Pakistan: A Hard Country (50 page)
Faisalabad is the Punjabi industrial and migrant city par excellence, at the heart of the canal colonies; and by many indices is Pakistan’s most modern and successful city. With a GDP in 2005 of $27 bil ion (according to Price Waterhouse Cooper) Faisalabad has the third highest GDP in the country after Karachi and Lahore, and the second in terms of per capita production and income; it vies with Karachi for the reputation of having Pakistan’s most efficient municipal administration, without Karachi’s feral ethnic politics; and it is the heart of Pakistan’s biggest export industry, that of textiles.
However, every time you begin to think that you real y are visiting ‘the Manchester of the East’, you are apt to be brought back with a thump to the realities of kinship-based politics, dysfunctional administration, ineffective law, irrational economic policies, mass il iteracy, obscurantist mass culture, and media and academia addled with lunatic conspiracy theories, and (in the case of the English-medium institutions) often barely understanding the language in which they operate. If Faisalabad is clear evidence of Pakistan not failing as a state, it is certainly not evidence that Pakistan is ever going to succeed as one.
Faisalabad earned its proud title of ‘Manchester of the East’ when Manchester, England, was stil the textile capital of the West; and its self-image has a certain nineteenth-century utilitarianism about it. In talking with me, Faisalabadis used the word ‘practical’ so often to describe themselves and their city that it was easy to think oneself in the world of industrial England in the age of Dickens; especial y, it must be said, given the living conditions of the working class.
Literacy in Faisalabad is stil between 40 and 50 per cent according to the city government. This is a grotesque figure for a city and region that hopes to become an industrial giant of Asia, and one that reflects both the historic failings of repeated Pakistani and Punjabi governments and the cultural attitudes of the local population – above al when it comes to education for women.
Faisalabad was founded in 1880 as Lyal pur, and named after the then British Governor of the Punjab. It was renamed Faisalabad in 1977 after the late King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who had displayed considerable generosity to Pakistan. Like the town of Montgomery (now Sahiwal) to the south, it was created by the British as the commercial and administrative centre of one of their new canal colonies, on what had previously been an almost uninhabited area of arid jungle and semi-desert. Patches of this stil remain, where either the canals never reached or salination has destroyed the land’s fertility again.
The original town was laid out in the shape of a Union Jack, with streets radiating from a central clock-tower, in a sort of Victorian gothicsaracenic style. In 1902 it stil only had 9,000 people, but thereafter the growth of commercial farming and cotton cultivation, South Asia’s great tradition of textile production, and the settlement of east Punjabi refugees after 1947 led to explosive growth. Today, the city has almost 3 mil ion people and the district more than 5 mil ion – and, being Faisalabad, these statistics may even be accurate. A large proportion of the population – some say a majority – are east Punjabis who replaced local Hindus and Sikhs who fled in 1947. Faisalabad is therefore, partly at least, another example of the economic dynamism of these migrants, even while it also reflects their cultural conservatism.
Faisalabad’s municipal government is home to a strategic policy unit, the only effective city institution of its kind (so far as I know) outside Karachi, the leaders of which seemed models of efficiency and dedication. With the help of GHK, a British-based public policy consultancy, and assistance (now alas ended) from the British Department for International Development (DIFID), the unit has developed a number of new projects to revolutionize the city’s administration and provision of services. Its work is based largely on a mixture of satel ite imaging of the district backed by an intensive programme of local inspection. As a result, for the first time the government is developing an accurate picture of the city, the spread of population, the provision of services, and so on.
Perhaps most importantly, as Gul Hafeez Khokar of GHK told me, it is now possible at the click of a mouse to see whether a planned road or school has actual y been built or not: ‘This is a check on corruption, because the city government can now check immediately whether a planned road has been built, or the money stolen. And on the other hand, if it has been built, then it doesn’t need to be commissioned al over again – something that happens al the time in Pakistan.’
The digital map wil al ow more efficient provision of services, and hopeful y prevent disasters like that of 2007 in a Faisalabad slum when local community pressure on the politicians led to the city government increasing the flow through water pipes to the area. Because it had no idea how many pipes were actual y there, it increased the pressure too much and burst the pipes. The result was an outbreak of gastro-enteritis in which several dozen people died. Until the digital mapping project started, the government could not even properly tax gas stations in the city, because it did not know how many there were. It is possible to see al this when the computers are working; but, when I was there, they were not, because the electricity had failed; and, although the local government has its own generators, the money had run out to provide them with fuel.
According to Mr Khokar, ‘Things are improving. Not as fast as we would like, but stil they are on track.’ One key reason for this is that in 2008 the new PML(N) government in Punjab did not withdraw its support from the project, even though it had been initiated under Musharraf and the PML(Q) government of Punjab. This marks a change from the usual – and disastrous – Pakistani practice, which the PML(N) government has fol owed in other areas.
Some of Faisalabad’s cotton industry is also truly impressive. The Chenab mil at Nishatabad is the biggest of eight mil s in the Chenab group, with 4,000 workers (out of 14,000 in the group as a whole) and an output in 2008 worth $130 mil ion. The mil is capable of turning out 12,000 individual garments a day. The group owns the stylish (and extremely expensive) Chen One chain of clothes shops and shopping mal s in Pakistan, and supplies Macy’s, J. C. Penney, Debenhams, Ikea and Laura Ashley, among other international outlets. I am no expert on textile production, but the mil gave a completely modern impression, with apparently wel -fed women working on huge, smoothly running machines in giant air-conditioned workshops. One that I visited was producing fril y women’s underwear, and I have never seen so much pink in such a large space at the same time. The headquarters building could have been an unusual y stylish office in Singapore or Frankfurt. None of this is the kind of thing one sees in a ‘failed state’.
When I visited Faisalabad last in January 2009, however, boasts of the city’s success were interspersed with bitter complaints about its present economic state (admittedly, a local journalist also warned me that ‘Faisalabad is known as “the city of opposition” because our industrialists are not happy whatever happens’). Local anger and worry focused above al on the electricity shortages which at that time were crippling the city’s industrial production and exports.
Just as even very moderately wel -off families in Pakistan pay a fortune for private generators to avoid the constant load-shedding, so the bigger mil s and factories have had to develop their own power plants and import the fuel for them privately. The problem is that not only is this extremely expensive, but in Pakistan’s – and even Faisalabad’s – semi-modern economy, the big mil s rely for supplies of many of their semi-finished goods on smal local mil s and even piece-workers, who are completely dependent on the state electricity grid. Chenab’s managing director (and son of its founder, Mian Mohammed Kashif Ashfaq) told me that this is true even of his group.
Above al , though, the problem when I last visited the city was electricity, and the lack of it seemed likely for a while to provoke mass riots that could even have toppled the national government, a conflict in which the industrialists and their workers might have found themselves on the same side. The head of Faisalabad district council, Rana Zahid Tauseef (himself a textile industrialist), complained bitterly: My customers in the US, UK, Australia need guaranteed commitments that I wil keep my contract to supply them. Yes, my firm has a good reputation so they may wait one week or even six but final y they wil say, ‘You are not reliable, you live in a shit country, I can’t order from you any more.’ How can we possibly compete with other countries if we can’t rely on our own electricity grid?11
Quite apart from the issue of electricity supply, the working conditions in the smal er workshops – or rather sweat-shops – bear no resemblance to those at Chenab Mil s. The contrast is absolutely jarring – as if, while visiting a factory in Lancashire today, you were to be transported by a wicked witch with a taste for education back to a factory in Lancashire in 1849. And for al the modernity of parts of Faisalabad, the ‘old’ centre around the clock-tower is a typical Pakistani inner-city slum, in which the roads are not even paved.
Concerning the clock-tower, I experienced a smal example of how constant mass migration from the countryside continual y undermines the development of a civic identity and urban culture in most of Pakistan’s cities. My driver, a recent migrant to Faisalabad from a vil age (but a vil age only 10 miles away), could not find the tower in the dead centre of town, even when I showed him a postcard of it.
The industrialists heaped curses on the administration of President Zardari for incompetent purchasing decisions and favouring agriculture over industry; but they also had harsh words for the previous Musharraf administration and especial y his Prime Minister (previously Finance Minister, from 1999 to 2004), Shaukat Aziz.
In the words of Azem Khurshid, a mil owner: In terms of our recent leaders, Musharraf was the best of the worst. He appointed some good people and got us out of debt.
But he and Shaukat Aziz were obsessed with empty growth figures and with how many cel phones and fridges people were buying. Beyond Gwadar and the motorway, they did nothing for the infrastructure of the country, including electricity generation, on which industry depends – and we are paying the price for it today. We are suffering from al those years of the Washington Consensus which our leaders fol owed blindly. Now the West is revising its approaches but it wil probably take years to filter through here, and we have already lost years which we should have spent building up our real economy ...
And then Musharraf made his compromise with the feudal politicians, and that of course meant favouring agriculture at the expense of industry, and the PPP government is dominated by feudal landowners. Even the Sharifs, though they are industrialists themselves, have to favour the feudals because they have the seats in the countryside and you can’t win a majority without them. So throughout Pakistani history, state resources have gone to buying feudals and their families and fol owers, and not on turning Pakistan into a modern economy.
The obvious question is why, with their wealth, intel igence and economic dynamism, the industrialists and businessmen themselves have not been able to gain greater influence over state policies. After al , even the PPP is no longer explicitly hostile to private industry (as it was in the days of Z. A. Bhutto) and the other major forces are strongly in favour of industry: the PML(N) because the Sharifs are industrialists themselves, the MQM because industry is part of their vision of a modern, successful Karachi, and the military not only because it too believes strongly in modernizing Pakistan, but also because indirectly (thanks to the Fauji Foundation and Army Welfare Trust) it is itself a major industrial force.
The answer seems to lie partly in a combination of sheer lack of weight within society, and an absence of kinship networks. For al that the textile industry dominates Pakistan’s exports and is absolutely crucial to its balance of payments and ability to import essential goods, its share of the economy is relatively smal , and its workers form a smal part of the population as a whole – and this is especial y true of modern industries like Chenab Mil s.
For every semi-modern city like Faisalabad, there are dozens of medium-sized towns (which in Pakistan means towns with populations of hundreds of thousands of people), where the entire local economy is based on smal shops and stal s, smal family-owned workshops, and mostly fairly primitive food-processing. In these towns, kinship remains of central political importance, and the political scene is dominated not by modern businessmen but by interlinked clans of urban and rural notables living mainly off rents. The constant swamping of settled urban populations by new waves of migrants also plays a key role in preventing the growth of truly urban politics.
The business community is also fractured along lines of kinship, and by the rivalries and bitterness caused by past political alignments, and the victimization by governments of businessmen who have backed the other side. This has made many industrialists wary of becoming involved in politics at al . ‘Businessmen are afraid to get involved with politics because they are afraid that their businesses wil be targeted with tax raids, land claims, court cases, deliberate electricity cuts and so on,’ Mr Khurshid told me.
