Pakistan: A Hard Country (58 page)
The dogs, so I was told, were a variety of lurcher: a cross between greyhounds and bul terriers, with ugly, formidable heads but graceful bodies. Each couple of hounds was held in leash by a huntsman, al three of the group looking with raised heads and fixed attention into the jungle, the huntsmen seeming to quiver with eagerness along with the dogs. The huntsmen, mostly young, looked intensely proud at being responsible for such splendid animals, and in the service of so splendid a lord as Sardar Mumtaz Ali Bhutto. They also looked markedly better fed than the ragged peasantry who provided the beaters. And indeed there was no pretence of egalitarianism about this hunt. As the guest of honour and provider of the dogs and huntsmen, Mumtaz Ali Bhutto sat directly facing the jungle. His younger son Ali and I sat some distance behind. Everyone else was firmly to one side.
However, in the subcontinent hierarchical organization is always only a step or so away from anarchy, whether cheerful or malignant, and it was certainly no proof against the mass excitement when the boar broke cover. This was especial y so when one enterprising beast plunged into the Indus, pursued to the bank – and nearly over it – by a mob of yel ing huntsmen and spectators, stirring the powdery dust into a maelstrom. Half-way over, a fishing boat tried to head it off, and a fisherman, whether overcome by excitement or in hope of a reward, actual y dived into the river, grasped the boar round its neck, and guided it back to shore – a sight to remember. On reaching land, it shook him off indifferently along with the water and disappeared into the jungle. Four more boar succeeded in outrunning the dogs and knocking over or shaking off those that came close; so that in the end the entire bag for some five hours of hunting was one medium-sized female; which shows that the boar had a sporting chance.
The patches of jungle like the one in which we hunted are the remains of the great shikargahs (noble hunting reserves) of the past.
They consist of low scrub and tal grasses, fertilized annual y by the water and silt brought down by the melting of the Himalayan snows, and by the monsoon. This is the original natural cover of the Indus val ey before human cultivation. In the past – and very likely in the future too – the ferocity of the floods and the frequently changing course of the river meant that the riverine areas themselves could not be cultivated, and so were never registered for ownership and taxation.
Canals and dams have to a large extent reduced this threat, and landowners in recent decades have il egal y encroached on the riverine areas, greatly increasing their wealth in the process – but stil paying no tax.
However, some patches of jungle stil remain, used as hunting reserves for boar and deer – and as the favourite hideouts of bandits; though whether with the knowledge and protection of the waderos, as is universal y believed, I cannot say. One feature of the boar hunt, however (which I hardly noticed at the time, because it is so much a feature of the life of the rural nobility that you forget about it), was the bodyguards with their Kalashnikovs; not because most of the time there is any expectation that they wil be needed, but as an insurance policy, and also of course as a source of prestige.
Not that Mumtaz Ali Bhutto apparently needed much to boost his prestige. The ancestral home in Mirpur Bhutto is one of the most magnificent that I have visited in rural Pakistan. More than 150 years old, it is also an example of how far local architecture has fal en since the days of the British, let alone the days of the Mughals. The old aristocratic architecture is not just beautiful, but efficient. The tal ceilings and ventilation windows make it habitable even during electricity cuts, when modern rooms become unendurable without fans or air-conditioning.
The drawing-room contains a throne-like silver chair on which the Sardar’s grandfather was inaugurated, and a family tree which shows only male members – thereby omitting Benazir Bhutto! Beside the front gate is the exquisite eighteenth-century mausoleum of a family saint. In front of the house, facing a garden with the inevitable lawn for political meetings, an open hal between columns provides a space where the Sardar holds court, with his two sons sitting on either side of him and his steward standing respectful y to one side. Before him, a variety of petitioners appear to touch his feet and wait with hands clasped, as if in prayer, to receive an order or a judgment. Having received it, most sit to one side for a longer or shorter period to show respect, and by their presence and numbers help boost their lord’s prestige.
The morning that I was a witness seemed fairly typical – and was almost identical to an audience by Mumtaz Ali Bhutto on the same spot when I had visited him twenty years before. Sharecroppers and local ‘incharges’ received orders for planting crops; participants in a land dispute were told to stop work on the land pending a decision; and two sheepish-looking peasants received a sharp response, tried to argue, and were sent packing by one of the gunmen. ‘They are sharecroppers of a neighbouring landowner,’ Amir Bhutto told me: He took away their land for various reasons and they have come to us for help getting it back. But this man is our political rival and they have always voted for him. So my father said, ‘You never came to me in the past, you voted for my opponent.
What can I do to help you? He is in another party and not in my influence.’11
When the circumstances are right, such discussions are often the prelude to a change of al egiance, or to new bargaining based on the threat of it. Al over rural Sindh, and much of the rest of Pakistan as wel , such scenes happen every day – the basic stuff of Pakistani politics, though rarely played out against such a magnificent background.
‘FEUDAL’ DOMINATION
One very proud member of a wadero family – but a highly educated one with an MA from Cambridge – was scathing about his fel ow ‘feudals’:
The Sardars in Sindh are changing, but not as fast as they should. Many are not interested in education. They don’t think it helps them to run their estates or manage politics. So even the children of the bigger landowners are often surprisingly uneducated; and that of course also means that they don’t understand new agricultural techniques and have no idea or interest in any kind of wider development or improvement, beyond traditional charity. And because they dominate politics and government, that means that Sindh society in general is also changing very slowly.
Local journalists in the nearby town of Larkana recounted for me a litany of recent actions by ‘feudals’ in their region. One, a local chieftain, had been using his gunmen and dacoits to seize packets of land from smal farmers, ‘people without links to feudals and from weak tribes’. He was protected from police retaliation, I was told, because his brother was a provincial minister from the PPP. A much worse case involving local chieftains and PPP politicians wil be recounted in the next chapter, on Balochistan. During the floods of 2010, landlordpoliticians in western Sindh were credibly accused of opening local barrages so that the flood waters would spare their lands and inundate those of rivals.
I asked the Larkana journalists how Sindhi society and economy had changed over the past twenty years. There was a very long pause. ‘Not much,’ one said. Another said that there was now more education. In the industrial sector, they mentioned a considerable growth of smal rice-processing units, with 200 – 300 of these in Larkana District alone; but then their remarks quickly turned to complaints about monopolization and price-rigging by the rice processors in league with the central bureaucracy in Islamabad.
Of the state industrial plants set up by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to benefit his home district and since privatized, the textile mil has col apsed and been sold off for scrap – ‘because of corruption and bad management’. The sugar mil , I was told, operates seasonal y, but it looked quite derelict when I passed it. Local people blame non-PPP
governments for lack of support – but private management has also failed. In other words, yet another tale of ‘Third World’ state-led industrial development which failed to take root.
People in Larkana told me that the PPP-led government which took power in 2008 had started a few road-building projects in Larkana, but that their main help to the town and district had been to create thousands of new jobs in the local bureaucracy, police, health and education systems and distribute them to their supporters. This pleased most of the people I talked to, because ‘jobless people who were ignored by governments for the past twelve years have been given jobs. Some are from my vil age,’ as Ghulam Abbas, a farmer, told me.
However, when asked if the newly appointed people were qualified for these jobs he did not even to pretend that this was the case. When a new government comes to power, these useless jobs wil either be abolished, or – more likely – redistributed to their own fol owers, leaving the area with absolutely nothing in terms of real development.
For there is nothing unique to the PPP about this. G. M. Morai, who runs a Sindhi television channel in Hyderabad, told me: Education is the only thing that can produce a bigger Sindhi middle class, but this is happening only very slowly. Sindhi education was put in the doldrums by Zia-ul-Haq, and since his time it has been the plaything of the waderos. Most of the teachers have been appointed by local wadero politicians from among their relatives and fol owers. Most have no training at al .
Our whole education system is terribly backward. In 1999, I stil did not know how to use a computer because there was nowhere in Hyderabad to learn. That has changed, but much more slowly than it should have. This also means that most of our politicians have no real education and no administrative or technocratic skil s. Al they can do is make speeches. The PPP
has always been the biggest party in Sindh, but they reward loyalty and courage, not ability. Of course, it’s admirable to have gone to gaol for five or ten years under Zia or Musharraf but it doesn’t make you a good minister.12
Certainly Larkana, which given the PPP’s periods in government should be one of the most developed towns in interior Sindh, is not visibly different from the others: a mass of higgledy-piggledy brick and mud houses with barely paved roads and heaps of uncol ected rubbish. In the centre of one busy road was a frightful sight: what appeared to be a heap of rags was in fact a squatting beggar, inviting death and alms at the same time, with cars swerving to avoid him.
EXISTENTIAL THREATS?
On the whole, most Sindhis seem not unhappy with the existing social order, and that also seems true of the middle classes, such as they are. Like my Pakistan Airlines acquaintance, if they condemn waderos i n general, they are very often attached to one wadero family in particular, or to a pir family which plays the same role. Outside some of the smal radical nationalist groups, demands for land reform are extremely rare.
The potential y disastrous element in al this, however, is that in two respects Sindh is not in fact static: the population is growing ever bigger, largely because of the lack of education for women; and the water is ever diminishing, largely because the people are too uneducated, apathetic, conservative, divided along tribal lines and distrustful of one another and of the authorities to improve their agriculture or build their own local water infrastructure. If this goes on, and is not reversed by increased monsoon rains due to climate change, there is a real chance that Sindh one day wil cease to exist as an area of large-scale human habitation.
One should, however, think twice about advocating a revolution against the waderos. In the first place, it is by no means certain that a ruling class made up of the wealthier peasants would be any more progressive economical y or cultural y. Certainly those more enterprising waderos whom I met complained constantly about the blind conservatism of their tenants and workers, very much in the fashion of Russian nineteenth-century landowners – though there is doubtless a self-serving element in their complaints.
Secondly, the waderos are by far the most important barrier against a Sindhi nationalism which, if given free rein, would not only destroy Pakistan, but plunge Sindh itself into ethnic conflict that would tear the province apart and wreck any hope of progress. The waderos are not attached to Pakistan by affection, with the exception of the Bhuttos.
Even wadero members of the PML(N) whom I met – in other words, members of a Punjabi-led party – spent much of their time complaining about Punjabi domination and exploitation. Rather, the waderos are attached to the Pakistani state by ties of patronage, circulated and recirculated through the ‘feudal’ landowning elite by changes of government in Islamabad. In turn, as my experiences with the Unar Khans demonstrate, the waderos then circulate this patronage and protection downwards through society; smal shares, but enough to help them go on dominating that society.
This charge of national treason for the sake of patronage is precisely the charge made against the wadero class by nationalist parties like Jiye Sindh; but even Jiye Sindh’s former leader, G. M.
Syed, was persuaded by General Zia’s administration to modify his hostility to Pakistan by the offer to his son of a pilot’s job with Pakistan Airlines. A movement against the waderos would have to be a middle-class one, and its ideology would inevitably be Sindhi nationalist.