Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [127]
All this can also be illustrated visually by the houses of leading Pakistani political families. Of course, these are very luxurious indeed by the standards of the vast mass of the population. However, when it comes to size, at least, the grandeur of these houses can sometimes be exaggerated – because they contain far more people than initially meets the eye: political workers, servants and family members themselves.
Take an unusually large but otherwise typical example: the rural home of Makhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat, a leading politician from a Shia pir family in Jhang, who started with the PPP before switching to the PML(Q) in order to join the Musharraf administration, and as of 2010 is back in opposition. At first sight, the frontage of this vaguely neo-classical monstrosity is on the approximate scale of Buckingham Palace, a resemblance strengthened by the glaring floodlights by which it is illuminated at night.
A closer look reveals something closer to Sandhurst or West Point. It is in fact a giant political barracks, and the great majority of the rooms are bleak, barely furnished sleeping cells for political workers and visiting supporters, and bleak halls for political consultations. Similarly, as with most of the houses of politicians, the lawn in front is not part of a private garden, but is an arena for political rallies and entertainments.
Then there are the servants. Every big ‘feudal’ family I have visited has far more of them than it actually needs. It doesn’t pay them much – but then again, according to strict free market capitalist rules, it doesn’t need to employ most of them at all. One reason is of course to display wealth and power through the number of one’s entourage. The other was summed up for me by a lady in Lahore:
Oh, what I wouldn’t give for one hard-working servant with a vacuum-cleaner instead of having to pay and keep an eye on ten who sit around eating and staring into space and getting into all kinds of trouble which we have to get them out of again. But of course it’s impossible. They all come from my husband’s village, and some of their families have been in our family’s service for generations. If we sacked them, the whole village would start saying how mean and treacherous we are.10
Her husband was not a politician – but his brother was, which comes to the same thing; and he needed to be elected from his village and district, in the face of rival politicians from his own kinship group appealing to inhabitants of ‘his village’ for their support.
One can, however, be too cynical about this. This lady’s old nursemaid, to whom the family was devoted, was now looking after her own children. There was thus a commitment to look after the nursemaid’s family, which was emotional and indeed familial, and not just political. During my stays with Pakistani elite families, I have seen servants treated with appalling arrogance; but I have also seen those elite families paying for their servants’ children to be sent to school, making sure that they go to the doctor when they are ill, that the daughters have at least modest dowries, and so on.
Finally, there are the families themselves. According to the cultural ideal prevalent across most of Pakistan, the ideal family is the joint extended family of patriarch, sons and sons’ families resident together in the same house (albeit often with separate cooking-spaces). As so often, this cultural value also has a practical political underpinning in collective familial solidarity and self-defence against rivals and enemies. This is connected to the fact that among rural landowning families a mixture of land reform and the subdivision of land by inheritance means that many estates are the collective property of several