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Waiting
for Allah Extract Every year come April, the nation’s shoe industry would shudder to a halt and local teashops creak under the• weight of conspirators planning how to sway the judges and ensure the success of their chosen candidate. ‘It’s like a mafia operation,’ grumbled Butt, a local farmer who had been persuaded by what he described as ‘security considerations’ to withdraw his prime beast. As in the elections, lines were drawn on the basis of biradaris or clans. Gujrat has three main biradaris – Gujas, Jats and Kashmiris – each of which would field a candidate selected by practised ‘spotters’. As the day of the show approached, the peaceful fields around Gujrat were transformed into scenes of heinous crimes as rival groups went to extraordinary lengths to seek victory. ‘It’s a matter of honour,’ explained the editor of the local newspaper. ‘They start with trade-offs or bribes. If that fails they resort to grievously wounding the owner or his relations. In a close year it can be a fight to the death.’ A local police officer confirmed that the crime rate rockets. The beasts themselves are rarely touched, surprisingly, though one year a wolf was let loose upon a particularly fine specimen. Camel dancing and best sheep contests apparently never evoke such emotions. ‘They are usually settled by a few wife abductions,’ said the editor dismissively. He spoke of the show as an incentive for development, but to the onlooker it represented the worst excesses of Pakistan’s feudal society. Leading landlords lounged in cushioned chairs on a rose-bedecked stage, protected from the sun by colourful awnings. Waiters in crumpled, sweat-stained white jackets and slipping bow-ties scurried among them obsequiously, bearing tea in china cups and sandwiches on silver platters. As the teams of the major feudals trotted past on powerful white chargers, their riders resplendent in bright silks and jewelled turbans, the lesser landlords clapped limply, apparently oblivious to the surging sea of faces below, kept back by the lathis of the riot police. For the crowds it was perhaps the only annual entertainment, TV being unaffordable even if they were lucky enough to have electricity, and dancing forbidden. For bonded labourers it was almost certainly their only day off. The highlight of events was, judging by the roar of the crowd, tent-pegging, a horseback game similar to jousting. As expected, the biggest landlord emerged victorious, his Herculean mount far superior to the scrawny creatures of his lesser colleagues. As with most events in Pakistan, the show had a political dimension. Local bigwigs as always took the opportunity to make turgid speeches, eulogizing their role in upholding Islam. Using wealth and tribal connections, Gujrat’s leading Jat family won all four seats contested in the elections. They had scored a further coup by attracting as chief guest Nawaz Sharif, enjoying the attention in his role as high priest of patronage, verbally doling out schools and hospitals and other vote-winning goodies. An old man with the audacity to mount the stage was rewarded with a road to his village. A police officer was upgraded for his outstanding performance in an utterly indecipherable game of tag-wrestling, played by skinny men in Speedo trunks. By the end of the day the Chief Minister’s secretary was laden with sheafs of applications from people demanding postings, transfers and project approvals. Outside Sharif’s private house in Lahore, a mini-secretariat had been built to accommodate the floods of people who arrive daily asking for help in resolving domestic disputes or minor problems that seem baffling to most of Pakistan’s population. One woman I met there told me tearfully that her father had married her off to a dwarf in exchange for money to pay off a debt to the landlord, and she had fled out of the window on their wedding night. I never found out how Mr Sharif resolved that one. One needed to go to the top for everything, and the man at the top would not willingly relinquish the powers of patronage that enabled him to remain there. The PPP leadership was condescending of this system but in power found themselves expected to make use of it, while many members saw government as their turn to get rich. Perhaps they were no different to their predecessors but, judging from comments by Western bankers, diplomats and businessmen, they were more blatant. Economic success in Pakistan had little to do with talent or hard work and everything to do with political access and who one knew. Nepotism and using connections was seen not as corruption but as a right. A friend of mine returned from Johns Hopkins University imbued with Western values, to take up a job as manager of the Agricultural Development Bank in Mardan, a position with both jobs and much credit at his disposal. Daily he was besieged by relations, friends of aunts, acquaintances of cousins, sons of colleagues of his father, and others claiming even more tenuous connections, asking for positions or loans. Amjad refused to treat their cases any differently from other applications he received from those with no connections. Eventually he found he could get no work done because of the constant stream of people touting family or tribal links. So he shut his door and put a notice on it asking people to make appointments with his secretary. There was outrage. Relations, however distant, are supposed to be accessible, and from bank managers to ministers, travel agents to police superintendents, it seemed that no one was supposed to do any actual work in offices. Life for those some step up the hierarchy involved a constant round of samosas and cloying tea with visitors. Spending hours chatting in the offices of senior civil servants, I often imagined that somewhere in the depths of buildings there must be armies of faceless people scurrying around, mole-like, producing the vast quantities of files that occasionally surfaced. Amjad, for his attempts at efficiency which had his branch whizzing up the league table of credit reimbursement, was censured by the family for his behaviour. Nepotism was expected – if you have contacts you use them. Not to participate was seen as ‘not cricket’ – friends or acquaintances would constantly ask me to get them a visa or to ask a favour for their son, brother or cousin when I met a minister. My refusal and explanation that it would compromise my position was never understood. When Bhutto became Prime Minister she found that everywhere she went she was mobbed by supporters waving petitions, demanding recompense for their sacrifices during martial law. Ministries in Islamabad would be under daily siege by people waving green, red and black party cards and demanding entry to see their ‘People’s Minister’. A senior official from the Development Finance Institute told me, ‘corruption will be far worse under a political government – now they have not just friends and relations but also constituents and party workers to provide for.’ Under eleven and a half years of dictatorship an awful lot of people had suffered for the PPP, and with the Treasury coffers empty Bhutto could satisfy few of them. Committed to cutting development expenditure but the victim of promises made to lure people into the party, Bhutto appointed the biggest cabinet in Pakistan’s history and an entire battalion of advisers – more than seventy in all. According to press reports and diplomatic chitchat, loans, sanctions and contracts were given to friends and relations with gay abandon, in what one general later described as ‘the rape of a nation’. This was apparently not patronage politics. In the PPP’s terminology, it was people’s politics. When ministers spent all day arranging jobs for voters and licences for their patrons, this was not corruption – it was people’s government. Using the same ploy, the party renamed many of the country’s schools People’s Schools, then claimed to have created thousands of new schools. For once there was a price to pay. On 6 August 1990 Bhutto’s government was abruptly dismissed by President Ishaq, accused of corruption and maladministration. Less than two years from assuming office, Bhutto was in the dock on four charges, the penalty for which was seven years’ disqualification from public office. Also charged were several ministers and her husband Asif Zardari, of whom even Bhutto’s closest colleagues said that he had been running a parallel government and that his nod had been essential for projects to be agreed. His frequent presence at cabinet meetings infuriated the President, who sent Bhutto notes saying, ‘I don’t remember swearing in a Mr Zardari as minister.’ Mr Roedad Khan, the retired civil servant who was heading the inquiry said, ‘We have concrete evidence – I’m sure several people will be disqualified.’ He added, ‘Even if not, the important thing is the accountability process has started and will warn politicians to behave in future.’ Ms Bhutto, emotional after the first court appearance in Karachi for charges of selling cotton at a cheap price to a British company, claimed that the whole process was a political vendetta. Face blotchy and voice one note from hysteria, she said, ‘I’m outraged. I’m the only Prime Minister whose relatives did not take an industrial unit, who did not have loans written off, yet those who looted the country go scot-free and dare to point their fmgers at me.’ But she admitted, ‘Pakistan is a third world country. I’m sure if you can have scandals in America with 200 years of democracy you can have them in Pakistan.’ Certainly in Pakistan’s complicated social system it could be difficult to position the fine line between corruption and patronage. ‘Pakistan is a country of superpatronage,’ explained Fakr Imam, the Clifton-College-educated former Parliamentary Speaker who had lost his Multan seat in the election. I had wanted to see his village and had gone to visit him by train, a complicated process. The tourist office had condemned the idea, the bored director who would rather be an artist telling me in the most disparaging of tones that there was ‘nothing to see but Islamic architecture’ and suggesting a trip to the mountains. The railway director was even less help, telling me vaguely that there was a train, ‘some time in eveningtime’. Eventually a timetable from British days was produced, and a train located (the Shalimar Express – the fastest in Pakistan and interminably slow), only for me to be told that it is always full and seats cannot be reserved unless one knows a ‘high-up’. Going to Multan by tram seemed so complicated that it became an obsession, and eventually I was forced to fall m with the system and find a ‘high-up’ who sent some of his servants to the station with me, brandishing a piece of paper on which was scrawled VVIP in very big red letters. An entire family was shoved from their seats to make room so that I could get on, and then compounded my guilt by pressing on me some of their small flask of cold curry and nan bread wrapped in newspaper.
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