Pakistan: A Hard Country (6 page)
In Pakistan, however, as in India, the vast majority of human rights abuses come not from state strength, but from state weakness. Even when they are committed by state policemen, they are not on the orders of the government, but are the result of individual policemen or groups of police preying on the population as their ancestors did for centuries. Take the police chief in the interior of Sindh, who told me, ‘I try to stop my boys raping women and torturing people to death.
Beyond that, you have to be realistic. Anyway, we need to raise more money from the people just to do our job half-way properly.’
No one can seriously imagine that when police rape a woman or torture a suspected criminal in their custody, that this is the wil of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India or President Zardari of Pakistan. They can be accused of not doing enough to stop such abuses – but their ability to do so is very limited. So Pakistan – and indeed South Asia and much of Latin America – demonstrates the frequent irrelevance of democracy even in an area where we instinctively think that it makes al the difference, namely human rights.
The overwhelming majority of human rights abuses in Pakistan stem from a mixture of freelance brutality and exploitation by policemen, working either for themselves or for local elites; actions by local landlords and bosses; and punishments by local communities of real or perceived infringements of their moral code.
The murder of women in ‘honour kil ings’, the giving of young girls in marriage as compensation in the settlement of clan feuds, the dreadful cases of gang rape as a punishment which have taken place in recent years in southern Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan are the work of families, or local clans and their col ective leaderships, not of the state.
Atrocities by local dominant clans and the police are also entirely characteristic of much of neighbouring democratic India. As regards the police, this is starkly revealed in a report by Human Rights Watch of August 2009.15
Not for nothing was an old Hindustani popular term for banditry ‘padshahi kam’, the imperial trade. This indicated not only that ordinary people could usual y see no difference between bandits and soldiers, but that they often changed places. Unpaid soldiers became bandits; successful bandits became soldiers of conquering armies, and their leaders became kings.
According to standard Western models, and to the Pakistani constitution that derives from them, authority stems from the sovereign people through elections, and then spreads downwards from the government through hierarchical structures, which transmit orders from above, from superior to inferior officials, in accordance with laws made by parliament or at least by some formal authority.
In Pakistan, only the armed forces work even in the second half of this way. For the rest of the state, the law, the judiciary and the police, authority is a matter of constant negotiation, with violence or the threat of it very often one of the cards that can be played on either side. The negotiated nature of the Pakistani state was summed up for me in a grim anecdote from a retired general who in the 1990s was responsible for commanding anti-dacoit operations in Sindh.
A subordinate had run a dacoit gang to earth on the estate of a parliamentarian from the then ruling party, and wanted to send troops in to get them – which would have led to furious protests from the governments in Islamabad and Karachi, and most probably the immediate release of the men arrested. His commander overruled him, and instead invited himself to lunch with the landowner concerned.
At the end of a convivial meal, he passed his host a note and said that he’d be personal y obliged for his help. The next day, four of the dacoits were handed over to the army with a message from the landowner-politician saying that the general could shoot two of them, but could he please charge the other two before the courts.
‘Any two?’ I asked, somewhat faintly.
No, he said which two we could shoot. Probably they had offended him in some way, or they were not from his tribe. As to the other two, he knew perfectly wel that his influence meant that the courts would never convict them, and they would be released after a few months. The courts are useless when it comes to criminals in this country if the criminals have any connections – they are bribed, or scared, or both. That is why if you real y want to deal with a miscreant, the only way is to kil him out of hand. This is a hard country, and this is the way things are here, sadly.
This negotiated nature of the state also applies to the workings of democracy. For democracy is representative not only of the people, but of al those classes, groups and institutions through which the popular wil is refracted until it eventual y finds some kind of distorted reflection in elected institutions. In other words, democracy usual y reflects not so much ‘the people’ or ‘the electorate’ as the distribution of social, economic, cultural and political power within a given society.
The nature of Pakistani society, and the weakness of real democratic development, are shown among other things by the lack of real, modern, mass political parties, with their own cadres of party workers.
A while spent pondering on these themes should bring out why so much Western analysis of Pakistan misses the mark, because it expects institutions with names like ‘the law’ and ‘the police’ to work as they are meant to work in the West, according to rules rather than negotiation. Similarly, Western language about ‘corruption’ in Pakistan suggests that it can and should be cut out of the political system; but in so far as the political system runs on patronage and kinship, and corruption is intertwined with patronage and kinship, to cut it out would mean gutting Pakistan’s society like a fish.
This of course is precisely what the Islamist revolutionaries would like to do. The modern Islamist political groups are trying to replace the clan and patronage politics of the ‘feudal’ landowners and urban bosses with their own version of modern mass politics, so far with only very limited success. With the partial exception of the Jamaat Islami, the Islamist political parties have themselves been swal owed up by the patronage system. As for the Pakistani Taleban (the Tehriq-e-Taleban Pakistan, or TTP), they are so far a primitive col ection of guerril a and terrorist groups, which would be completely at sea if they found themselves responsible for Peshawar, let alone Lahore or Karachi.
Of course, they do draw a great deal of their strength from the glaring inequities and oppressions of the Pakistani system, and above al the justice system. It is true, as I have said, that ordinary Pakistanis are themselves part of endless conspiracies to pervert the course of justice – but it is also true that they feel they have no choice, given the nature of the justice system. The state’s law is felt by many ordinary people not just to be rigged in favour of the rich, and hopelessly slow, corrupt and inefficient, but also to be alien – alien to local tradition, alien to Islam, the creation of alien Christian rulers, and conducted by the elites for their own benefit.
So, as this book wil describe, when ordinary people speak of their reverence for the Shariah, and their respect for the Taleban when they introduce the Shariah, this should not necessarily be taken as active support for the Taleban’s complete programme. Rather it is a mixture of a reverence for the Shariah as part of the word of God, dictated to the last Prophet, with a vague yearning for a justice system that might be cruder than that of the state, but would also be quicker, less biased in favour of the elites, and conducted before the eyes of the people, in their own language. Mixed in with this is a great deal of somewhat veiled anti-elitist feeling, which in the eyes of parts of the Pathan tribal populations helps fuel mass acceptance of Taleban attacks on the local maliks and khans, or tribal bosses and local landowners.
But then, the Pathans have always been the most cultural y egalitarian people of Pakistan. Among the masses elsewhere, the progress of the Islamists has so far general y been very limited when it comes to gaining active mass support. One key reason for their failure to date is the deeply conservative nature of much of Pakistani society; for – quite contrary to most Western perceptions – Islamist mobilization often thrives not on backwardness, but on partial y achieved modernity. Thus, to judge by al the economic evidence about poverty and landownership, radical Islamist groups preaching land reform ought to be flourishing in the Pakistani countryside.
In fact, the only areas where they have had any significant success (outside the Pathan territories) are where a sectarian (Sunni versus Shia) or tribal element comes into play. This is partly because of clan solidarity, but also for the simple reason that the only people who could lead such a radical Islamist movement in the countryside are the local mul ahs, and they are in effect chosen by the local ‘feudal’ landowners – who do not exactly favour radicalism of any kind, least of al involving land reform.
In the cities, things are freer, but even there most attempts at political mobilization from below are stifled by the grip of the political bosses and the kinship groups they lead, as wel as by the political y apathetic condition of society, and by divisions along religious lines. In other words, while there is certainly a great deal of economic, social discontent in the Pakistani population, being discontented is not at al the same thing as being able to do something about it. As of 2009, the perennial discontent of the urban masses in most of Pakistan continues to express itself not in terms of political mobilization behind new mass movements, but sporadic and pointless riots and destruction of property – including most notably the buses in which the rioters themselves have to travel every day.
According to the standard Western version, by which the Western way is the only way to modernity, the key ideological struggle in Pakistan is between Westernized modernity (including democracy, the rule of law, and so on) and Islamic conservatism. A more accurate way of looking at it would be to see much of Pakistan as a highly conservative, archaic, even sometimes quite inert and somnolent mass of different societies, with two modernizing impulses fighting to wake it up.
The Western modernizers have on their side the prestige and success of the Western model in the world in general, and the legacy of British rule, including a vague belief in democracy – but are crippled both by the conservative nature of Pakistani society and by growing popular hatred for the US and its Western al ies.
The Islamist modernizers can draw on a much more ancient and deeply rooted tradition, that of Islam – but are crippled by the conservative nature of Pakistani society, by Pakistan’s extreme fissiparousness, by the failure of their programme elsewhere in the Muslim world, and by the fact that the vast majority of the Pakistani elites reject their model, for cultural as wel as class reasons. Both Westernizers and Islamists see the battle between them as apocalyptic, and ending with the triumph of good or evil. Yet there is a fair chance that Pakistan wil in effect shrug both of them off, rol over, and go back to sleep.
A GAMBLE ON THE INDUS
Pakistan cannot however afford to do so, because time is not on Pakistan’s side. In the long run, the most important thing about the people of Pakistan is not who they are or what kind of religion they fol ow, but that whoever they are, there are too many of them for the land in which they find themselves – and more of them al the time. In 2010, the population was estimated at between 180 and 200 mil ion, making Pakistan the sixth largest country on earth in terms of population. It had risen from 131 mil ion at the census of 1998, 34
mil ion at the census of 1951 (four years after independence) and only 19 mil ion at the British census of 1911 – and is today ten times what it was 100 years ago. Official y, population growth now stands at 2.2 per cent a year – which would seem to be a serious underestimate.
Pakistan’s inability to bring this rate down more quickly reflects state weakness, social conservatism, lack of education (above al among women) and the ability of the religious parties to play on popular prejudices. Since Ayub Khan in the late 1950s, no Pakistani government has dared to promote family planning seriously, and the reduction that has occurred has happened because of socio-economic change and urbanization, not through state action.
The huge youth bulge making its way through the Pakistani population means that this population wil continue to grow steeply for a long time to come (in 2008, 42 per cent of the population was estimated as under the age of fourteen). If present trends continue, then by the middle of the twenty-first century, according to World Bank projections, Pakistan may have as many as 335 mil ion people.16
This is far too many people for Pakistan’s available water resources to support, unless the efficiency of water use can be radical y improved. If the old Indian economy used to be described as ‘a gamble on the monsoon’, then the entire Pakistani state can be described as ‘a gamble on the Indus’ – and climate change means that over the next century this may be a gamble against increasingly long odds. The capricious power of water in this area is demonstrated by the remains of numerous cities – starting with those of the Indus Val ey civilization 4,000 years ago – that have been either abandoned because rivers have changed their course, or been washed away by floods, as so many towns and vil ages were by the great floods of 2010.