Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [170]
Most importantly, perhaps, unlike most of the ‘feudals’, the industrialists and businessmen in politics have no mass kinship groups to fall back on – and their workers are hardly likely to behave like a clan and guarantee them a permanent vote bank. Because so many city-dwellers have only recently arrived from the country, even in the cities kinship networks often remain vital to power and influence. Money and property are of course very important, but not all-important. Even in Faisalabad city and district, a majority (though a small one) of members of the national and provincial assemblies are from landed families. These are not huge ‘feudals’, and they usually draw most of their wealth from urban land, but they are still primarily landed notables rather than urban businessmen or professionals.
All of this might have been set aside if the military and the industrial elites had formed a solid alliance to develop the country, as has been the case in a number of developing economies in the past (Germany and Japan are the most famous, if not the happiest examples). This looked as if it might be happening when Zia-ul-Haq re-created the Muslim League and put Nawaz Sharif in charge of it. But in the ten years after Zia’s death, first the army refused to back the Muslim League against the PPP, then the Muslim League tried to gain dominance over the military, and then the military under Musharraf shattered the alliance for good by overthrowing Nawaz Sharif. Musharraf, to stay in power, compromised with the same old ‘feudal’ elements in Punjab, and all chance of a military – political – industrial alliance for development was lost.
That leaves the Islamists. In Turkey, the moderate Islamist party (in its various incarnations) rose to power with mass support, but also very much on the shoulders of provincial business and industrial elites. If anywhere in Pakistan, Faisalabad would seem to be the place where the beginnings of such a development might be found. But, as mentioned earlier, the Jamaat Islami there seems hopelessly tied to its lower-middle-class constituency – which is barred from seeking working-class support by class and cultural factors, but is also too poor and uneducated (compared to its Turkish, Egyptian or Iranian equivalents) to generate any kind of coherent modern social and economic policies.
In the words of a local administrator: ‘It would be very difficult for the Islamists to make much headway in Faisalabad, because they have no answer to practical problems like gas and electricity, and this is a very practical place. We are Punjabi businessmen here, not Pathans – warriors, dreamers, fanatics.’ Despite the intense anger of many Faisalabad workers at electricity cuts and growing unemployment, during my stay in the city I found no one who seemed to think that there was any serious chance of the Pakistani Taleban successfully appealing for their support and setting off a mass revolt in Faisalabad.
SECTARIANS AND TERRORISTS
It is quite otherwise in different parts of central and southern Punjab. If Punjab – and Pakistan – were to be broken from within by Islamist extremism, then the process would start here, in the belt between Jhang and Bahawalpur, with the ancient city of Multan at its heart. Here, Islamist militancy may be able to make serious inroads with the help of local sectarian forces which since the 1980s have been attacking the local Shia community. The Pakistani Taleban have formed an alliance with these sectarian groups which in 2009 – 10 led to increasing terrorism in Punjab. Because of poverty, madrasahs in southern Punjab are more important than in the north, where the state education system has a bigger presence (in rural areas, the literacy