Pakistan: A Hard Country (53 page)
That done, I turned on the television to see if anything important had happened during the day, and discovered that yes, it had – thirty-four people had been kil ed in gun battles and targeted shootings over the previous few hours in outlying parts of Karachi; and no one whom I’d met in the centre of town had thought it worth mentioning, or had changed their behaviour in any way as a result.
What was even more striking was that this experience echoed one of almost twenty years before, when I was visiting Karachi as a journalist in August 1989. Then, too, a gun battle erupted in another part of town, of which I and everyone I met were unaware until I was tipped off by a local journalist. On that occasion, if I remember rightly, there were only six dead.
The fighting then was between fighters from the Mohajir majority in Karachi and others from the Sindhi minority in the city (but majority in the province as a whole). In 2009, the fighting was between Mohajirs and Pathans. Otherwise, at first sight, plus ça change . . . Nothing about the Rangers (a paramilitary corps under the army, acting as a reserve force of order in the city) trying to separate the two sides had changed, nor the alert, tense, rather contemptuous glances they cast over the local population from behind the light machineguns mounted on their jeeps. Nor had anything at al changed in the handful of mostly il -equipped and dirty hospitals to which the wounded were ferried.
There have been several more such battles in 2009 and 2010.
Al this is a long way of saying that Karachi is a deeply divided city, but also a very big city, with a remarkable capacity to tolerate episodes of great violence. In 1989 the population was already 8
mil ion, bigger than London’s. By 2009, it had swel ed to a megalopolis of around 18 mil ion – or at least that was the estimate Karachi’s mayor gave me and uses as a basis. Other opinions from officials ranged from 15 to 20 mil ion. Obviously, a city which is not sure of the existence of several mil ion people isn’t going to miss thirty-four very badly; and indeed, visiting the affected areas in the fol owing days, it was not easy to spot the occasional burntout shop and minibus amid the thousands of shops and minibuses stil plying their trade on the endless streets.
Nor is Karachi a particularly violent city by world standards. Even if political and ethnic violence are included, the murder rate in Karachi at the last count put it twenty-fifth among the great cities of the world.
Remove these elements, and the rate goes down to wel below that of several large cities in the US. Despite the kil ings of April 2009, Karachi is stil – God wil ing – much more peaceful than it was when I knew it in the late 1980s. As of 2010, kil ings are chiefly targeted, aimed at the activists and ‘hard men’ on either side; the kil ings are part of the political game, of the ‘negotiated state’. Then, there were mass kil ings, with bomb attacks and pil ion riders on motorbikes firing Kalashnikovs into crowds, leaving dozens dead at a time, and pointing towards outright ethnic civil war. This improvement in the country’s greatest city has to be set against the growing violence of the Pathan areas of northern Pakistan. As usual, Pakistan is stumbling along, worse in some ways, better in others.
For that matter, even in its worst years Karachi was very far from the anarchy of West Africa, let alone Somalia or the Congo. Indeed, anyone who has done no more than visit Karachi airport can tel the difference. Since 2000, under two general y honest, efficient and dynamic city governments, the city’s infrastructure has considerably improved. Al the same, there have been moments in Karachi when I was tempted to kiss the Rangers (a temptation strongly to be resisted).
Final y, it is worth noting that none of the major outbreaks of conflict in Karachi over the past generation has involved the Taleban, or Islamist extremism in general. There have been isolated terrorist attacks by Sunni Islamist extremists in the city, including serious terrorism against local Shia, the murder of Daniel Pearl and the bomb attack on the US consulate; and Jamaat Islami students have been involved in armed clashes with other student groups in the university, but Karachi’s tensions are overwhelmingly ethnic, not sectarian.
In fact, the Taleban stand about as much chance of taking over Karachi as I do, given the make-up and culture of most of its inhabitants. Rather, the dangers to Karachi from the Taleban are twofold. The first is that Taleban terrorist attacks attributed to members of the Pathan minority in the city may exacerbate ethnic tensions to the point where they are beyond the power of the army and Rangers to contain, and the economic life of the city – and of Pakistan – is severely damaged.
The second, more remote possibility is that developments elsewhere wil split the army and weaken the state to the point where their control over Sindh and Karachi wil col apse altogether, and this region wil be delivered over to its own inner demons. On the basis of my own researches, I can state with melancholy confidence that the ability of Sindh’s populations to regulate their differences peaceful y in the absence of the Pakistani state would be low to non-existent.
Looming behind the short-to medium-term threat of ethnic violence is an even greater long-term danger – that of water: not enough of one kind, and too much of another. For the past 5,000 years and more, human civilization in this region has been a gift only of the River Indus, which flows through what would otherwise be desert and semi-desert.
After the British conquered Sindh in the 1830s, their first census recorded a population of barely 1.3 mil ion people. One hundred and seventy years later, the population has soared to around 50 mil ion people – and 50 mil ion people cannot live in a desert.
This growth was thanks above al to massive British irrigation projects, which turned large areas of semi-desert into some of the most fertile land on earth. But almost al the water that flows down these canals stil comes from the same old source: the Indus, that ‘capricious and incalculable river’; and through a mixture of over-use and appal ing wastefulness, in the decade leading up to 2010 the Indus no longer flowed into its delta for much of the year, and the sea crept in to replace it.
The great floods of 2010 have replenished the delta and promised Sindh’s farmers a bumper crop in 2011, but this is likely to be a purely temporary effect – unless, on the one hand, Sindh can develop an infrastructure to conserve and use its water properly; or, on the other hand, such floods become a frequent occurrence, in which case much of Sindhi agriculture wil be reduced to a subsistence level. By driving hundreds of thousands of Sindhi and Pathan peasants from their swamped lands and wrecked vil ages into Mohajir-dominated Karachi, the 2010 floods have also threatened Sindh’s precarious ethnic peace – atendency that can only get much worse if ecological disasters become a regular pattern.
As to the consequences of a real y serious rise in sea levels as a result of climate change, you only have to stand on the low sea wal at Karachi and look at the city with its mil ions of inhabitants stretching back across miles of lowlying land (Karachi’s average height above sea level is 26 feet) to imagine what would happen.
Caught between the hungry sea and the thirsty land, and with both pressures in danger of drastical y intensifying as a result of climate change, Sindh needs nothing less than a revolution in its system of land use and water management over the next decades if human civilization in this region is not to be seriously threatened. Given the centrality of landownership to Sindhi political society, and the centrality of water to usable land, such a revolution would probably need to be not only technological and economic but also social and political; and whether one of the most stagnant societies in Asia is capable of such change seems highly doubtful.
THE HISTORY OF SINDH
The Indus (in Sanskrit, Sindhu) gives its name to Sindh, to India and also to the oldest civilization in Sindh, and one of the oldest on earth: the Indus Val ey civilization, which existed in various forms between around 3300 and 1300 BCE. That civilization was destroyed, presumably by Aryan invaders from Central Asia, around 3,000 years ago, and no visible link exists between it and the Sindh of today.
However, it is rather depressing, when visiting the excavated ruins of the city of Mohenjo Daro in upper Sindh, to note that its clay bricks were better made and better laid than those of most Sindhi towns and vil ages of the present, though both are made from the same mud.
Samina Altaf remarks that Mohenjo Daro’s water supply also seems to have been better than those of many Pakistani cities today.2
Equal y depressing is the fact that waterlogging because of rice cultivation in the surrounding fields and neglect by the Pakistani government means that by far the greater part of Mohenjo Daro, and al its earliest levels, are now lost for ever, melted back into the mud from which they came. In fact, Mohenjo Daro is apt to arouse bitter musings on cycles of historical decline in anyone with a reverence for the past and its exploration.
A travel er of 1842 described the homes of ordinary rural Sindhis: Al the houses here are built of clay; they are scarcely twenty feet high, have flat roofs, from which a kind of ventilator sometimes rises, and air holes supply the place of windows.
Long continued rain would destroy these huts and sweep away whole vil ages.3
Just as nothing much about the dwel ings of ordinary people had changed in the thousands of years of human habitation in Sindh prior to this description, so nothing much seems to have changed in the 168
years since. This is one reason why the floods of 2010 were not as destructive as appeared at first sight. To put it bluntly: mud huts are easy to rebuild.
The ruins of Mohenjo Daro are topped by the much later stupa of a Buddhist monastery, representing the religion which for 1,000 years or so partial y displaced the Hindu system created by the Aryans. Muslim rule began in the region with the conquests of Mohammed bin Qasim, an Arab general, after 710 CE, though it was not until some 500 years later that the bulk of the Hindu population was converted to Islam.
Though the original conquest was extremely violent, the subsequent conversion was largely peaceful, and was above al the work of the ‘Sufi’ saints described in Chapter 4, whose worship stil predominates in interior Sindh. Around 20 per cent remained Hindu until the partition of India in 1947, and Sindh stil contains by far the largest number of Hindus in Pakistan.
Sindh was the original gateway of Islam into the Indian subcontinent, spreading by sea from Arabia. In subsequent centuries, however, the importance of the sea links to Arabia faded, and the main Muslim route of invasion, migration and trade came to be from Iran and Central Asia through Afghanistan to Punjab and on to the plains of the Ganges. Cut off by the deserts of Balochistan to the west and the Thar to the east, and by the swamps of the Rann of Kutch to the south-east, Sindh developed in partial isolation from the main currents of Muslim life in the subcontinent. This isolation has strongly marked Sindhi culture down to the present.
From the early sixteenth century to the early eighteenth, Sindh was incorporated in the Mughal empire, though actual control by the central government was very loose. With the decline of the Mughals in the early eighteenth century, power was progressively seized by their local governors, the Kalhoras. In the later eighteenth century, the Kalhoras transferred their al egiance first to Nadir Shah of Iran, then to the Durrani dynasty of Afghanistan. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Kalhoras were themselves displaced by a new dynasty, that of the Talpurs, who ruled until the British conquest of 1843. The glory of the Talpurs is stil recal ed by the magnificent tiled and painted palaces of their secondary capital of Kot Diji, a place that cries out for conservation and tourism development but which, like Mohenjo Daro, has been quite shameful y neglected by the government.
The Kalhoras and Talpurs represented traditions which remain of central importance in much of Sindh today. The Kalhoras represented the hereditary descendants of the saints and of the Prophet (highly improbably in this as in most cases, since they are general y thought to have been descended from converted Hindus). The Talpurs represented the tribes of Baloch origin, which had always been present in Sindh but which increased their numbers greatly in the disorders which fol owed the end of Mughal rule.
These two groups provide many of the great landowner-politicians who continue to dominate the politics of ‘interior Sindh’. Both the Kalhoras and the Talpurs also il ustrate the vagueness of religious distinctions among the Sindhis, since the Kalhora saints were worshipped by both Sunnis and Shia, while the Talpurs include both Shia and Sunni branches. The shrines of the saints, large and smal , extend across the Sindhi countryside. As Sarah Ansari writes: ‘By the end of the eighteenth century, it had become virtual y impossible to travel more than a few miles in Sindh without coming across the shrine of one saint or another.’4
Like the Seraiki belt of southern Punjab described in the last chapter, Sindh is the area of Muslim South Asia most dominated by the worship of pirs. As to the Baloch tribes, their migration from the deserts and semi-deserts to the west has contributed to the extreme conservatism of Sindhi rural society, its violent obsession with honour, and its tendency to cattle-lifting, banditry and tribal feuds.