Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [193]
Of eighteen people I spoke to in the village, all but four said that they had voted and would vote for the PML(Q), for a reason about which they were entirely candid: ‘This is the village of Unar Sahib. His house is just over there. We vote how our wadero says, because we are his people. He gives us everything, so we follow him,’ as Nizar Shaikh, a carpenter, told me. As I sat in the café in the gleaming surroundings of Karachi airport I thought back to this scene, in a dusty village of mud houses which seemed little changed from those of Mohenjo Daro – two worlds apparently so utterly different, but linked by invisible but immensely strong links of kinship and patronage.
HUNTING BOAR AND LEADING TRIBES
The purpose of the first days of my journey to interior Sindh was not supposed to be politics – but then, in the world of Pakistani landowners, as in that of their English equivalents in the past, everything is in fact politics, including deaths, births and above all marriages; and hunting parties, which was what this particular trip was about. Sardar Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, uncle of Benazir Bhutto and hereditary chief of the Bhutto tribe, had invited me to a hunt for wild boar, organized in a patch of jungle on the banks of the Indus by a landowning family called Khoshk, waderos of a village of that name. Mumtaz Ali Bhutto was providing most of the dogs, for the breeding of which he is famous, and the huntsmen.
The Sardar’s love of animals can take some curious forms. As our vehicle passed an emaciated, exhausted-looking horse pulling an overloaded cart, he told me how unhappy such sights make him: ‘Sometimes, if I see a man beating his horse and donkey, I will stop the car, get out and give him a beating instead.’ Since kindness to animals is not much of a South Asian tradition, this must be one of the more interesting combinations of British attitudes to animals and Sindhi ‘feudal’ attitudes to people.
Like fox-hunting in Britain, wild-boar hunting in Pakistan is a matter of pure sport, since in a Muslim country the animals cannot be eaten by the hunters. The carcasses are thrown to the dogs or given to one of the remaining groups of low-caste, formerly tribal Hindus who live along the Indus. I was offered one myself, but declined; because driving around interior Sindh like a motorized Obelix, with an enormous putrefying pig tied to the roof of my car, while it would undoubtedly have attracted attention, would probably not have contributed to my prestige.
As was the case for millennia in Europe, hunting is an important means of maintaining connections and forging new bonds among the landowner-politicians in Sindh. Hunting in Sindh twice played a part in the rise of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: once in 1955 when President Iskandar Mirza brought General Ayub Khan to Larkana to hunt and introduced Bhutto to him; once in January 1971 when a joint duck-shooting trip with President Yahya Khan helped bring them together in the moves which led to the horrible events surrounding Bangladeshi independence.
I had wanted to go on a boar hunt ever since I had had to turn down an invitation in southern Punjab in 1989, despite the incentive added by my host that two local landowning families were covertly at odds and might use the occasion to shoot each other rather than the boar. No such possibility was present on this latter occasion, if only because it turned out that the boar were to be hunted not with guns, but with spears.
At this news, my joy at being invited to this absolutely quintessential ‘feudal’ event was rapidly overtaken by the comical mental image of myself holding a spear, and the less comical one of my doing so while facing a large and understandably irritated boar. However, I needn’t have worried. Only one huntsman carried a spear, to deliver the coup de grâce after the boar had been brought down by the hounds. The rest of us were spectators, with a very slight chance of becoming participants if the boar charged us directly.
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