Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [197]
One should, however, think twice about advocating a revolution against the waderos. In the first place, it is by no means certain that a ruling class made up of the wealthier peasants would be any more progressive economically or culturally. Certainly those more enterprising waderos whom I met complained constantly about the blind conservatism of their tenants and workers, very much in the fashion of Russian nineteenth-century landowners – though there is doubtless a self-serving element in their complaints.
Secondly, the waderos are by far the most important barrier against a Sindhi nationalism which, if given free rein, would not only destroy Pakistan, but plunge Sindh itself into ethnic conflict that would tear the province apart and wreck any hope of progress. The waderos are not attached to Pakistan by affection, with the exception of the Bhuttos. Even wadero members of the PML(N) whom I met – in other words, members of a Punjabi-led party – spent much of their time complaining about Punjabi domination and exploitation. Rather, the waderos are attached to the Pakistani state by ties of patronage, circulated and recirculated through the ‘feudal’ landowning elite by changes of government in Islamabad. In turn, as my experiences with the Unar Khans demonstrate, the waderos then circulate this patronage and protection downwards through society; small shares, but enough to help them go on dominating that society.
This charge of national treason for the sake of patronage is precisely the charge made against the wadero class by nationalist parties like Jiye Sindh; but even Jiye Sindh’s former leader, G. M. Syed, was persuaded by General Zia’s administration to modify his hostility to Pakistan by the offer to his son of a pilot’s job with Pakistan Airlines. A movement against the waderos would have to be a middle-class one, and its ideology would inevitably be Sindhi nationalist.
My meetings with Sindhi intellectuals in Hyderabad were not encouraging as to the likely character of that nationalism. Like their East European equivalents in the past, their principal occupations appear to be folklore, nationalistically coloured religion (in this case, Sindhi Sufism), and what might be described as folkloric historiography – an approach now extended from the glorious past of the Indus Valley civilization and the Talpurs to the martyrs of the Bhutto dynasty. These have a huge gallery devoted to them in the Folklore Museum of Hyderabad University, where you pass from the exquisite traditional embroidery of Sindh to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s worshipfully preserved socks.
With rare exceptions, repeated attempts on my part to discuss social, economic and ecological issues with Sindhi intellectuals led to a few platitudinous statements of concern, followed by a rapid reversion to the eternal topics of Mohajir and Punjabi exploitation of Sindh. The eventual collapse of Pakistan was taken as a given by most of them, but very few had thought seriously as to what would come next, beyond a wonderful independent Sindhi national existence in ‘the most fertile part of Asia’, as Sindh was repeatedly described to me.
If all this was depressingly familiar from conversations in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union before their collapse, even more depressing was the light-hearted way in which a number of people on all sides talked of forthcoming ethnic war. The landowner brother of a PPP member of parliament described Sindh’s prospects to me as follows:
We are a peace-loving people, but if you look at our history, we are also the greatest fighting people in Pakistan, and we have the Pathans and Baloch on our side. I tell you that if there is war with the Mohajirs, Sindhis may receive the first blow, but then we will kill the Mohajirs like rats. They will be like the Jews in World War II, hiding in cellars and being hunted down. And in any case, Karachi could not live a week without Sindh’s food and