Pathans are good eaters, but less talented conversationalists. After supper was finished we returned to the sitting room to grunt and burp and meditate. Dialogue was intermittent. Soon however the conversation turned to armaments, a subject dear to the heart of every Pathan.
‘What defences do you have here?’ asked Imran.
Mohammed ud-Din considered.
‘Well,’ he said, adding up slowly, ‘I have about fifty gunmen, ten anti-aircraft guns, and … ooh … about four hundred batteries of missiles. They’re only small missiles – you know, four kilometres range.’
Imran looked nonplussed. ‘A show of strength is very important in the tribal areas,’ he explained to me in a matter-of-fact tone.
‘I’m one of the largest landowners in my tribe,’ added Mohammed, ‘so it’s my duty to support my poorer relatives. Most of my guards I employ for this reason.’
‘It surely can’t be healthy having this amount of weapons in private hands,’ I said lamely.
‘You Westerners are always telling us this,’ he replied. ‘But for poor people the tribal system is very good. In the settled areas in Pakistan there is much violence. But here no one can rape any girl. No one can steal. They know the tribe will rally round and there will be a blood feud if they do. In Pakistan you can kill a man in broad daylight and if you have the money you can buy justice. But with tribal law rich men and poor men are equal. You cannot buy the tribal council – you pay with your neck.’
Several large joints passed around the room before someone suggested it was time to go outside and play with the Kalashnikovs. We piled out on to the porte-cochère, and Imran was handed a rifle and a magazine of tracer. He pointed the gun in the air and fired off the whole clip. Scarlet shooting stars streaked up in a glowing arc and fell outside the walls, beyond the deer park.
‘At my friend’s wedding, I alone fired eight hundred rounds,’ said someone behind me. Other tribesmen were muttering in Pushtu, out of which emerged, as solitary comprehensible islands, the names of weapons: ‘Rumble, rumble, rumble, anti-tank gun. Rumble, rumble, Stinger! Stinger rumble? Kalashnikov rumble, SCUD rumble, T-72 rumble. RPG. Acha.’
On the way back in the Mercedes, Imran was in high spirits.
‘What did you think?’ he asked.
‘Terrifying.’
‘Yes,’ he said, proudly. ‘These are my people.’
Two years later, Imran retired from cricket but remained in the news: first by raising funds to build a cancer hospital in Lahore following his mother’s death from the disease; then by announcing he had ‘reawakened’ to his Muslim faith; then by marrying Jemima, daughter of the Europhobic tycoon Sir James Goldsmith. Following Jemima’s conversion to Islam a ludicrous – and sadly characteristic – wave of anti-Islamic hysteria swept the British press. The Sun, anxious that the glamorous Jemima would not be able to wear figure-hugging clothes in Lahore, filled its front page with the query ‘HOW KHAN JEMIMA COPE WITH ALLAH THIS?’ Andrew Neil in the Sunday Times described Jemima as ‘sleepwalking into slavery’, while the Evening Standard’s front page showed her leaving San Lorenzo ‘after throwing off the shackles of her Muslim religion to enjoy a traditional hen night with her friends’.
The following year Imran founded his own political party, the Tehrik-e-Insaaf, or Justice Movement. Following the dismissal of Benazir Bhutto’s venal government on 5 November 1996, he mobilised his new party to fight the election, amid high hopes that he would change the face of Pakistani politics by riding the wave of public disgust with corrupt politicians. Shortly afterwards I returned to Pakistan to cover his election campaign. It quickly became clear that, despite the enthusiasm of both the crowds and the British media (who sometimes made it seem as if the election was already in Imran’s pocket), it was by no means going to be an easy ride for the former cricketer.
LAHORE, 1996
‘I will vote for Imran Khan,’ said the man on the motorbike, ‘because he is a very good cricketer and because he has very nice inner beauty.’
Imran’s convoy had been ambushed by cheering fans as it drew to a halt at the toll gate on the Lahore-Islamabad highway. Amid a pall of smoke, an arsenal of Chinese firecrackers exploded by the side of the road, while nearby a Punjabi wedding band in mock-regimental finery struck up ‘For he’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. From every side a thousand overexcited supporters closed in on the candidate, bawling out the chant ‘Imran zindabad!’ (Long live Imran!) ‘Imran Khan Vizier-e-Azam!’ (Prime Minister Imran Khan!)
After baskets of rose petals had been showered and speeches made, the convoy began to move off again, now led by a squad of fifty boys on Vespa scooters, all flying the red and green flag of Imran’s new party, the Tehrik-e-Insaaf. Bringing up the rear was Imran’s battered Mercedes, which following the floral welcoming ceremony looked as if it had crashed in to a stand at the Chelsea Flower Show, its bonnet thickly carpeted with rose petals while several strings of marigold garlands dangled from its wing mirrors.
The Mercedes looked nearly old enough to have been a Nazi staff car, but it was painted bright yellow and plastered with lurid posters of the aspiring politician. They all carried a photograph of Imran which must have been shot in the late 1970s, when he had sported a bouffant hairdo that made him look more like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever than the cropped, chiselled, more austere figure he cuts today.
Inside the car, Imran looked profoundly tired and slightly haggard. He had been on the road, holding three or four rallies a day for two weeks now, and every day the campaigning had been followed by late nights in an endless chain of committee meetings. These days, he said, he considered himself lucky to catch even four hours’ sleep a night. This latest rally had been organised only two days before, and as it was being held on the land of a feudal landowner hostile to Imran everyone had been worried that nobody would turn up. Certainly no one had expected a reception like this.
As we approached the venue, a one-horse mofussil nowhere-town called Lala Mousa, the crowds lining the pavements and hard shoulders began to spill out on to the motorway itself, reducing our speed to a crawl. Over the motorway signs, banners had been hung: ‘Victory to Imran Khan!’ ‘Imran Khan the Conqueror!’ Every roof was lined with cheering fans and supporters; out of every window fluttered Justice Movement flags.
‘You’re seeing the beginning of a revolution,’ Imran shouted to me, struggling to be heard above the noise. ‘When our supporters started work six months ago people dismissed them as lunatics; they said we had no chance. Now those same people are queuing up to join us. The people are sick of the old politicians. Just look around you: something very, very big is brewing up.’
As our pace slowed, in our wake there built up a tailback of some two hundred vehicles. Immediately behind us was a brightly painted coach (or rather, as the inscription on its side put it, a MERCEDES RAJAH SUPER AIRBUS) whose passengers, caught up in the excitement, had begun to dance on the roof, and who only narrowly avoided being decapitated when the bus passed underneath a low-slung power cable. All the while Imran waved regally from the open window, shaking some of the outstretched hands thrust towards him, while his driver endeavoured somehow to plough slowly through the milling multitudes without killing anyone. When he finally pushed through to the base of the platform, Imran leapt out and sprang up to the dais. His baggy khaki salwar kameez billowing in the breeze, he began to thunder out his pitch:
‘For fifty years the politicians have been exploiting the people of Pakistan,’ he declaimed, punching the air like a demagogue. ‘They’ve been looting and plundering the country! The thief protects the thief! We want to bring the plunderers to justice! We will hang the corrupt! The people of Pakistan should unite to achieve their cause!’
At the side of the platform, the District Superintendent of Police and the local magistrate gazed down at the ecstatic crowds which now stretched for at least two miles down the road, totally blocking both lanes of Pakistan’s principal motorway.
‘I have b
een here for ten years,’ said the DSP, ‘and I’ve never seen anything like this. In fact I’ve never seen a crowd even one tenth this size. How many are here? Thirty thousand? Thirty-five thousand? Benazir’s people had to throw money around to get even two thousand when she came here.’
The District Magistrate, a portly, moustachioed gent in a tweed jacket, nodded his head in agreement. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘this is something quite new.’
Imran Khan might have been pulling in record crowds out in the provinces, but in the political lobbies of Islamabad and the establishment drawing rooms of Lahore, it was extremely difficult to find anyone who really rated his chances at the election.
In many ways this was hardly surprising. Imran had launched his Tehrik-e-Insaaf only six months earlier. At the time he believed he would have two years to prepare the new party for a general election, to form a set of coherent policies, set up offices across Pakistan and find clean, capable candidates to run them. In the event, less than a month after he had formally announced that he was entering politics, Benazir Bhutto’s government was prematurely dissolved for gross corruption by the President, Farooq Leghari. Suddenly Imran found he had only three months in which to mobilise his embryonic political movement.
The result was that, for all his undoubted popularity, few commentators in Pakistan took his challenge seriously. As the election drew near, they began to point out that he still had no credible grassroots organisation, no big-name candidates and no clear policies. Moreover, his enemies questioned whether he had the intellectual capacity to form them.
‘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. Righ
t, 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?’
The Age of Kali Page 30