Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [152]
More than ten years after immense coal reserves were discovered beneath the Thar desert in Sindh, as of 2009 plans to develop them were still in limbo because of disagreements between the Sindh and federal governments, and because the federal government was both unwilling and constitutionally unable to impose its will on Sindh, for fear of splitting the Pakistan People’s Party and creating a new surge of Sindhi nationalism. But this was not only a problem of civilian rule. Musharraf in his nine years in government also failed to push through this project. In this way, Pakistan’s delicate ethnic balance, and the endless negotiations it entails, contribute to the sluggish pace of Pakistan’s development.
On the other hand, the maintenance of this balance has helped ensure that with the exception of some of the Baloch, who think that they would do well on the strength of their gas and mineral reserves, very few political or intellectual groups in Pakistan and Pakistan’s provinces actually want to break the country up, whether because they are genuinely attached to it (in the army, the bureaucracy and much of the Punjab); because they hope to take it over and use it as a base for a wider programme (the Islamists); because they are afraid of Indian domination (Punjabis); because they are afraid that Pakistan’s break-up would lead to a dreadful civil war with other ethnicities (the Sindhis and Mohajirs, and even the Pathans, since the Hindko-speaking minority in the NWFP is strongly opposed to Pathan nationalism); or simply because the alternative looks so much worse (the Pathans, when they look across the border into Afghanistan). So one of the biggest factors holding Pakistan together is fear.
However, it isn’t the only factor by any manner of means. The different ‘ethnic’ groups of Pakistan are often very intermingled, to the point where the standard definitions of ethnicities or nationalities within Pakistan sometimes seem almost as artificial as Pakistan itself. Thus Sindhis, Pathans and Baloch complain frequently of Punjabi domination, especially under military rule; yet the army, or at least the other ranks, have until recently not represented ‘Punjab’ at all, but rather the Potwar plateau, half a dozen districts in the north-west of Punjab, bordering on the North West Frontier Province – the same area from where the British recruited their soldiers. Some other parts of Punjab have been almost as poorly represented in the military as Sindh.
For that matter, Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan are in their way also ‘artificial’. It is a mistake to see them as Czechs, Hungarians or Poles under Habsburg rule, increasingly self-conscious nations with an earlier history of nationhood, which with the collapse of the empire easily formed national states. Linguists dispute how many different dialects of Punjabi there are, but certainly Seraiki, in the southern third of Punjab, could just as well be a language in its own right. The Baloch for their part, while having some kind of ethnic unity with a common tribal code, are divided into two completely different languages, one of them descended from the Dravidian of southern India, presumed to be the language of the Indus Valley civilization 4,000 years ago.
And linguistic divisions are not the most important ones. Particular religious allegiance counts for as much; still more do endless combinations of family, clan and lineage. Like the Sayyids, these often trace their ancestry back to somewhere else, whether in legend or fact. Even where the Rajputs came from originally is not known. As the eighteenth-century Indian Muslim reformist theologian Shah Waliullah stated proudly of his Sayyid ancestry,
I hail from a foreign country. My forebears came to India as immigrants. I am proud of my Arab origin and my knowledge of Arabic, for both of these bring a person close to the ‘Master of the Ancients and Moderns’, the ‘most excellent of the prophets sent by God’, and ‘the pride of all creation’. In gratitude for this great favour I ought to conform to the habits and customs of