Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [128]
Joint families are by no means an aspect only of rural society. Even many very wealthy and powerful urban families, for example the three sons of the late General Akhtar Abdur Rehman (chief of the ISI under Zia-ul-Haq) and their children in Lahore, still live together; and obviously the size of any house has to be divided by the number of people in it.
Thus in conservative joint families, the hidden presence of large numbers of women and children may be revealed by muffled howls of joy, sorrow or imprecation from behind closed doors. In more liberal ones, those doors may open to disgorge a seemingly endless flow of relatives – and it is remarkable how even a very large room may suddenly seem quite small when filled with two or three mothers, a grandmother, sometimes a great-grandmother, a couple of nursemaids, a horde of children and an entire assembly line of aunts – all of whom have to be fed and clothed, and, in the case of the children, educated, and jobs found for the boys and dowries for the girls.
In grander and more liberal families, this increasingly also means jobs for the girls – including elected positions. This change was given a tremendous push by Musharraf’s requirement that members of the national and provincial assemblies possess college degrees. Musharraf’s educational requirement eliminated a good many male politicians, but, since the law was cancelled by the new PPP government in 2008, the effects may not prove long-lasting.
On the other hand, the move of women into politics reflects other factors. Even more than elsewhere, being a politician in Pakistan requires a particular set of qualities of which the women in a given family may have more than the men. Their choice by the family is also an extension of the fact that in Pakistani ‘feudal’ families the political representative of the family was never necessarily the eldest son, but whichever son seemed fittest to be a politician. Thus, while the younger brother or even wife may stand for election, the elder brother or husband may keep a more secure and equally lucrative job as a civil servant, policeman or whatever.
In 2002, a senior customs officer from a big landowning family from Sarghoda sketched for me what this meant for ‘feudal’ politics, in the context of his family’s general political strategy. There was obviously no question of his giving up his own job to run for election, since customs is not only among the most lucrative areas of state service, but one where it is possible to do a great many political favours:
There are three branches of my family, and we rotate the seats in our area between us. My uncle has held one seat for the Jamaat, but the Jamaat is now in alliance with the PPP, so my wife is now standing for the PPP. She was chosen because I am a civil servant and can’t run and my brother is working abroad. Our sister doesn’t have a degree, so it had to be my wife.
The ideal Pakistani political family thus has its members in a range of influential occupations: a civil servant, a policeman, a lawyer, a businessman and, if possible, representatives in several different political parties. As a member of a rival family said admiringly of a great political ‘feudal’ family in Sindh, ‘the Soomros have been everyone else’s teachers at keeping one member of the family in power whatever happens. They have someone in each party, but they are also all loyal to each other.’ The Saifullahs, a leading business family of Peshawar, probably hold the record for this, placing different brothers, sons and nephews in mutually hostile political parties, while retaining an inexorable commitment to family solidarity and family collective advantage.
It would be a mistake, however, to focus too heavily on the top elites when it comes to understanding how Pakistan’s political system works, and how it has proved so remarkably stable. As subsequent chapters on Pakistan’s provinces will explore, different parts of Pakistan vary greatly