Pakistan: A Hard Country (63 page)

Dr Gul – the only police surgeon for the whole of Balochistan – is the most remarkable person I met during my travels in Pakistan. Among other things she is very much more of a man than the vast majority of the men I encountered – if I may be forgiven a Baloch-sounding comment. This fifty-eight-year-old Pathan grandmother, deaf as a post in one ear (our conversation was conducted in bel ows on my side), spends her professional life travel ing around Balochistan at night (because there are a great many people of course who do not exactly favour her investigations), digging up rotting corpses and examining them in makeshift morgues in temperatures which can reach 50

degrees Celsius. ‘Sometimes the bodies fal to pieces and I have to put them back together again,’ she told me.13

Dr Gul does her work without a police escort – for reasons that wil come as no surprise to anyone who knows the police of Pakistan. And she goes on doing her duty despite the fact that of the ten or fifteen bodies of women murdered in ‘honour kil ings’ which she examines each year, not one case has ever been successful y prosecuted, though a few people may have been embarrassed a bit; and those she examines are in her estimate only around 5 per cent of the total kil ed, because the vast majority are never reported.

Dr Gul retired in 2008 but then took up the job again in 2009

because no one else wanted it. For myself, if I had Napier’s powers I would begin by making her the Inspector-General (i.e. provincial chief) of police in Balochistan, and then promote her upwards from there.

She certainly deserves a senior job more than any other local politician or official whom I met.

VISIT TO A BUGTI

Nawabzada Jamil Bugti, son of Nawab Akbar Bugti by his second wife, took a rather more restrained – and coherent – line on the murder of the girls when I visited him on his estate outside Quetta. He also said that there was no proof that they had been buried alive, but then immediately changed his line to say that, if indeed it had happened, it was contrary to Baloch tradition:

If there is a case of adultery then in our tradition you have to kil the man as wel as the woman involved; and if you do so without sufficient evidence then you have a blood feud on your hands.

Salik Umrani is not even the real head of his tribe. He is neither partridge nor quail, that is why he didn’t fol ow tribal tradition in this case ... I remember a case that my father once deputed me to judge. A man had kil ed his wife and her lover and volunteered to walk through a fire to prove that they had been having an affair. The lover’s family had denied it and demanded compensation, or they would have launched a blood feud. And the husband took his seven steps through the fire as if on rose petals! So the lover’s family withdrew their demand and I closed the case.14

This was strange stuff to hear in an elegant modern living-room lined with vaguely Impressionist stil -life paintings, and from a man with some at least of the manners and appearance of an English gentleman; but then, there was a good deal that was strange – and revealing – about our meeting.

Nawabzada Bugti’s house is set in an artificial, tube-wel -fed oasis near the vil age of Miangundi, a few miles outside Quetta. The area has been developed by various Baloch nobles as a commercial venture of orchards, with their mansions set in the middle of them. The contrast between his garden, with its green lawns and rose-beds, and the arid, savage mountains behind added to the slightly surreal air of our conversation.

The Nawabzada complained that the conservatism of Baloch farmers meant that they would not accept drip technology even though almost the whole cost of instal ing it is covered by the Asian Development Bank – though I could not help noticing that his own garden was being watered by the old, horribly wasteful technique of flooding the whole lawn several inches deep. In one corner of the vast garden, a new swimming pool was under construction.

Like his father and most of his family, Jamil Bugti at fifty-nine is a tal , handsome, aristocratic-looking man with aquiline features and a modified version of the bristling Baloch beard. He towered over his lawyer, a squat, rubber-faced and obsequious Punjabi who had driven out with us from Quetta as a partial safeguard against nationalist banditry. The sense of racial difference was even starker when it came to the Nawabzada’s smal , thin, dark-skinned servants. These are ‘Mrattas’, descendants of Marathas from central India, captured in war by the Mughal emperors and given to their Bugti troops as slaves in lieu of wages.

Traditional y, their women have served as concubines to the Bugti (‘their women were regarded as fair game for al Bugtis’ in Matheson’s words) but there was no sign of Bugti blood in the faces of the Nawabzada’s servants. The Mrattas were official y made equal citizens of Pakistan after 1947, and the Nawabzada insisted that ‘they have merged completely with the Bugti and no one can tel the difference any more’ – given al the circumstances a real whopper. On the other hand, the British official and ethnographer R. Hughes Bul er stated in 1901 that,

Many Baloch tribes consist chiefly of elements which have been affiliated to the Baloch and have afterwards set up for themselves. As time passes, their origin is forgotten and with it any social inferiority which may have original y existed. An instance of a group which has only lately asserted Baloch origin, is the Golas of Nasirabad. Though enumerated with the Baledis they are looked upon by other Baloch as occupying a low place in the social scale. Common report assigns them a slave origin, and as the word gola means slave in Sindhi, it is quite possible that this belief has some foundation in fact.15

So just possibly something of the sort may indeed very gradual y be happening in the case of the Mrattas, even if it obviously hasn’t happened yet.

Like most of the members of Sardari families whom I met, the Nawabzada talked a fiercely pro-independence and anti-Pakistani talk, accentuated by his deep booming voice and frequent use of English obscenities. His resentment of the Pakistani state seemed genuine enough when he spoke of his father’s death at the hands of the Pakistan army, of how, at the age of nine, he had seen his father arrested for the first time (‘When he was released in 1969 I had already graduated’), and of his fury at seeing pictures of Pakistani officers posing in his ancestral home at Dera Bugti. He accused the Pakistani army of committing ‘genocide’ in Balochistan, and declared that ‘I don’t see how any honourable Baloch can celebrate Pakistani independence. For us it has been sixty years of slavery, barbarism and torture.’

He expressed utter contempt for Pakistan-led development in Balochistan, declaring of Musharraf’s new port at Gwadar, We don’t want to develop Gwadar or other ports – we don’t want another Dubai in Balochistan. What is Dubai? A bloody whorehouse like the Hira Mandi [‘Diamond Market’, or red-light district] in Lahore. Why should we al ow mil ions of outsiders to come here and take our land?

At first hearing, then, this is an example of the Pakistani state’s utter failure to retain or cultivate the loyalty of many of the Baloch tribal aristocracy. At the second hearing, however, certain questions began to arise. If he was so committed to independence, why had he not taken sides in the conflict over the leadership of the Bugti tribe between his two nephews, Nawabzada Ali Bugti, the official y turbaned head of the tribe sitting in Dera Bugti under army protection, and Nawabzada Baramdagh Bugti, leading the pro-independence forces from exile in Afghanistan (whom he described as ‘fol owing my father’s line and doing a pretty good job’)?

And, above al , of course, why had he not been arrested by the Pakistani security forces, and why in fact was he stil sitting in a paid position on the board of Pakistani Petroleum, to which he had been restored after a period of suspension? To these questions the Nawabzada’s responses became rather less fluent. Concerning his non-arrest, he declared that ‘I suppose given al my medical problems, they do not want another dead Bugti on their hands’, though I must say he looked in fine fettle to me.

By the end of the interview, therefore, the Nawabzada seemed to me to represent not an unqualified failure on the part of the Pakistani state, but rather a sort of qualified success – a success, that is for the old twin imperial policies of divide and rule and co-optation of elites, something that every successful empire-builder from Rome to Victorian Britain has understood perfectly. In the case of the British empire on the Baloch frontier, this involved financial subsidies to the Sardars to keep their tribes quiet, subsidies which could then be withdrawn from those who stepped out of line. Military action was very much a last resort.

PAKISTAN AND BALOCHISTAN

The Pakistani approach has general y been the same in essence but different in form. It is summed up in the remarkable fact that, as of 2009, out of sixty-five members of the Baloch Provincial Assembly, sixty-two were in the provincial government as ministers, ministers without portfolio or advisers with ministerial rank. Nor did the remaining three deputies constitute much of an opposition. Two had not occupied ministerial chairs by virtue of being dead, which is an obstacle to government service even in Balochistan. The third cannot visit Quetta because of the blood feud with the chief minister, mentioned above.

This is the kind of thing which has led me to place the word ‘democracy’ in this book in inverted commas; and perhaps I should do the same for ‘development’; because the point of this whole set-up is that on top of their ministerial salary and staff, every member of the government gets a Rs50 mil ion (£385,000) personal share of Balochistan’s development budget, to spend on projects in his own district.

Irrational? Not at al . From the point of view of serious development, yes of course completely crazy. As a new way of co-opting the tribal leadership (in an age when you can’t just have political agents handing out bags of gold coins), eminently sensible – and effective. It is above al thanks to the Pakistani state’s ability to hand out this kind of personal largesse – as wel as some hard blows when necessary – that as of 2009 al but three of the eighty-odd tribal Sardars or claimants in Balochistan were ranged with the government, and had not joined the anti-Pakistan insurgency. For that matter, even members of Nawab Bugti’s own Jamhoori Watan Party continued to sit in the provincial assembly!

The priorities of Baloch ministers took on an almost comical y obvious shape in the already mentioned interview I had with the Minister of Sports and Culture. Outside his office, his four staff sat around drinking tea, chatting, reading the papers and otherwise doing absolutely nothing – not that they could have done very much, since neither they nor the minister had a computer or even a typewriter. The minister complained bitterly that Balochistan has a quota of state jobs according to its smal population, when instead – in his view – it should get the same proportion of jobs as it has of Pakistani territory –
i.e.

almost half of al jobs in the central bureaucracy, a thought which made me choke into my tea. For the population in general, he demanded that Islamabad create 60,000 junior administrative jobs in Balochistan, and distribute them to graduates. As of early 2010, this is being negotiated between the governments in Islamabad and Quetta, with 30,000 jobs a frequently mentioned compromise figure.

Completely unprompted by me, the minister also complained three times in the course of the interview that ethnic Baloch should be given more Pakistani ambassadorships, which seemed to me a pretty clear indication of what was on his own mind as far as jobs were concerned.

The idea that merit or qualifications should play any part in appointments to any these jobs appeared nowhere in his remarks – nor does it, apparently, in the negotiations between Quetta and Islamabad.

Rather than the old British strategy, this then is closer to the Roman approach of making smal er local tribal chieftains into local officials, and bigger ones into Roman senators. By making them responsible for tax col ection, these local leaders were also given a share in state revenues. The Romans, though, had the advantage of representing not just overwhelming military force and an efficient state bureaucracy, but also a great state-building idea, summed up in the values of Romanitas.

It would be quite a stretch to suggest that there exists a civilizing concept cal ed Pakistanitas – if only because Pakistanis differ so radically over what it is or should be. However, sitting in Quetta and looking at the alternatives does bring home the fact that there is at least a certain kind of modernità alla Pakistanese. In Balochistan, this is to be found above al in three places: among the Hazara; in the gas fields and mines; and in the army. The last element in a way embraces the other two. The Hazara are both deeply attached to the armed forces and proud of their prominent role in them, and look to those armed forces for protection; and the gas fields and mines also depend whol y on the army for protection. Inevitably, therefore, and despite a determined effort on their part to pretend otherwise, the responsibilities of the Pakistani army in Balochistan go far beyond the purely military.

This appeared strongly from my interview with the Pakistani general commanding in Balochistan, Lt-General Khalid Wynne. I am not qualified to judge his qualities as a general; but when it comes to relative modernity, I must confess that I was greatly prejudiced in his favour by his daughter – whom I have never met, but who is studying for a PhD in molecular biology in the US. The general admitted disarmingly that ‘my wife and I wanted to arrange her marriage but she insisted on doing research instead, so we gave in, and sold some property to pay for her education. Then she won a top scholarship, which makes us very proud.’