Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [133]
Being a politician in Pakistan therefore has its particular strains; yet, on the other hand, since every major landowner needs to attract and keep followers, deter rivals and maintain influence over the administration, in many ways every landowner is a politician. To be successful at this requires particular qualities, as described to me by a banker from the great Soomro landowning family in Sindh in 1990:
You need a strong family or tribe behind you, and you also need to play a role in politics, so as to gain influence over the government, the police and the courts. When you grow up, you decide or it is decided for you whether you will go into politics. There is no fixed rule in the great families which son or cousin should go into politics. Junaid is my youngest brother. It depends on who seems best suited to it. But someone always has to.
Me, I’m not suited to it. I like a regular life as a banker, getting up at eight to go to the office, coming back at six. Junaid can be woken up at 1 a.m. any night by one of our tenants or followers: ‘Sir, I have a problem with the police’ – and of course every one wants precedence. You have to be always on call, and you have to judge person by person who to help, and how much to help, and how quickly. Some friends will wait and stay your friends, others not. It’s a disorganized kind of game, and everything depends on circumstances. You also have to be patient and careful. Many are not suited to it. You need to have the right temperament and like the game to succeed at it and if, like me, you give it up, sometimes you miss it, like a drug.
And the power of single lords or landowning families is now fading. You also need to attach yourself to a party, with some kind of ideology. Then even when you are in opposition you will still have friends in the bureaucracy, and your enemies will remember that you may be in government again, and will be more careful with you.
But going into party politics also makes the game even more dangerous, because when the government changes you can be imprisoned, or even killed. The brothers in my family are a surgeon, a banker, a lawyer and a politician, and we’ve all gone to jail. You have to be motivated to do this – standing in chains before a military judge, for fifteen straight days. The people of our class are not usually tortured, but a selected few are. More common is murder, which can be blamed on criminals. And then there is mental torture – fake executions, waking you up repeatedly at night. But there is this to be said for it: it hardens you. And life in this country is difficult whatever you do, so there is no room for weaklings.17
So while Pakistani politicians in general get a pretty bad press, and deservedly so, it is sometimes possible to feel sorry for them. They are often not saints, but they often need the patience of saints, as well as the courage of wolves, the memory of elephants and the digestion of crocodiles. 18 This last requirement was brought back to me by my last political journey with a Pakistani politician, in Sindh in the spring of 2009.
My host was one of the Bhuttos – in fact the hereditary chief of the Bhutto tribe, Sardar Mumtaz Ali Bhutto. He is a cousin of the late Benazir, but no love is lost between the two branches of the family. Mumtaz Ali was chief minister of Sindh in the first years of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s administration but, in a familiar