Pakistan: A Hard Country (45 page)

(ppp.org.pk) and the Muslim League (pmln.org.pk) do not begin to compare. Once again, the MQM and Jamaat (itself largely of Mohajir origin) are the only parties in Pakistan that do this in any systematic way.

Crucial to the nature and success of the MQM’s social and political organizations is that they are staffed and led by people of the same origins as those whom they are helping. I visited their local headquarters in north Karachi’s sector 11B, responsible for 12,000

MQM members out of a population of around 1.3 mil ion. A smal , scrupulously tidy place, wel equipped with computers, printers and photocopiers, its wal s were lined with ordered files of information on local issues and letters from the population – and with pictures of Altaf Hussain, of which there were no fewer than twelve in one room alone.

The local mayors (nazims) who had been invited to meet me seemed a good cross-section of the Mohajir middle classes: an electrical engineer, a salesman for Philips, a software manager and a couple of shopkeepers. Basharat Hasnia, a middle-aged man with a dark, deeply lined, thoughtful face, said: The MQM is a party for lower-middle-class people, in a country where most parties are run by feudals. Their representatives are not real y elected but selected according to their land, money and clan. The MQM gives us a voice against these people, as wel as helping us solve the problems of our own city and neighbourhoods.35

MQM leader Altaf Hussain himself is of humble origin, and was once a lower-middle-class student and part-time taxi driver. Apart from his bril iant qualities as an organizer, Altaf Hussain possesses an immense charisma among his fol owers. This is reflected in the name they have given him: ‘Pir Sahib’, intended to recal the blind devotion of murids to their saint. Oskar Verkaaik quotes the sincere words of a Karachi worker:

We are like robots. Pir Sahib holds the remote control in his hands. When he tel s us, Stand up, we stand. When he says, Sit down, we sit down. We don’t use our brain. If we would, we would be divided.36

Some of the mystique which surrounds Altaf Hussain – including his public image of austerity and asexuality – recal s Mahatma Gandhi and other Hindu religious-political figures, though he certainly has not practised non-violence. The MQM sometimes refer to themselves as ‘the Altafians’. Since he went into exile in 1992 after an assassination attempt on his life, his image has been maintained from London via videos, DVDs and recordings – and may indeed have been maintained al the better by his physical absence.

His charisma has puzzled many non-Mohajir observers, given his dumpy appearance, undistinguished face and high-pitched though oddly compel ing voice; but his mass appeal seems to lie precisely in the fact that his is the charisma of the ordinary. Looking at Benazir Bhutto, ordinary Pakistanis felt that they were looking at a great princess who had descended from a great height to lead them.

Looking at Altaf Hussain, lower-middle-class Mohajirs feel that they are looking at an exalted version of themselves.

The key to the nature and success of the MQM lies not just in their middle-class composition – for a considerable part of the support of t h e PML(N) is made up of the Punjabi middle classes. Equal y important is the fact that migration from India shattered the two fundamental and tightly connected building-blocks of the other Pakistani parties: kinship, and domination by local urban and rural magnates, whose power and prestige are derived not just from wealth but equal y importantly from their positions of leadership within particular kinship groups – or from a combination of land and religious status, as in the pir families. Members of formerly great Muslim families from India do stil play an important part in Pakistani social and cultural life, but their political power was natural y destroyed by migration and their loss of property.

Meanwhile traditional kinship and religious links were violently disrupted by a process which took Muslims from al over India, separated them, and threw them down at random in what in effect were completely new cities of Karachi and Hyderabad. As Chapter 8 on Sindh wil explore further, this experience, together with the mostly urban tradition of most Mohajirs before 1947, has al owed this community to break out of the web of elite domination and patronage politics which continues to enmesh every other Pakistani party but the Jamaat.

There are two sad and frightening things about this: that to bring this political possibility about took an immense upheaval, a divided country, the displacement of mil ions of people, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands; and that the party created as a result, though undeniably ‘modern’ compared to the other Pakistani parties, has about it more than a touch of the ‘modernity’ of some notorious lower-middle-class European nationalist parties before 1945 – also famous for their successful social work and strong organizations. Compared to this kind of modernity, there may be something to be said for ‘feudalism’ after al .

7

Punjab

Lahore – the ancient whore, the handmaiden of dimly remembered Hindu kings, the courtesan of Moghul emperors – bedecked and bejewelled, savaged by marauding hordes – healed by the caressing hands of successive lovers. A little shoddy, as Qasim saw her, like an attractive but ageing concubine, ready to bestow surprising delights on those who cared to court her – proudly displaying royal gifts.

(Bapsi Sidhwa)1

PAKISTAN’S PROVINCIAL BALANCE

Unlike India, Pakistan has one province – Punjab – which with almost 56 per cent of the population can to a certain extent dominate the country. No Indian province comes anywhere near this in terms of relative weight – though if al the Hindi-speaking states worked together as a bloc they would approach Punjab’s weight in Pakistan.

Punjab also provides most of the army, and without Punjabi support no military government of Pakistan would be possible.

Yet at the same time, whatever the other ethnicities may sometimes al ege, Punjab is not nearly strong or united enough to create a real ‘Punjabi Raj’ over the whole country, an effective, permanent national regime based on Punjabi identity. Pakistan is in this, as in other ways, more like India than immediately appears.

India is held together as a democracy (or at least a constitutional system, since Indian administration often does not work in ways that the West thinks of as ‘democratic’) in large part precisely because it is so big and varied. Many years ago, I asked an Indian general if he and his col eagues ever thought of creating a military dictatorship, as in Pakistan. ‘We’re not that stupid,’ he replied.

Democracy in India is a damned mess, but it gives the system the flexibility it needs to survive. It means that rebels who can’t be kil ed can always be bought off by being elected to government, and given jobs and favours for their relatives. This country is so big and so varied and so natural y chaotic, if you tried to introduce an efficient dictatorship in India it would actual y destroy India within a year.

If you emphasize the word ‘efficient’ and add the word ‘Punjabi’, then the same is true of Pakistan. No national government can simply crush the warlike, heavily armed Pathans. Al have preferred instead to co-opt them through service in the army and bureaucracy, and into government through elections. The Pathan territories of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Federal y Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) have always been administered overwhelmingly by ethnic Pathan officials. Nor can any Punjab-based regime dream of ruling over the megalopolis of Karachi, with al its rival ethnicities, by simple dictatorial means. There too, cooption and compromise are essential. So while Pakistan’s Punjabi core makes it different from India, and more susceptible to dictatorship, it is like enough to India to make sure that its dictatorships can’t work in an effectively dictatorial manner.

So the balance between the provinces also forms part of what I have cal ed Pakistan’s ‘negotiated state’. There is a real element of Punjabi dominance, but fear of breaking up the country on which Punjab itself depends means that this dominance always has to be veiled and qualified by compromises with the other provinces. Thus in 2009 – 10, in a considerable achievement for Pakistani democracy and the PPP

government, the centre and the provinces agreed on a new national finance award rebalancing revenue al ocation in favour of the poorer and more thinly populated provinces. Punjab, with some 56 per cent of the population and around 65 per cent of the revenue generation, was al ocated 51.74 per cent of revenue.2

Sometimes, however, these compromises are damaging not only to Punjab’s interests but to those of Pakistan as a whole. For example, it is absolutely essential for Pakistan to develop greater, more reliable and more ecological y responsible sources of electricity. It is now more than fifty years since the idea of a great hydroelectric dam at Kalabagh on the Indus was first mooted. The site is eminently suitable as far as hydroelectricity is concerned; yet for that entire half-century the project has been stymied by opposition from the NWFP and Sindh, which fear that they would lose water to Punjabi industry. And that has continued to be the case through no fewer than three periods of military rule, the project decried by provincial nationalists as expressions of Punjabi dominance!

More than ten years after immense coal reserves were discovered beneath the Thar desert in Sindh, as of 2009 plans to develop them were stil in limbo because of disagreements between the Sindh and federal governments, and because the federal government was both unwil ing and constitutional y unable to impose its wil on Sindh, for fear of splitting the Pakistan People’s Party and creating a new surge of Sindhi nationalism. But this was not only a problem of civilian rule.

Musharraf in his nine years in government also failed to push through this project. In this way, Pakistan’s delicate ethnic balance, and the endless negotiations it entails, contribute to the sluggish pace of Pakistan’s development.

On the other hand, the maintenance of this balance has helped ensure that with the exception of some of the Baloch, who think that they would do wel on the strength of their gas and mineral reserves, very few political or intel ectual groups in Pakistan and Pakistan’s provinces actual y want to break the country up, whether because they are genuinely attached to it (in the army, the bureaucracy and much of the Punjab); because they hope to take it over and use it as a base for a wider programme (the Islamists); because they are afraid of Indian domination (Punjabis); because they are afraid that Pakistan’s break-up would lead to a dreadful civil war with other ethnicities (the Sindhis and Mohajirs, and even the Pathans, since the Hindko-speaking minority in the NWFP is strongly opposed to Pathan nationalism); or simply because the alternative looks so much worse (the Pathans, when they look across the border into Afghanistan). So one of the biggest factors holding Pakistan together is fear.

However, it isn’t the only factor by any manner of means. The different ‘ethnic’ groups of Pakistan are often very intermingled, to the point where the standard definitions of ethnicities or nationalities within Pakistan sometimes seem almost as artificial as Pakistan itself. Thus Sindhis, Pathans and Baloch complain frequently of Punjabi domination, especial y under military rule; yet the army, or at least the other ranks, have until recently not represented ‘Punjab’ at al , but rather the Potwar plateau, half a dozen districts in the north-west of Punjab, bordering on the North West Frontier Province – the same area from where the British recruited their soldiers. Some other parts of Punjab have been almost as poorly represented in the military as Sindh.

For that matter, Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan are in their way also ‘artificial’. It is a mistake to see them as Czechs, Hungarians or Poles under Habsburg rule, increasingly self-conscious nations with an earlier history of nationhood, which with the col apse of the empire easily formed national states. Linguists dispute how many different dialects of Punjabi there are, but certainly Seraiki, in the southern third of Punjab, could just as wel be a language in its own right. The Baloch for their part, while having some kind of ethnic unity with a common tribal code, are divided into two completely different languages, one of them descended from the Dravidian of southern India, presumed to be the language of the Indus Val ey civilization 4,000 years ago.

And linguistic divisions are not the most important ones. Particular religious al egiance counts for as much; stil more do endless combinations of family, clan and lineage. Like the Sayyids, these often trace their ancestry back to somewhere else, whether in legend or fact.

Even where the Rajputs came from original y is not known. As the eighteenth-century Indian Muslim reformist theologian Shah Waliul ah stated proudly of his Sayyid ancestry, I hail from a foreign country. My forebears came to India as immigrants. I am proud of my Arab origin and my knowledge of Arabic, for both of these bring a person close to the ‘Master of the Ancients and Moderns’, the ‘most excel ent of the prophets sent by God’, and ‘the pride of al creation’. In gratitude for this great favour I ought to conform to the habits and customs of the early Arabs and the Prophet as much as I can, and abstain from the customs of the Turks and the habits of the Indians.3