GUNS AND TUBEROSES

William Dalrymple sees candidates

mustering clan support for Pakistan's election

Lahore IT WAS a hot, sticky equatorial night, and Yusouf Salahuddin was dressed in a cool, white salwar kemiss; he lay curled up on a long divan, his arm resting on a bolster of Kashmiri cloth of gold. From beyond the cusped Moghul arches of the wooden canopy came the patter of a small fountain: beneath the trellis the air was heavy with the mesmeric scent of frangipani and tuberoses.

`Baby, I've told you,' repeated Yusouf into his portable phone, 'I'm not going to stand this time. It's going to be a dirty election; it's going to be rough, really rough. No, no, I'm not ducking out. Honey, listen a second. I'm in control, OK? I'm running the politics of this city from my bedroom. Right, OK, baby. See you.'

Yusouf clicked the machine off, re- tracted the aerial, and snapped his fingers in the air. Two liveried bearers came running.

`Sorry about that,' he said to me. 'You want a drink?'

`Sure. What have you got?'

`Everything.'

I ordered a glass of malt, my first real drink since I got to dry Pakistan. As the bearers scurried off, I asked him whether he was telling the truth. Was it going to be a dirty election?

`Yup,' he said. 'The worst. All kinds of goons are standing: underground figures, drug smugglers, real crazies. . .

`But if — as you say — you are still `We'll do it in modern dress.' pulling the strings in Lahore, won't it be dangerous for you?' I asked. 'Shouldn't you be armed?'

`I don't think I need to be,' replied Yusouf. 'I haven't got any enemies. . .

He paused, and made a slight sweeping gesture with his hands. 'But still, you know, these days you can't be too careful. I keep five bodyguards, ex-commandos, just in case. They are all armed.'

`Pistols?'

`Oh, no big deal,' replied Yusouf. `They've got five Kalashnikovs, MP-5 sub- machine guns, Chinese-made Mausers, Ita- lian pump-action 10-shot repeater shot- guns. No heavy artillery.' I had met the bodyguards. They had smiled sweetly as I passed by them, under the stuffed animal heads in the great gateway of Yusoufs haveli; I had thought them loiterers, friends of the chowkidar. I hadn't seen their hardware. I asked, 'You really need all that?'

`You need it at election time,' said Yusouf. 'Pakistani elections are . . . diffe- rent from British ones.'

`What do you mean?'

`Let me tell you a story,' he said. Yusouf lay back on the divan and sipped delicately at his drink. 'Last time around, on polling day, late in the evening, I was checking out some booths — there had been talk of violence. Just as I arrived there the Jamiat Islami candidate appeared. He had about 100 men, all armed. They closed in, and fired five shots, wounding one of my guards. My boys had just got their new Italian guns, and one of them fired ten shots in the air, rapid fire. No one had ever seen anything like those guns in Lahore, so while the Jamiat goons hesitated, we man- aged to get into the car and get the hell out.'

`I see what you mean.'

`I'm not finished yet. The Jamiat then made their mistake. They gave chase, and came into my territory, into the diamond bazaar, shooting. The police fled, but my bradhari — my people — were outraged. They could not bear to see me attacked. They thought my family had always pro- tected them, so they considered it their duty to protect us.' `They had guns too?'

`While I was a member of the Provincial Assembly I'd given out a lot of licences, so there was quite a bit of hardware about. The whole population went up onto their roofs and began shooting down at the Jamiat boys with whatever they'd got. It was a bloody great gun battle — uncon- trollable. We thrashed them. After half an hour they fled, taking their dead and wounded with them.'

I was familiar with the talk of guns and shooting and street fights. It is very much par for the course in Pakistan these days, and has been so ever since the Afghan war turned the country into the world's biggest ammunition dump outside Lebanon. What interested me was Yusouf's support for his bradhari, his clan. It is a cliché that a modern African election can be fought on purely tribal (as opposed to ideological) grounds; in the same way, it seems, Pakis- tani elections revolve not around a candi- date's politics, but whether he is charisma- tic enough to win the support of his bradhari. I asked Yusouf about his clan: who were his supporters, and why did they follow him?

long story,' he said. 'You really want to hear?'

`Please.'

Yusouf's family, it appeared, were Kash- min landowners who had come to Lahore at the beginning of the 19th century after some unpleasantness — a property dis- pute, a death, an execution order. They brought with them their gold, and invested it in property. By the time Yusouf's great- great-grandfather died, the family owned about one third of Lahore. They had been good landlords and pious Muslims, giving away much of their fortune as alms, and they were always popular as well as power- ful. After Partition, Yusouf s family, co- founders of the Muslim League and con- nected through marriage to the national poet Iqbal, easily managed to transform themselves from the city's most powerful feudal landowners into the city's leading politicians. At every election Yusouf's family could count on the support of a great chunk of the population of the old city — partly Kashmiri relations, partly tenants and ex- tenants, partly neighbours and admirers. It did not matter which party the family chose to support, the bradhari votes would come with them. And even if one of the family did not stand, they could transfer their support to the candidate of their choice, just as Yusouf was doing now. It's not just a tribal thing — we are more like honorary clan leaders. So when the Jamiat invaded our territory, the people took it as a personal insult. Their love for us flared up, and they . . . well, they just massacred our rivals,' said Yusouf. As he talked the bearers reappeared carrying our supper — kebabs, grilled meat, rice, great tent flaps of nan — on silver trays. Yusouf shrugged his shoulders. `The Pakistanis are very loyal to their leaders,' he said, smiling.

WHAT happened in Lahore — the most powerful feudal family transforming itself into the most powerful political family was repeated all over Pakistan when demo- cracy came to the country in 1947. Since then, despite three periods of martial law, the system has not changed. Landowning — the feudal system — is still the only social base from which Pakistani politicians can emerge: Benazir is a big landowner from Sindh; and most of what she does not own in that province is controlled by the inconceivably wealthy Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, prime minister of the caretaker government and one of Benazir's main rivals. The traditional wrangling of rival feudal landowners that is the very essence of northern Indian mediaeval history (just open any page of the Baburnarna) has continued into the present in the guise of political vendettas. The huge and highly educated middle class — the same class which seized control in India in 1947, castrating the might of the landed mahara- jahs almost immediately — is, in Pakistan, still excluded from the political process.

If clan and tribal allegiances can survive in a cosmopolitan modern city like Lahore, these links are still more potent in the wild, untouched northern territories of Pakistan: the foothills of the Hindu Kush, the Karakorums, and the Pamirs.

A week after I left Lahore, I found myself in Swat, one of the most beautiful valleys on earth. Here, the snow peaks of the Karakorums widen and thaw into a landslide of cultivation terraces while, be- low, the Swat river — lapis-lazuli-coloured in autumn — meanders around a green plain of orchards and wheat fields. As you drive past, scenes from Moghul miniatures take shape around you: men are bent double beneath stooks of corn, reaping with sickles; others carry bundles of junip- er branches for feeding to their goats.

Around Lahore, despite the nearness of the polls, there was very little evidence of campaigning: it was still far too hot for marches and demonstrations, and elec- tioneering had begun sluggishly. But in the cool of the Swati highlands, the campaign was in full swing. The Swatis love celebra- tions, festivals and bright colours; and to their minds elections seem to come under the same heading as religious festivals, pilgrimages, and New Year celebrations. They much enjoy festooning their mud- brick houses with the colourful flags of the different political parties, even if it means that one house carries the flapping colours of three rival parties. Processions and meetings are popular and well-attended, and even the most hopeless candidate can gather a cheerful crowd of Pathan tribes- men as he tries to make headway up the narrow, crowded bazaar streets through the counter-flow of pack-donkeys and fat- tailed sheep coming into market from the country.

Democracy is popular here and it looks like a bona fide election, but as so often in Pakistan it is really a feudal dispute in disguise. Until 1969, Swat was ruled by the Wali of Swat, the grandson of the great Akund of Swat whose obituary inspired Edward Lear's famous comic poem: Who or why, or which, or what, Is the Akond of Swat?

Is he tall or short, or dark or fair?

Does he sit on a stool or a sofa or chair, Or squat, The Akond of Swat?

The Wali was a popular and liberal- minded Pathan monarch who endeared himself to the British by leasing out the best duck-shooting in the subcontinent while earning the equally devoted loyalty of his own tribesmen by building roads, schools and hospitals long before it became fashionable for subcontinental rulers to interest themselves in such mundane mat- ters.

Since the Wali died, his political mantle has been disputed by his son on one hand, and his son-in-law on the other. The son is standing for election as the candidate of the Islamic Democratic Alliance (IDA); the son-in-law for Benazir's Pakistan Peo- ple's Party (PPP). The election is in fact nothing more than a feudal succession dispute. There is no ideological difference between the two principal candidates, and only the entry into the fray of a third, outsider candidate — a mullah from the Jamiat Islam' — has led to the campaign being fought on a holier-than-thou, more- Muslim-than-the-other basis. This has at least added a little spice to the electioneer- ing, and produced a very odd poster campaign on behalf of the PPP; the poster shows Benazir, dressed as some sort of female Muslim sage, standing, hands cup- ped in a prayerful trance, while behind her the Kaaba at Mecca — the most sacred shrine in Islam — hovers mysteriously in mid-air; Benazir's reputation at Oxford may have been anything but monastic, but no one is letting on in Swat.

ALL this of course presupposes that the election, scheduled for Wednesday 24 October, will actually go ahead. This is far from certain.

A serious election was probably on the cards when President Ghulam Ishaq Khan deposed Bhutto on 6 August, but since then the political scene has changed dra- matically. The president — and his army bosses — seriously overestimated the de- gree of dissatisfaction with Benazir's gov- ernment. Her PPP administration was widely perceived as corrupt, certainly, but then Pakistanis have never known anything else from their rulers. And although Bhut- to may have no idea how to govern a country — in 20 months she neglected to push one single piece of legislation through parliament — she is an inspirational street fighter, and, by victimising her, the interim government managed only to revive her case. Her failures as a leader were forgot- ten: it was back to those heroic days when Benazir, a single, defenceless woman, took on the might of the Pakistani military establishment. Wherever she goes now in Pakistan, people flock to see her. Two months ago it seemed the Bhutto dynasty was finished; now Benazir is doing well, and her rivals are worried.

It looks unlikely that the special anti- corruption courts set up by the interim government will be able to disqualify Be- nazir before the election takes place next week. And if elections do take place, Benazir's party could possibly still squeeze into power, although the odds are still on the Islamic Democratic Alliance. All this opens up the possibility of army interven- tion. If the army decides it cannot work with Benazir and her party does look set at the last moment to sweep the polls, then the military may feel that it is time to step in and declare martial law for the fourth time. Already it is clear that few of the election candidates are investing their full resources in the campaign: across the party divide there is agreement that the future of democracy in Pakistan is too uncertain to warrant much financial outlay.

Yet surprisingly you hear few complaints against the army from the people of Pakistan. While they regard their politi- cians as inefficient and corrupt feudals, out to safeguard their own interests, the army is perceived as being strong and disci- plined, capable of imposing much-needed order on the country. Zia ul-Haq may have held few charms for the West, but he was a popular figure in Pakistan and there are many who still revere his memory.

On my last day in Pakistan I went for a last exploration in the Qissa Khawani, the Street of the Storytellers in the Peshawar bazaar. There amid the gunshot and the spice-sellers, the tea stalls and the kebab- grillers, I came across a shop selling little cardboard cut-outs of national heroes; cricketers, film stars, holy men and politi- cians. The shop contained figures from across the political spectrum, but was dominated by a wondrous selection of cut-out General Zias, shown in a great variety of poses and personas: as a soldier in uniform, moustache heavily waxed, as a besuited diplomat, as a relaxed father- figure in a loose saiwar kemiss. I poked around the stall for several minutes, and fell into conversation with its owner. Why, I asked him, was he selling so many more General Zias than Benazirs or Jatois?

'Because Zia was a great leader and a great Muslim also.'

'Is Benazir not a great leader?' I asked. 'No, Sahib,' he said firmly. 'She is not.' 'Why not?' I asked, trying to provoke a response.

'We are poor people,' replied the shop- keeper. 'We do not have any interest in democracy. We want jobs. The best govern- ment for this country is martial law.'

He paused to look at his little General Zias. 'Democracy is for rich countries,' he said. 'We cannot afford it here.' The man was not articulate, but I had heard what he had said expressed elsewhere in Pakistan, and I thought I knew what he meant: that in a country where democracy had become just a means of consolidating the power of the landowners, martial law did seem relatively fair and even-handed to the people at the bottom of the pile.

'So Zia is your best-selling line?' I asked. 'No, Sahib.'

'Who is then?'

'The Ayatollah Khomeini, Silvester Stal- lion [sic] and Imran Khan.' 'Perhaps you should get Imran to be your prime minister,' I suggested. 'Perhaps we should,' he replied.

When I first arrived in Pakistan, I got into conversation with a group of earnest young journalists who I met taking the air in the Shalimar Gardens on the outskirts of Lahore. They had different political views, but agreed on one point: that democracy did not work in Pakistan. I disagreed with them, and told them that I thought their views dangerous, that they were inviting dictatorship. Three weeks later, having seen a little of Pakistani democracy at work, I still think their views are danger- ous, but am now not sure that they haven't got a point. When most of the country is excluded from the political process and elections become just another way of consolidating the power of the feudal aristocracy — and the occasional lucky drug baron — that is hardly democracy. Something is clearly wrong.