Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [212]
Like his father and most of his family, Jamil Bugti at fifty-nine is a tall, handsome, aristocratic-looking man with aquiline features and a modified version of the bristling Baloch beard. He towered over his lawyer, a squat, rubber-faced and obsequious Punjabi who had driven out with us from Quetta as a partial safeguard against nationalist banditry. The sense of racial difference was even starker when it came to the Nawabzada’s small, thin, dark-skinned servants. These are ‘Mrattas’, descendants of Marathas from central India, captured in war by the Mughal emperors and given to their Bugti troops as slaves in lieu of wages.
Traditionally, their women have served as concubines to the Bugti (‘their women were regarded as fair game for all Bugtis’ in Matheson’s words) but there was no sign of Bugti blood in the faces of the Nawabzada’s servants. The Mrattas were officially made equal citizens of Pakistan after 1947, and the Nawabzada insisted that ‘they have merged completely with the Bugti and no one can tell the difference any more’ – given all the circumstances a real whopper. On the other hand, the British official and ethnographer R. Hughes Buller stated in 1901 that,
Many Baloch tribes consist chiefly of elements which have been affiliated to the Baloch and have afterwards set up for themselves. As time passes, their origin is forgotten and with it any social inferiority which may have originally existed. An instance of a group which has only lately asserted Baloch origin, is the Golas of Nasirabad. Though enumerated with the Baledis they are looked upon by other Baloch as occupying a low place in the social scale. Common report assigns them a slave origin, and as the word gola means slave in Sindhi, it is quite possible that this belief has some foundation in fact.15
So just possibly something of the sort may indeed very gradually be happening in the case of the Mrattas, even if it obviously hasn’t happened yet.
Like most of the members of Sardari families whom I met, the Nawabzada talked a fiercely pro-independence and anti-Pakistani talk, accentuated by his deep booming voice and frequent use of English obscenities. His resentment of the Pakistani state seemed genuine enough when he spoke of his father’s death at the hands of the Pakistan army, of how, at the age of nine, he had seen his father arrested for the first time (‘When he was released in 1969 I had already graduated’), and of his fury at seeing pictures of Pakistani officers posing in his ancestral home at Dera Bugti. He accused the Pakistani army of committing ‘genocide’ in Balochistan, and declared that ‘I don’t see how any honourable Baloch can celebrate Pakistani independence. For us it has been sixty years of slavery, barbarism and torture.’
He expressed utter contempt for Pakistan-led development in Balochistan, declaring of Musharraf’s new port at Gwadar,
We don’t want to develop Gwadar or other ports – we don’t want another Dubai in Balochistan. What is Dubai? A bloody whorehouse like the Hira Mandi [‘Diamond Market’, or red-light district] in Lahore. Why should we allow millions of outsiders to come here and take our land?
At first hearing, then, this is an example of the Pakistani state’s utter failure to retain or cultivate the loyalty of many of the Baloch tribal aristocracy. At the second hearing, however, certain questions began to arise. If he was so committed to independence, why had he not taken sides in the conflict over the leadership of the Bugti tribe between his two nephews, Nawabzada Ali Bugti, the officially turbaned head of the tribe sitting in Dera Bugti under army protection, and Nawabzada Baramdagh