Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [198]
Hearing this, I remembered similarly vainglorious words the previous week from a Mohajir doctor in Karachi: ‘If Pakistan breaks up, the Mohajirs would conquer the whole of Sindh in a week and take their water. These waderos and their slaves will never fight.’ All this recalls an old German proverb, ‘He who speaks like this, also shoots.’
At the moment, however, all this remains just ugly talk. The leaderships of the various parties, the wadero class in the interior, and the businessmen of Karachi all know how much they have to lose from the disintegration of Pakistan. The tragedy of interior Sindh therefore does resemble that of some of the former Communist states – the revolution it so desperately needs would also spell its destruction.
Thus I remember Sindhi nationalists declaring back in 1989 how there would soon be a ‘war to the death’ against the Mohajirs. A debauched and repulsive younger member of the Soomro clan told me: ‘We have only one choice. Either we lose Sindh or we kick those bloody bastard Mohajirs into the sea.’ But twenty years on, no war to the death has occurred. And he was the least impressive nephew of a couple of pretty formidable brothers whom I met – both of them proud Sindhis but also completely pragmatic individuals who continue to draw patronage from the Pakistani state – which in Sindh, as elsewhere, has somehow managed to stumble on.
9
Balochistan
Might was right in days gone by, and the position of the party aggrieved was the principal factor in determining the price to be paid for blood; hence the compensation for a mullah, a said or a person belonging to a leading family was ordinarily double that for a tribesman. The ordinary rate of compensation (for a death) at present among the Jamalis, Golas and Khosas is a girl and Rs200; Umranis, a girl and Rs200 or Rs1,500 if no girl is given.
(District Gazetteers of Balochistan, 1906)1
Quetta is a garrison town in an oasis, on a high desert frontier. Windblown dust is everywhere, covering the world with a fine, gritty film, and turning the coarse grass and dry shrubs to a uniform grey, so that from the air it sometimes seems as if you are flying over the moon. Every now and again, whirlwinds stir the dust up into looming towers, which spread out and fall again in a stinging grey rain. At the end of the broad, straight streets of the cantonment, bare tawny mountains rise against the hard blue sky. In summer, the sun burns with a searingly dry heat. In winter, it is freezingly cold.
The kepis of the Foreign Legion would not feel out of place here, and as for the sola topees of the British Raj – well, they built the place. Their dead rest in the bleak, windswept Christian cemetery on the outskirts of the cantonment. Many of them are from the Welch Regiment, which served in Quetta in what seem to have been the especially unhealthy years of 1905 and 1906. By an odd chance, both the Welsh when they were conquered by the English and Indians when they converted to Christianity often took Christian names as their surnames. So Private William Hughes rests beneath the carved ostrich feathers of his regiment next to Martin Williams, a Punjabi Christian clerk. Pairs of old British cannon and mountain guns stand outside the gates of the Pakistani generals who have succeeded them; and many of the challenges that those guns were dragged on to this high plateau to face continue to face those Pakistani generals, though in new forms.
But Quetta, like Ougadougou or Fort Lamy, is today a garrison town with elephantiasis. For reasons that will appear, people in Balochistan are even vaguer about figures than in the rest of Pakistan, but the general assumption is that Quetta has between 2 million and 2.5 million people – almost a quarter of Balochistan’s sparse population. It contains not just the government and the military headquarters, but the vast majority of Balochistan’s institutions of higher education and almost the whole of whatever little the province has of manufacturing industry.
Like so many colonial creations, Quetta sometimes