Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [129]
This is partly because, even in Balochistan, when it comes to leadership Pakistani tribalism is closer to ancient Irish tribalism than to Scottish tribalism. The latter, at least in the romanticized version, involved blind loyalty to a hereditary chief, invariably the eldest son. In Irish tribes, the leading men of the tribe elected as chief whichever male member of the royal family they thought most suitable – as in Pakistan, a fecund source of bloody family feuds. In consequence, a majority of Pakistani chieftains know very well that dear old uncle Ahmed over there in the corner, so very nice and respectful, is all too ready to seize the leadership if the chance offers itself.
More important for Pakistan as a whole is the fact that politics in large areas of the Punjab and the NWFP are no longer dominated by great individual landowners. This is partly because of land reform and the subdivision through inheritance of formerly great estates, and partly because of social mobility due to economic change. The key rural politician in these areas is a relatively small landowner (with perhaps 100 acres or so), deeply embedded in a powerful local landowning clan, with influence over the police and administration.
Such landowners are very often local urban politicians too, because they own urban property from which they derive most of their income, even while their prestige and ability to mobilize kinship links continue to come from rural landownership and their leading position in landowning clans. Sometimes, the enormous expansion of the towns means that the lands of local landowning lineages have been swallowed up, greatly increasing their wealth in the process but leaving their approach to politics and kinship unchanged. As Abida Husain told me: ‘Very little of our income actually comes from land any more, but land is our essential link to the people and our voters.’11
The cultures of leading groups in northern Punjab and the NWFP have also always had a more egalitarian and meritocratic tinge, as with the Pathans and the Jats. In these groups, it is often more accurate to talk of ‘big men’, risen through personal wealth and character, rather than hereditary chieftains. Thus back in 1988, I asked a Punjabi Jat member of parliament (for the PPP) to explain how exactly it was you became a Chaudhury like him (the name for a respected and influential figure among the Jats), since I had noticed that in many cases it was not by inheritance. ‘It’s very simple,’ he replied. ‘You become a Chaudhury among the Jats when you can call yourself a Chaudhury without all the other Jats laughing at you!’ Very often, as he and many others told me, the decisive moment in a family’s rise was when they became sufficiently locally powerful to get into a political party as a candidate, and on that basis to get a government job – ‘after that, they can make their fortunes by corruption’.
In Sindh and southern Punjab, most of the important political families are old, with a minority of newcomers. In northern Punjab, it tends to be the other way round. However, in a great many ways these new families tend to merge into established ‘feudal’ patterns of power. Just as with the English aristocracy and gentry of the past, this is partly through intermarriage. Some of the greatest aristocratic families of Punjab turn out on examination to be intermarried with new business dynasties.
As in England, this is partly because of the immense social and cultural prestige attached to owning land – something which has defined the identity and self-image not only of the ‘feudal’ classes, but of the landowning tribes