Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [54]
Among the relatively well-defined and structured Pathan and Baloch tribes, such councils have a fairly regular appearance, and among the Baloch and other tribes influenced by their culture, the jirgas are presided over by the sardar (hereditary chieftain) of the tribe concerned or a close relative. In Punjab they are much looser and less informal. If a case involves members of the same local biradiri, then the panchayat concerned will represent that clan involved; if members of different clans, then representatives of the whole village (or at least its dominant landholding elements) will be present. More rarely, representatives of different villages will meet to discuss disputes between them.
Membership is informal and ad hoc, and emerges from a local consensus as to who is worthy of taking part. In the Pathan and Baloch areas especially, a respected local religious figure may play a mediating role. The local village mullah, however, does not have any right to do so ex officio – a sign of the low respect in which these figures have traditionally been held. Judgments also generally emerge informally from local consensus.
This is especially true when the alleged perpetrator of a given ‘crime’ is some universally despised figure, or one who has committed an action which directly threatens the wellbeing of the whole community – for example, a miller who mixes sawdust into his flour. Such people may be punished by fines, by collective ostracism, or by some form of public ritual humiliation, like being paraded around backwards on a donkey with a blackened face (a South Asian version of the collectively imposed ‘rough music’ in traditional English villages which gave rise to the expression ‘face the music’).
Very often the jirga or panchayat really only ratifies a communal decision which has in effect already been made. This is equally true of the greatest of all jirgas, the traditional loyah jirga, or grand national assembly, of Afghanistan. In disputes involving two families or clans, this decision in turn will be based not on any strict definition of formal justice, but rather on a whole set of shifting elements in which considerations of equity, of relative power and above all of communal peace will all play a part. Judgments will inevitably involve relative winners and losers; but because communal peace and family prestige are both of the essence, considerable care will usually be taken to ‘save face’ on all sides, and to arrange compromises. Here, compensation rather than punishment is of the essence.
As Imran Aslam of Geo TV continued:
Pakistan works at one level which is informal. You could call it the informal moral economy, which keeps hitting back against the elites. Attitudes to the law are part of this ... One thing that ordinary people here fault the state’s Anglo-Saxon legal system for is that there is no compensation. Yes, they say, the law has hanged my brother’s killer, but now who is to support my dead brother’s family – who by the way have ruined themselves bribing the legal system to get the killer punished? Both the traditional justice systems and the Shariah are all about mediation and compensation, which is an important part of their appeal for ordinary people.9
Some of the British themselves recognized these objections to their system; and from the time when they first introduced the modern Western legal system and modern Western administrative, and later representative, institutions to their Indian