Pakistan: A Hard Country (49 page)

The second region is the Potwar (or Potohar) plateau of north-west Punjab, extending from the Salt range of hil s to the Indus River and the Pathan lands, which have exerted a strong cultural influence here. A good many of the Potwari-speaking inhabitants of this region are in fact from original y Pathan tribes, like the ancestors of the cricketer-politician Imran Khan Niazi, but consider themselves to be Punjabis.

This is an area of poor, arid soil which the canal colonies did not reach. As in Balochistan and parts of Sindh and the NWFP, in much of the Potwar region the water table is dropping rapidly because of both excessive and inefficient use by agriculture, and the booming needs of the mushrooming twin cities of Islamabad – Rawalpindi. Water shortages in turn are driving farmers off the land to swel these urban populations stil further. This is at present a low-level, undramatic movement, but its importance in worsening living standards should not be underestimated – as anyone who has seen Pakistani rural women carrying containers of water for long distances in the heat of summer can easily appreciate.

The Potwar region has few great landowners but numerous landowning clans, with bigger farmers exercising leadership – a development encouraged by past land reforms, which led landowners to split their lands between different members of their families. This marks a difference from central and southern Punjab, where (as in Britain) landowners tried to keep their estates in the hands of one son, and put other sons into the army, the civil service or business. Politics here is no longer ‘feudal’, but it is stil critical y dependent on kinship and leadership within kinship groups.

Owing to the poverty of its soil, the Potwar region has long exported its labour in one way or another. The British recruited most of their Muslim soldiers from the Potwar area, and until recently a large majority of the Pakistani army was also recruited from these few districts. The strong Pathan influence in this region has created concerns that Taleban influence could spread here from the NWFP.

This could undermine the wil ingness to fight of the ordinary jawan (young man), or even in the worst case lead to mutiny. A great many people from this region are working in the Gulf, and the remittances that they send home help support the region economical y and increase their families’ independence from local landowners.

The biggest city of the region is Rawalpindi, which now has more than three mil ion people but was a tiny vil age until the British developed it as their military headquarters to cover the Afghan frontier (though it is close to the site of another city erased by war, the great Gandharan Buddhist centre of Taxila). The choice of this region by Ayub Khan for his new capital, Islamabad, reflected its better climate but also no doubt a desire to base the capital in an area with solid military ties.

The third great Punjabi region is the south. This area overlaps but is not identical with the Seraiki-speaking belt, and in certain ways includes parts of central Punjab such as Jhang. It is defined more by cultural and economic patterns than by language. With a much smal er share of the canal colonies, the south was less affected by the greater social mobility and economic dynamism they brought in their train, and also received relatively fewer refugees from east Punjab. It also contains fewer egalitarian Jats than the northern and central parts of Punjab, and more Baloch, with their traditional deference to their autocratic chieftains.

In consequence, southern Punjab is far more ‘feudal’ than the north, in ways that connect it cultural y to Sindh. Also linking this region to Sindh is the very strong tradition of worshipping saints and shrines, in many cases the base for great ‘feudal’ families of hereditary saints, or pirs. The shrines bind together many local Sunnis with the Shia, who have a major presence in this region. However, this presence, and especial y the high proportion of the local ‘feudals’ who are Shia, has also helped stir up some bitter sectarian chauvinism against the local Shia.

Given al these divisions within Punjab itself, can one real y speak of Punjabi domination of Pakistan, or of a Punjabi identity as such? The answer is less than the other provinces like to claim, but more than the Punjabis themselves like to pretend. To a great extent, of course, there is no establishment conspiracy about Punjab’s domination of Pakistan – with some 56 per cent of the population and some 75 per cent of the industry, it natural y outweighs the other provinces, just as England natural y dominates the United Kingdom. This industry is no longer only limited to textiles and food processing. Sialkot is a major international centre of sports goods and somewhat weirdly (but presumably by extension through bladders) of bagpipes. Gujrat produces high-quality shoes and medium-quality electrical goods. No industries of this scale and sophistication exist in any of Pakistan’s other provinces, with the obvious exception of the city of Karachi.

When representatives of other provinces denounce Punjab for its 55

per cent quota of official jobs, they conveniently forget that this is actual y slightly less than Punjab’s share of the population, just as, fol owing the seventh National Finance Commission Award of 2010, Punjab’s share of state revenues is considerably below its share both of population and of revenue generation. The great majority of Pakistan’s national leaders (including three out of four of its military rulers) have not been Punjabis. A widespread opinion exists among the Punjabi elites that the province is in fact ‘leaning over backwards’

to accommodate the other provinces, even at the cost of both Punjabi and national development.

This feeling in Punjab contributes to support in the province for the Sharifs and the Muslim League. As one of the Muslim League’s leaders told me in November 1988, after the elections in which the PPP had won power in Islamabad and the IJI al iance (led by the Muslim League) in Lahore:

There has been a tremendous growth in provincial awareness in Punjab. The province is looking for its own leader. This is necessary to balance the other provinces, which in the past have blackmailed Punjab – ‘if you do not give us more water we wil break up Pakistan’ and so on. We are 62 per cent of the population of Pakistan, but have only a 45 per cent share of jobs in the state services. We have taken the role of a generous uncle to the other provinces.9

On the other hand, the leader in question was Chaudhury Shujaat Hussain of Gujrat; and, after Musharraf’s coup against Nawaz Sharif’s government in 1999, Chaudhury Shujaat and his brother, Chaudhury Pervez Elahi, abandoned the Sharifs to join Musharraf’s administration and take over the government of Punjab themselves. So, as always in Pakistan, col ective identities (whether provincial, ethnic, religious or whatever) are constantly being trumped by personal and family loyalties and ambitions.

If the Punjabi elites functioned as a united whole with a common agenda, then they certainly could dominate Pakistan absolutely for a while; but as the sensible ones realize, in the long run they would also destroy Pakistan, because of the furious resentment this would cause in the other provinces. There is little likelihood of this happening, because, as the previous account of Punjab’s divisions should suggest, the Punjabi elites are themselves very divided, and have very different agendas.

There does seem to be a sort of loose community of sentiment favouring Punjab among many senior Punjabi army officers and bureaucrats – though one which is endlessly cut across by personal and political ties and ambitions, and by considerations of qaum (community) and religious affiliation. As a senior official in Islamabad told me:

You have to argue twice as hard to push through any project in one of the other provinces; and if I want to push through a project to help a city in one of the other provinces, I always have to be careful to balance it with one helping a Punjabi city; but it doesn’t work the other way round. Any Sindhi-based national government has to lean over backwards to show that it is not disadvantaging the Punjab in any way.

Concerning official jobs, according to the quota Punjabis have less than their proportion of the population, but they are over-represented in the senior jobs. That is partly because they are better educated on average – and that also means that they dominate the merit-based entry and the quota for women.

He also said that I should be aware that he is a Mohajir, and therefore possibly biased himself.

The closest Pakistan came to a united Punjabi establishment was under Zia-ul-Haq, when a Punjabi military ruler created a Punjab-based national political party under a Punjabi industrialist (Nawaz Sharif). However, the al iance between the military and the PML(N) frayed in the 1990s and col apsed completely when General Musharraf overthrew Nawaz Sharif’s government in 1999. Since then, relations have been at best extremely distrustful.

In turn, there are deep differences between northern Punjabi industrialists (who tend to support either the PML(N) or military regimes), and southern Punjabi ‘feudals’ (who tend towards the PPP).

Punjabi industrialists, however, cannot dominate military regimes, as witness their failure to achieve their infrastructure and energy needs under both Zia and Musharraf. Final y, the Muslim religious leaders in Punjab are so fractured along theological, political, personal and regional lines that it does not make sense to speak of them as an establishment at al .

Punjabis from north-central Punjab certainly feel superior to the other nationalities in Pakistan, and this feeling – of which the others are wel aware – helps to keep ethnic relations in a permanent state of mild tension. The Punjabis from these regions are quite convinced (and it must be said, with good reason) that they are harder working, better organized and more dynamic than anyone else in Pakistan except the Mohajirs; and while Punjabis respect Mohajirs, since the latter are not farmers they cannot real y be ful y fitted into the traditional Punjabi view of the world (as a very unkind saying about the Punjabi Jats has it: ‘Other peoples have culture. The Jats have agriculture’).

For the Sindhis, Punjabis tend to feel a rather amused and tolerant contempt, as for pleasant and easygoing but lazy younger relatives.

For the Baloch there is contempt without the tolerance, as primitive tribesmen sponging off Punjabi charity. For the Pathans, however, Punjabi sentiments are very different, in ways that may have an effect on their attitudes to the Taleban and the war in Afghanistan.

Punjabis believe (once again with good reason) that they are more modern and economical y dynamic than the Pathans. Yet in Punjabi Muslim culture there is also an ingrained cultural and historical respect for the Muslim pastoral warriors who repeatedly swept across Punjab from Afghanistan, and from whom many Punjabis – especial y in the upper classes – are or claim to be descended; and the Pathans, however savage, are widely seen as Muslim warriors par excellence, whose prowess has been celebrated in Pakistani literature and propaganda in al the modern wars from Kashmir to Afghanistan.

This identification with the pastoral tradition gives rise to the public and formal (as opposed to private and familial) eating habits of the Punjabis, including in hotels and restaurants; a tradition whereby the green vegetable is almost a publicly persecuted species: part of a heroic effort by a people of mainly bean-eating sedentary farmers to portray themselves to visitors, each other and most of al themselves as meateating nomadic herdsmen.10

However, the fact that Pathan armies also repeatedly raped, looted and burned their way across Punjab (contributing to the province’s lack of historic cities) makes this Punjabi respect for Pathans a somewhat wary one. As a Punjabi lady acquaintance said to me of the Afghan Mujahidin back in 1988: ‘I know they are very brave people, fighting for their country against the great Russian army and so on, but I must say I’m glad they are based in Peshawar, not Lahore.’ Or as an old southern Punjabi proverb used to have it: ‘The son of a Pathan is sometimes a devil, sometimes a demon.’

INDUSTRIALISTS

Driving in Punjab can be a slightly surreal experience. Magnificent (but usual y almost empty) new motorways coexist with the same old potholed two-lane ‘highways’, where the SUVs of the wealthy jostle perilously with the bul ock carts and camels of the poor. The motorways are patrol ed by the astonishingly honest and efficient national motorway police. The other roads are patrol ed (or rather not) by the same old Punjab police.

The same element of surrealism goes for the contrasting sights along the road. Driving to Faisalabad from Multan in the evening, we passed mile after mile of primeval-looking mud vil ages, with the occasional electric light il uminating some home or roadside stal . My need to stop and retire behind a tree became increasingly urgent, but my driver would not permit it. ‘No stop here sir, here very bad people.

Baloch, dacoits.’ Just as I was preparing to throw myself from the car and into the arms of any bandits who might happen to be passing, a mirage came into sight, blazing with lights like a solitary fairground in a desert: ‘Welcome to Paris CNG Station’ it said, and offered not merely gas, but a business centre with fax and e-mail and a lavatory with flush toilets.

Business and administration in Faisalabad are rather the same.