to the US and its presence in Afghanistan as the rest of society. Depressingly, this has also meant that I have heard as many cretinous conspiracy theories about America from journalists as from ordinary Pakistanis – indeed more, because the journalists’ background gives them more raw material with which to weave their fantasies. In fairness, however, I must say that liberal journalists are just as bad, with the difference that their baroque conspiracy theories are directed at the army.
The media are therefore a microcosm of the Pakistani middle classes, and reflect their views. One sign of this is television’s approach to religion. Many liberals are horrified by the number of religious programmes on TV – though as of 2009 this is only five out of around eighty, which is roughly the US proportion. It is equal y true that Jamaati supporters with whom I have spoken have been horrified by the content of many of these programmes.
This is partly because of a response to audience wishes and the strong element of popular religion, involving the worship of saints and other ‘Hindu superstitions’. It is also because, owing to privately owned television’s innate need for controversy and excitement, a considerable amount of debate and disagreement about religion appears on TV – once again, accurately reflecting the conflicting views of Pakistani society, but infuriating the orthodox. I was told about (though haven’t been able to trace) one lively exchange on a phone-in programme on religious rules when a Sunni cleric told a woman that it was sinful to paint her nails, and his Shia col eague asked him why, in that case, he himself was dyeing his beard!
It was indeed surprising that middle-class journalists from classes which general y have a traditional reverence for the army (if only because so many of their relatives are officers) should have turned against the Musharraf administration so radical y in 2007 – 8 – especial y since they had general y begun by supporting him. This can be partly be explained by a genuine middle-class respect for the law and desire to defend the independence of the judiciary; but it can also be explained by the fact that respect for the army is closely connected with nationalism. As in the judiciary itself, Musharraf’s perceived subservience to the US and obedience to ‘US orders to kil his own people’ had already begun to cripple his prestige with the middle classes before the Lawyers’ Movement rose against him. The same perception of being ‘America’s slave’, together with corruption, explains the growing hostility of much of the media to the Zardari administration in 2009 – 10.
This hostility to the US, rather than extremist feeling as such, explains the rather shocking toleration for the Pakistani Taleban shown by much of Pakistani television up to the spring of 2009. This did not take the form of outright propaganda, but rather of playing interviews with Taleban spokesmen, and military or official interviews, on an equal basis and without commentary; and, in the reporting of terrorist acts, of frequent references to conspiracy theories which might excuse the Taleban from responsibility.
This was not a matter of cynical manipulation – as far as I can see, from a great many interviews with journalists, they believed these theories implicitly themselves. There was therefore a reciprocal effect, with the media sucking up public prejudices and playing them back to the public, strengthening them in the process. In the spring of 2009, however, there was a real change. The military did some tough talking to media owners and journalists, and thereafter most of the media have been much more supportive of the campaign against the Pakistani Taleban – while continuing, like the rest of society, to oppose action against the Afghan Taleban.
As to the media’s future role in politics, there are two key issues: mass mobilization, and the righting of wrongs. On the first, television is indeed likely to play an important part in encouraging various kinds of protest and stirring up support for movements against the al eged crimes of unpopular and dictatorial regimes. However, if the past is anything to go by, this may just as wel be against civilian as military regimes.
On the exposure of wrongs, the media have indeed played an increased role. When it comes to justice for wrongs, the media’s ability is natural y limited to its capacity to embarrass, since punishment is a matter for the government, the police and the courts. Thus, I heard of a case in northern Sindh where three young ‘feudals’ had raped a nurse in a local clinic. On the insistence of her col eagues, the police arrested the youths concerned. Of course, I was told by a local journalist,
Their political relatives got them released again very quickly, and they wil never go to jail for what they did. But in the meantime the media had filmed them handcuffed in the police station. So at least their families were embarrassed, and maybe that meant they gave them a damned good beating when they got home.
On the other hand, despite extensive media coverage, the criminals in the monstrous case of the rape of Mukhtar Mai and persecution of her family, and the burial of girls alive in Balochistan (described in Chapter 9), have not been brought to justice years after the event, because of the political power of those responsible.
The use of the media to embarrass politicians could also become a weapon of political misinformation and attack between different parties, factions and individuals. This has always been the case on a smal scale but the new force of television vastly increases the possibilities. The media as weapon (though, in this case, of legitimate self-defence) was brought home to me by a Christian journalist friend in one of the rougher parts of Pakistan. He had got into a parking dispute with the fol owers of a notoriously ruthless local chieftain. I asked him whether this wasn’t dangerous, especial y given the way in which Christians in the area had been persecuted. No, he replied, because the Sardar and his men knew that he was a journalist and a friend of the other leading journalists of the area. ‘We journalists stick together and defend each other. So if they did anything to me, stories about al the bad things he and his family have done would be al over television, the papers and radio.’
It is stil too early to say whether the new media form a real y important new force, or whether they wil only be a new element of the old scene, and wil essential y be ingested by the traditional system – as has happened to so many forces before them. At the very least, though, the media are encouraging a wider range of people to think and talk about public issues than has been the case in the past – which is presumably a good thing, depending on what they think and say.
THE PAKISTAN PEOPLE’S PARTY (PPP)
As you drive towards the Sindhi town of Larkana from the north, a shining white lump appears on the flat face of the plain and gradual y grows to enormous dimensions. It is the mausoleum of the local Bhutto family of landowners and tribal chieftains, who in recent decades have made an impact considerably beyond their ancestral territory.
Reflecting this impact, the mausoleum is a squatter but possibly even bigger version of the Taj Mahal in gleaming white marble. It is built over the site of the ancient Bhutto family graveyard, and was started under the first government of Benazir Bhutto after 1988 as a monument to her executed father. Now she rests there herself.
The mausoleum is arranged on two levels. When it is finished, the upper one, under the huge dome, is supposed to be for the general public; the lower one, containing the actual tombs, wil be for VIP
visitors only. But perhaps one should say if it is finished, rather than when; for it has a curious look of having been designed to be a ruin. As of mid-2009, after twenty years of construction repeatedly interrupted by the PPP being ousted from government, both levels were unfinished, with scaffolding everywhere, the floors a patchwork of rough concrete and uneven, badly laid marble slabs, the stairs uneven to the foot, and heaps of unused building materials lying around. The mixture of pomp and shoddiness made a depressing contrast with the beautiful carvings and cal igraphy of the older Bhutto tombs.
On the wal s of the basement, posters proclaim the al egiance of various PPP politicians and would-be politicians. One, from Pervaiz Menon, head of a PPP chapter in the US, read: Once Athens bled and mourned death for Socrates, twice the persecution of beloved Bhuttos, for his death transcends the greatest tragedy in Asian history ... The integration of human sufferings begins within a promise to conquer the unknown, the unleashed giant.
Whatever that was supposed to mean. But as so often in South Asia, solemnity is not real y the local style. I spoke harshly to my guide about his lighting a cigarette beside the tombs, but my concern for decorum was quite unnecessary. As at some of the shrines described in the chapter on religion, extended families were picnicking among the tombs, their smal children running around squeaking, and sometimes competing in jumping over the smal er graves: in the midst of death we were in life.
Outside the mausoleum is a scene which also exactly recal s the shrines of saints (and the Catholic Mediterranean): a smal hamlet of stal s sel ing quasi-religious memorabilia mixed with cheap toys and jewel ery, and with the local equivalent of hymns – speeches by the various Bhuttos – booming over loudspeakers. Also familiar from shrines everywhere is another reputed use of the mausoleum – as a discreet meeting-place for lovers.
None of this is specific to the Bhuttos or Pakistan. South Asia is a region of hereditary political dynasties: the Nehrus-Gandhis in India, the Bandaranaikes in Sri Lanka, and the rival families of Sheikh Hasina and Begum Khaleda Zia in Bangladesh. The violent nature of South Asian politics means that most of these dynasties have their martyrs: Mrs Gandhi and her son Rajiv in India, the father of Sheikh Hasina and husband of Khaleda Zia, and of course Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and his daughter Benazir.
These dynasties have proved extraordinarily resilient. They have survived the violent deaths of their leading members, repeated failures in government, repeated failures to deliver on promises to the masses and, in many cases, the abandonment of whatever genuine ideology they ever possessed.
This reflects at a higher level the kinship al egiances which permeate most South Asian political societies; and the fact that, in most cases, these societies have not developed classes and groups that can generate parties based on ideology and mass organization rather than on family al egiance. As a PPP politician, Aftab Shaban Mirani, told me in 1990, ‘It is impossible to destroy the PPP. Individual politicians can be split from it, but the nucleus wil always remain the house of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.’21
Most of Pakistan’s parties, large and smal , are led by dynasties.
None of the others however – not even the Sharifs, described in the next section – approaches the monarchical atmosphere surrounding the Bhuttos. I had a taste of this back in 1988 at a press conference with the new Minister of State for Information, Javed Jabbar. The words ‘grace’ and ‘gracious’ tripped from his lips so often that they came to seem like royal titles – which in a way is exactly what they were:
After eleven years of darkness, a woman leader has come to power who is brave, bright, bril iant, gracious, to overthrow the forces of darkness. I would like to thank the Prime Minister for her most gracious act in appointing me to the ministry ... Thanks to her, every few days there is a moment which wil become historic. I am privileged to have sat in the first cabinet meeting led by a woman Prime Minister, which she presided over with her customary grace ...22
This was not personal sycophancy so much as general party style, which tends to be overripe even by the flavourful standards of South Asia. A book by a PPP supporter, The Ideals of Bhutto, reads in part as fol ows:
What is Bhuttoism? It is a clarion cal to establish a welfare democratic state. It is the power of people. It is an enlightened, modern, moderate and egalitarian society. It is the end of religious extremism, sectarianism, parochialism and terrorism ...
Jeeay Bhutto [Long Live Bhutto, or Victory to Bhutto] is a banging slogan raising the dead to life. It awakens the slumbered souls. It has a meaning. Long live Bhutto signifies his unending mission. This mission can never die. It is a permanent principle of paramount importance. It reminds us of democracy. It cuts the roots of fascism. It severs the branches of feudalism, militarism and mul ahism ...23