Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [55]
Since independence, a number of attempts have been made in both India and Pakistan to bring the jirga or panchayat into the regular state judicial and representative system. In India, ‘Panchayati Raj’, or basic democratic self-government, was for a long time the official Gandhian programme of the Congress Party. Attempts under Ayub Khan and Musharraf to create basic democratic institutions in Pakistan – paradoxically as an underpinning of military rule – both failed in the face of the opposition of the political elites.
When it comes to the judicial system, this issue in Pakistan must be divided into the informal and the formal level. At the informal level, policemen in much of Pakistan (but especially the tribal lands) frequently resort to customary judicial practices for the simple reason that – as so many of them stressed to me – given the reality of Pakistani society and police weakness, it would be impossible to operate half-way effectively without them. In particular, it is quite impossible to prevent, contain or end tribal feuds without recourse to tribal jirgas.
As the chief of police in Larkana District in Sindh told me in 2009 (echoing precisely what the police chief in the neighbouring district of Shikarpur had told me twenty years earlier):
We try to work between the [state] legal system and the tribal system. When the tribes fight each other, I try to first pressurize them by raids, arresting known violent characters or in extreme cases even the sardars themselves, and holding them for a while. Then having taught them a lesson about not going too far, I get both sides around a table to negotiate. You can contain tribal violence by prompt police action, but to solve a conflict, you always end up with a jirga; because you can only end feuds if the two sides agree between themselves to end them ... We are not like the army; we can’t just shoot people until they obey us. In the end we live among the people and have to work with local people. If we don’t, the whole system collapses.
Statements like this exemplify the nature of Pakistan as a ‘negotiated state’, and also the way in which the Pakistani police (and, indeed, much of the civil service) are still basically a colonial-era police force, or even a medieval one: dedicated chiefly not to the pursuit of crime as such, but to the maintenance of basic peace and order. In fact, the Pakistani police still operate on the basis of the British Indian Police Act of 1861, only slightly modified. This act was introduced in the immediate wake of the Indian revolt of 1857, and its structures and regulations were drawn up on the basis of those governing the paramilitary police force in Ireland, also charged with holding down a restive population.
The element of negotiation in police work applies not only to major tribal feuds, but also to quite minor cases. Thus in the Tehkal police district of Peshawar in August 2008, an investigating officer described to me a recent case in which two neighbouring families had fought each other. He said that they probably had longstanding issues with each other, but that the fight itself was the product of pure exasperation, heated to boiling point by a local electricity breakdown in the Peshawar summer.
After an endless wait, an electricity repair crew was bribed by both families to turn up, but naturally had to go to one of them first. An argument erupted which turned to blows, and then pistol shots, leaving two dead on one side. ‘Who started it?’ I asked. ‘God knows,’ the policeman replied. ‘They both say the other did. Does it matter? They weren’t criminals, just ordinary people who got a rush of blood to the head. That