Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [195]
The drawing-room contains a throne-like silver chair on which the Sardar’s grandfather was inaugurated, and a family tree which shows only male members – thereby omitting Benazir Bhutto! Beside the front gate is the exquisite eighteenth-century mausoleum of a family saint. In front of the house, facing a garden with the inevitable lawn for political meetings, an open hall between columns provides a space where the Sardar holds court, with his two sons sitting on either side of him and his steward standing respectfully to one side. Before him, a variety of petitioners appear to touch his feet and wait with hands clasped, as if in prayer, to receive an order or a judgment. Having received it, most sit to one side for a longer or shorter period to show respect, and by their presence and numbers help boost their lord’s prestige.
The morning that I was a witness seemed fairly typical – and was almost identical to an audience by Mumtaz Ali Bhutto on the same spot when I had visited him twenty years before. Sharecroppers and local ‘incharges’ received orders for planting crops; participants in a land dispute were told to stop work on the land pending a decision; and two sheepish-looking peasants received a sharp response, tried to argue, and were sent packing by one of the gunmen. ‘They are sharecroppers of a neighbouring landowner,’ Amir Bhutto told me:
He took away their land for various reasons and they have come to us for help getting it back. But this man is our political rival and they have always voted for him. So my father said, ‘You never came to me in the past, you voted for my opponent. What can I do to help you? He is in another party and not in my influence.’11
When the circumstances are right, such discussions are often the prelude to a change of allegiance, or to new bargaining based on the threat of it. All over rural Sindh, and much of the rest of Pakistan as well, such scenes happen every day – the basic stuff of Pakistani politics, though rarely played out against such a magnificent background.
‘FEUDAL’ DOMINATION
One very proud member of a wadero family – but a highly educated one with an MA from Cambridge – was scathing about his fellow ‘feudals’:
The Sardars in Sindh are changing, but not as fast as they should. Many are not interested in education. They don’t think it helps them to run their estates or manage politics. So even the children of the bigger landowners are often surprisingly uneducated; and that of course also means that they don’t understand new agricultural techniques and have no idea or interest in any kind of wider development or improvement, beyond traditional charity. And because they dominate politics and government, that means that Sindh society in general is also changing very slowly.
Local journalists in the nearby town of Larkana recounted for me a litany of recent actions by ‘feudals’ in their region. One, a local chieftain, had been using his gunmen and dacoits to seize packets of land from small farmers, ‘people without links to feudals and from weak tribes’. He was protected from police retaliation, I was told, because his brother was a provincial minister from the PPP. A much worse case involving local chieftains and PPP politicians will be recounted in the next chapter, on Balochistan. During the floods of 2010, landlordpoliticians in western Sindh were credibly accused of opening local barrages so that the flood waters would spare their lands and inundate those of rivals.
I asked the Larkana journalists how Sindhi society and economy had changed over the past twenty years. There was a very long pause. ‘Not much,’ one said. Another said that there was now more education. In the industrial sector, they mentioned a considerable growth of small rice-processing units, with 200 – 300 of these in Larkana District alone;