Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [131]
As the above account brings out, kinship remains of immense importance even among educated people in Pakistan’s cities, if only because in the case of fairly recent migrants (i.e. most people), the ties to ancestral villages remain firm. For that matter, as described in the Introduction, these ties stay strong even when the migration was not to a Pakistani city but a British one, and took place fifty years earlier.
Some of the ways in which the political traditions of the countryside continue to pervade the cities, while also having been changed by them, were illustrated for me by a series of interviews with ordinary people and political workers in the chief Potwari city of Rawalpindi in the summer of 2009. In the 1950s, Rawalpindi’s population was still less than 200,000. The building of Islamabad nearby, however, together with the enormous growth of the Pakistani army, whose GHQ is in Rawalpindi, meant that it grew even faster than other cities; according to the census of 2006 its population then was just over 3 million. The overwhelming majority of its inhabitants therefore are migrants from the countryside or their children.
One of these recent migrants with whom I talked was Mudassar, a taxi driver from the nearby area of Gujjar Khan, belonging to the Alpial clan or biradiri of the Rajputs. He was illiterate, and gave his age as ‘about twenty-two, I think’, but he had a humorous thinker’s mouth under his big moustache. In the last elections, he had worked as a driver for the campaign of PPP politician Raja Pervez Ashraf – a small piece of local kinship patronage. Pervez Ashraf is a leading local Rajput landlord, businessman and politician who became Minister for Water and Power in the new government. Because of its role in local patronage, this is one of the most politically important jobs in government. I asked Mudassar why he had supported Pervez Ashraf. ‘Because he paid me,’ he replied (very courteously stifling the obvious temptation to add ‘you idiot’):
And also because he is from the same Rajput biradiri as my family, and my family and most of my village voted for him. We still support Raja Pervez Ashraf, though we are not happy with Zardari and the PPP government in general ... Because after the elections he has brought new roads to our area and laid the first gas pipelines, which we have never had before though we are so close to Islamabad. And he shows us respect. Every week he comes to our village or a neighbouring village to meet us and hear our complaints, and to give us moral support. If someone is facing a court case or has trouble with the police, he helps us.
I asked him whether Raja Pervez Ashraf being an Alpial Rajput meant that Mudassar’s family and village would always vote for him no matter what. ‘Of course not,’ he replied:
If Raja Pervez Ashraf does not act justly towards us, and take care of the poor people of Gujjar Khan as he promised, and if he doesn’t come to us to show respect and listen to us, then we will vote for someone else ... Yes, we will always vote for a Rajput, but there are other Rajput leaders in Gujjar Khan.12
This reminded me of a famous remark by a Pakistani ‘feudal’ landowner summing up the changes in electoral politics since the 1950s: ‘Once, I used to send my manager to tell my tenants to vote the way I wanted. Then, I had to go myself to tell them to vote how I wanted. Now, I have to go myself to ask them to give me their vote.’13 Or, in the words of Amir Baksh Bhutto, son of Mumtaz Ali Bhutto and cousin of Benazir: ‘We’re the biggest landowning family in Sindh’ (by most accounts it’s actually the Jatois, but still). ‘If the waderos still had absolute power do you think I’d be driving through this bloody desert, begging people to give me their vote? I’d sit at home, wouldn’t I, and wait for people to come and present themselves.’14
It would not necessarily be correct to see this as a wholly new phenomenon, reflecting growing ‘modernity’. To some extent, it