The Age of Kali (45 page)

‘Not for nothing is he known here as Im the Dim,’ said Abida Hussein, a former Pakistani Ambassador to the United States and a candidate for Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League, which most people expected to win the election. ‘It’s a classic case of overdeveloped pectorals and underdeveloped brain cells. If you put any of our big movie stars up on a podium they’d probably pull the crowds, but it doesn’t mean anyone with any sense will vote for them. Would you vote for Ian Botham?’

Others dismissed Imran as a hypocrite. What can you make of a man, they asked, who castigates what he calls the ‘VIP culture’, then sends his wife to have her baby in the most expensive suite at the Portland Hospital? The Oxford-educated and thoroughly Anglicised Pakistani who attacks the ‘brown Sahibs’ and their Westernised ways? The ladies’ man, once the darling of a hundred Fulham bedrooms, who now thunders from his podium about rooting out the Western disease of promiscuity?

Even his friends had reservations. ‘I love Imran as a person,’ said one Lahore socialite. ‘He’s honest, he’s sincere, he’s got great integrity and he’s totally incorruptible. But I still have the nagging worry that if he got in to power he might have me stoned to death for adultery or cut my head off for drinking. He’s got some pretty strange ideas. Have you heard how he’s been promising to string up all corrupt politicians? And he means it, you know.’

Many of Imran’s ‘strange ideas’ are linked to his recent religious reawakening, the product of a midlife crisis following his mother’s slow and painful death from cancer. This has brought about a profound change not only in his outlook but in his manner. The old
joie de vivre
of the cricket pitches has given way to a new seriousness. Imran subscribes to the tolerant Sufi tradition of Islam, and is no bearded fundamentalist, but he takes his religion very seriously, and his conversation is now peppered with Sufi anecdotes and even the occasional quotation from the Koran.

More alarmingly, he believes that the Islamic Sharia law has much to recommend it, comparing the almost complete absence of petty crime in the tribal areas of Pakistan, where Sharia is in force, with the anarchy of New York at night. ‘In the tribal areas there has never been one single case of rape,’ he said at one point. ‘To me that is a million times more civilised than America, where there are one million rape cases every year.’ He has also expressed a rather unnerving admiration for some aspects of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, pointing out, for example, that the Iranian literacy rate has risen from 60 to 90 per cent since the fall of the Shah, a stark contrast to the situation in Pakistan, where literacy is actually falling year by year. When, as a joke, I asked him whether he saw himself as Pakistan’s answer to the Ayatollah, he thought for a second before replying, ‘Not exactly.’

While this sort of thing probably plays well with the Pakistani electorate, who are no doubt as keen on hanging and flogging as their British counterparts, the pundits point out that there is one major obstacle to Imran’s party translating its undoubted popularity in to votes: the Justice Movement had no money, and therefore no muscle, in a country where politics depends on little else.

In Pakistan, as in India, elections are not really about ideology: they are about outbidding rivals by making a string of extravagant local promises. Typically, a parliamentary candidate will go to a village and give a sum of money to one of the village elders, who will then distribute the money among his
baradari
, or clan. The
baradari
will then vote for the candidate
en bloc
. To win an election,
the most important thing is for the candidate to win over the elder of the most powerful clan in each village. As well as money, the elder might also ask for various favours: a new tarmac road to the village, or gas connections for his cousins. All this costs a considerable sum of money, which the candidate must then recoup through corruption when he gets in to office.

According to the conventional wisdom in Pakistan, the only thing that can overrule loyalty to a clan is loyalty to a
zamindar
, or feudal landowner. In many of the more backward parts of the country the local
zamindar
can automatically expect his people to vote either for himself, if he is standing, or for the candidate he appoints; as one commentator put it, ‘In some constituencies, if the feudals put up their dog as a candidate, that dog would get elected with 99 per cent of the vote.’

Such loyalty can be enforced. Many of the biggest
zamindars
are said to have private prisons, and most have private armies, or at the very least access to gangs of local
goondas
, or hired thugs. In the crowd at Lala Mousa, several of Imran’s supporters said that they would like to work for the Justice Movement, but did not dare: ‘I would like to help Imran,’ said one boy, ‘but I’m afraid I’ll get my legs sawn off. It happens. The candidates of the other parties here are very strong and have many gunmen. When the election comes they will threaten anyone who works for the Tehrik-e-Insaaf.’ In the more remote and lawless areas there is also the possibility that the
zamindars
and their thugs will bribe or threaten the polling agents, then simply stuff the ballot boxes with thousands of votes for themselves.

As part of his drive to clean up Pakistani politics Imran made it quite clear that he intended to do no deals with landowners or clan chiefs. If individuals wish to support him, he said, well and good. But only by breaking the system of patronage did he believe that corruption could be brought under control. This was clearly true, but in the eyes of most of the Pakistani journalists I talked to, it relegated Imran to the position of a hopelessly naïve idealist who had spent too long on the cricket pitches of the Home Counties,
and who had no grasp of the brutal realities of political power in Pakistan. He may pull the crowds, they said, but that was a very different thing to winning a Pakistani election.

Later that week in Lahore, I began to grasp what
baradari
politics actually involved.

It was a warm Punjabi night, and Imran’s best friend, but political rival, Yusouf Salahuddin was dressed in a thick white
salwar kameez
. 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 scent of frangipani and tuberoses.

‘Baby, I’ve told you,’ repeated Yusouf in to 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, retracted 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 had arrived in 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 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,’ said Yusouf. ‘This isn’t the Frontier. They’ve only got five Kalashnikovs, MP-5 sub-machine guns, Chinese-made Mausers and some Italian pump-action ten-shot repeater shotguns. 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 Yusouf’s
haveli
(courtyard-house); 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 … rather different from British ones.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Let me tell you a story,’ Yusouf said. He lay back on the divan and sipped his drink. ‘Last time around, on polling day, late in the evening, I was checking out some booth – there had been talk of violence. Just as I arrived there the Jamaat-i-Islami candidate appeared. He had about a hundred 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 Jamaat goons hesitated, we managed to get in to the car and get the hell out.’

‘I see what you mean.’

‘I’m not finished yet. The Jamaat then made their mistake. They gave chase, and came in to my territory, in to the diamond bazaar, shooting. The police fled, but my
baradari
were outraged. They could not bear to see me attacked. They thought my family had always protected 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 on to their roofs and began shooting down at the Jamaat boys with whatever they’d got. It was a bloody great gun battle – uncontrollable. We thrashed them. After half an hour they fled, taking their dead and wounded with them.’

I was quickly becoming 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 in to one of the world’s biggest ammunition dumps. What interested me was Yusouf’s support from his
baradari
. I asked him who his supporters were, and why they followed him.

Yusouf’s family, it appeared, were Kashmiri landowners who had come to Lahore at the beginning of the nineteenth century after some unpleasantness – a property dispute, 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 a 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 powerful.

After Partition, Yusouf’s family, co-founders of the Muslim League and connected through marriage to the national poet Iqbal, easily managed to transform themselves from the city’s most powerful feudal landowners in to its leading politicians. At every election they 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
baradari
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 Jamaat 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 and rice on silver trays. Yusouf shrugged his shoulders: ‘Privately, of course, I wish Imran the best of luck. But as you can see, the Pakistanis are very loyal to their traditional leaders. With the best will in the world, I doubt whether his party will win a single seat in this election. In fact, he’ll be lucky to get in himself.’

What happened in Lahore – the most powerful feudal family transforming itself in to the most powerful political family – was repeated over much of Pakistan when democracy came to the new country in 1947. Since then, despite three periods of martial law, the system has not changed. Landowning – feudalism – is still almost the only social base from which Pakistani politicians can emerge: the Bhutto family are big landowners in Sindh, and most of what they do not own in that province is controlled by Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, one of Benazir’s main rivals. The traditional wrangling of rival feudal landowners that is the very essence of north Indian medieval history (just open a page of the
Baburnama
or any other Moghul chronicle) has continued in to the present in the guise of political vendettas. The huge and highly educated middle class – the class which seized control in India in 1947, castrating the might of the maharajahs and feudal landowners almost immediately – is still to a remarkable extent excluded from the political process in Pakistan.