Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [16]
One of the most striking things about Pakistan’s military dictatorships is in fact how mild they have been by the historical standards of such dictatorships, when it comes to suppressing dissent and criticism among the elites. Only one prime minister (Zulfikar Ali Bhutto) and a tiny handful of politicians have ever been executed in Pakistan – far fewer than have been killed in feuds with each other. Few senior politicians have been tortured.
Of course, the poor are a different matter, but, as noted, they get beaten up by the police whoever is in power. Perhaps the single most important social distinction in Pakistan is that between what Graham Greene called the ‘torturable classes’ and the ‘untorturable’ ones.13 This view has support from a surprising source. As General Musharraf writes in his memoirs, ‘Whatever the law, civil or military, the poor are always the victims of oppression.’14
Nor indeed has the Pakistani state ever faced rebellion in West Pakistan on a scale that would have provoked massacre in response – though that could be changed by the Taleban insurgency in the Pathan areas which began in 2004 and gathered strength in 2008 and 2009. India has faced much more serious rebellions, and has engaged in much largerscale repression in response.
But in India, as in Pakistan, the state is not responsible for most human rights abuses. This is something that human rights groups in particular find hard to grasp, since they stem from a modern Western experience in which oppression came chiefly from over-mighty states. In Pakistan, however, as in India, the vast majority of human rights abuses come not from state strength, but from state weakness. Even when they are committed by state policemen, they are not on the orders of the government, but are the result of individual policemen or groups of police preying on the population as their ancestors did for centuries. Take the police chief in the interior of Sindh, who told me, ‘I try to stop my boys raping women and torturing people to death. Beyond that, you have to be realistic. Anyway, we need to raise more money from the people just to do our job half-way properly.’
No one can seriously imagine that when police rape a woman or torture a suspected criminal in their custody, that this is the will of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India or President Zardari of Pakistan. They can be accused of not doing enough to stop such abuses – but their ability to do so is very limited. So Pakistan – and indeed South Asia and much of Latin America – demonstrates the frequent irrelevance of democracy even in an area where we instinctively think that it makes all the difference, namely human rights. The overwhelming majority of human rights abuses in Pakistan stem from a mixture of freelance brutality and exploitation by policemen, working either for themselves or for local elites; actions by local landlords and bosses; and punishments by local communities of real or perceived infringements of their moral code.
The murder of women in ‘honour killings’, the giving of young girls in marriage as compensation in the settlement of clan feuds, the dreadful cases of gang rape as a punishment which have taken place in recent years in southern Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan are the work of families, or local clans and their collective leaderships, not of the state. Atrocities by local dominant clans and the police are also entirely characteristic of much of neighbouring democratic India. As regards the police, this is starkly revealed in a report by Human Rights Watch of August 2009.15
Not for nothing was an old Hindustani popular term for banditry ‘padshahi kam’, the imperial trade. This indicated not only that ordinary people could usually see no difference between bandits and soldiers, but that they often changed places. Unpaid soldiers became bandits; successful bandits became soldiers of conquering armies, and their leaders became kings.
According to standard Western models, and to