DYNASTIES are generally associated with monarchies. And until fairly recently, most monarchies were absolutist. Only those which were able to adjust to democracy survived as constitutional monarchies, like the British, still much loved by its people.

Others have met sticky ends, such as the Bourbons of France and the czars of Russia. Yet another bit the dust recently: Gyanendra Shah of Nepal, the descendant of a proud line of Shah kings going back 240 years. He was forced out of office by a popular revolt, followed by an election, becoming an ordinary citizen, with the country turning into a republic.

Didn’t Shakespeare warn, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown?” However, plenty of uncrowned dynasties abound, mostly in Asia, but some elsewhere as well.

There were the Kennedys, a glamorous but tragic family, with two brothers, one of them a president, falling to assassins’ bullets, while one of their sons died in a plane crash, and a fourth Kennedy — Edward — was recently diagnosed with a malignant tumour in his brain.

Equally tragic have been the Gandhis/Nehrus of India and the Bhuttos of Pakistan, details of which readers are only too familiar with.

In neighbouring Bangladesh, two women, Khaleda and Hasina, widow and daughter of slain leaders, have taken turns in being at the helm though the military has rudely pushed them aside, temporarily one hopes.

In Sri Lanka, the Bandaranaike family, husband Solomon (also assassinated), widow Sirimavo, and daughter Chandrika, have virtually monopolised their island nation’s leadership, one after the other.

In Myanmar, a bunch of thuggish and incompetent army generals have been in charge for several years, while the lady whom the people look up to, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, languishes in house detention. Her revered father, too, led his people until his death — yes, you guessed it — at the hands of an assassin.

In Indonesia, there was the elected head, Megawati Sukarnoputri, whose Sanskrit name gives the game away: ‘Putri’ means daughter and Sukarno was Indonesia’s founding father. Another family dynasty.

Further afield, we have Raul Castro, brother of the charismatic and colourful — and ailing — Fidel, effectively taking over the reins of power, while in Syria, Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father, as did Kim Jong-Il in North Korea. No democracy in any of these three countries, yet family rule prevails.However, it is my country, India, that naturally fascinates me more, where political dynasties are so numerous that they are virtually falling over themselves. Rahul Gandhi, the Italian-born Sonia’s son, is already referred to as ‘Yuvraj’ (prince), though he has shown his distaste for this appellation. Most observers of the Indian scene feel that his sister, Priyanka, is smarter and has more charisma — she also bears a striking resemblance to her grandmother, Indira Gandhi — but Sonia has preferred she remain a housewife, for now at least. Perhaps she is being kept in reserve, should Rahul fail.

In the troubled state of Jammu and Kashmir, the articulate Omar Abdullah belongs to the third generation of Kashmiri politicians. His grandfather was the legendary ‘Lion of Kashmir’, Sheikh Abdullah, and his father, Farooq Abdullah, was also a chief minister of the state but who has never been able to shake off his reputation as a playboy and dilettante.

Down south at the other end of India, in Tamil Nadu, there are the Karunanidhis, the father being the present chief minister, a post he has often held in the past, while his two sons, one of whom carries the outlandish name of Stalin, and daughter are being groomed for high office.

In Maharashtra, the Muslim-baiting leader of the fascist Shiv Sena, Bal Thackeray, has designated his son, Udhav, as his successor, resulting in his disappointed nephew, Raj, angrily breaking away, forming a separate ‘Sena’ and trying to outdo his uncle in narrow, violent chauvinism.

As for Karnataka, no less than three sons of Deve Gowda, a former chief minister of the state — and also, mercifully for a short time, prime minister of India — control the Janata Dal party which was earlier in power but fortunately got a drubbing in a recent state election.

There are also the Badals of Punjab, the Chautalas of Haryana and the Patnaiks of Orissa, among other dynastic political families.

What does all this show? Basically, that India remains a badly flawed democracy. In true democracies, power is not handed down in such shameless nepotistic fashion and voters are not fooled so easily.

Winston Churchill and de Gaulle, towering leaders of their respective nations, had no sons or daughters succeeding them. Of course, there have been Bush senior and Bush junior and now Hillary Clinton trying to emulate her husband (and failing). But they are the exceptions.

The other reasons for family rule are power and money — and the two are usually linked by corruption, certainly in India, probably in many other developing countries, including Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well. You don’t trust handing over power and money, especially if it is ill-gotten, to anybody but family.

The writer is a former editor of the Reader’s Digest and Indian Express.

singh.84@hotmail.com

THERE are two aspects to terrorism and Pakistan. First the phenomenon inside Pakistan itself hitting state and society; and then the western conception of Pakistan as adjunct to the Al Qaeda brand of terrorism that declaredly threatens their world.

The one has Pakistan a victim and the other has it a possible facilitator because segments of the population may be sympathetic, particularly to Afghanistan’s routed Taliban.

Both America and Pakistan would agree there is some kind of confluence in the waging of the war on terror and the terrorism that Pakistan itself experiences, but they inter-relate cause and effect differently. A terrorist act is as much an outcome of political opinion and experience as of religious and cultural outlook. The terrorist’s mode for violence is dictated by weakness. As well as a stratified cross-permeated historical narrative, geography and demography are important factors in terrorism and Pakistan.

The NWFP’s tribal belt is federally administered (Fata) and shares ethnicities with Afghanistan. That stubbornly undefined border has a tradition of illegal traffic and smuggling as well as of inviolable sanctuary and refuge. Since Pakhtuns also inhabit the valleys and plains of Federal Pakistan’s Sarhad province, that ethnicity is not confined to Fata. It brands provincial politics.

In Karachi, the Pakhtun labour force constitutes a large presence. And there are Afghan refugees — Pakhtuns and non-Pakhtun — dotting Balochistan, Sindh and major cities; some living as virtually settled migrants, in conditions that range from affluence to destitution. Because of Pakistan’s contiguity with Afghanistan, the dislocation of Afghans from war zones seeking asylum as refugees or fugitives would affect Pakistan directly, whether or not it was a partner in America’s war on terror.

America has had two separate ideological engagements — less than two decades apart — in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s presidents (military dictators in both cases) quite eagerly involved themselves and the country with both efforts. The first engagement was against the ‘godless’ USSR’s intrusion into Afghanistan. America found the Muslim jihadist concept a useful tool; and Pakistan’s semi-official facilitation of the Mujahideen was much facilitated by the US. When the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from Afghanistan, America also withdrew from proxy engagement. At that stage, it did not matter how the Afghans resolved their contradictions in the evolving civil war.

Pakistan sought to gain ‘strategic depth’ and rather foolishly fancied itself in the role of kingmaker amid conflicting factions. Inevitably, this alienated tranches of the Afghan population. In NWFP where nationalist, secular elements compete with an obscurantist clerical stream, political sentiment was from the outset sharply divided about involvement in Afghan affairs. When the now notorious Taliban established some kind of writ over most of Afghanistan, Pakistan pinned hopes of strategic depth on them.There is some assuming the government (Benazir Bhutto was in her second tenure as prime minister) gave encouragement if not quite sponsorship to the fledgling Taliban movement. To this day, Pakistanis do not know where the truth lies. Pakistanis believe US officialdom possesses some of the facts. Yet, so murky has the Afghan context become configuring the current triangle, American commentary and disclosure are suspect.

However, one thing is indisputable. Well before the Taliban emerged, Pakistan, thanks to its clumsy Afghan policy, had earned enemies within neighbouring Afghanistan and generated grudges within its own NWFP. Favouring Pakhtun ethnicity among Mujahideen factions alienated other Afghan ethnicities. By siding with the Taliban, powerful warlords gave progressive secular Afghans cause for double rancour. Eventually, when camps closed at UN direction, even returning refugees left feeling hostile about losing shelter!

In its first engagement, America impacted Afghanistan befriending the tribesmen’s mores and rejecting foreign troops on their soil. The second time the US was the invader and the tribesmen were the enemy. Osama had sanctuary with the Taliban who refused to give him up to the US, though they were less reluctant to negotiate handing him over to intermediaries. This possibility was not pursued.

In the Cold War perspective, America used the jihadist mindset deliberately and dispassionately. Its recoil was visceral post 9/11, originating in fear of Muslim fundamentalism perceived as irradiating terrorism. The Mujahid America had encouraged Pakistan’s establishment to link up with was now the jihadist they had to smoke out.

The American-led global alliance pulverised Taliban resistance along with the hills and caves of Tora Bora and much else in ‘collateral damage’. But Osama eluded them. Eventually, they installed what may be called a puppet regime, for their troops are not yet able to withdraw. To ordinary Pakistanis, America’s Afghan role now seems quasi-suzerain.

But the war on terror goes on and Pakistan comes under more and more pressure — internationally for not doing enough and nationally for not protecting its citizens’ lives and property from Nato incursions. There is contempt of the macho tribal warrior sort for a government that lacks autonomy and anger with the American bully. But anti-Americanism is not restricted to chauvinist fundamentalist mindsets.

Pakistan’s progressives are exacerbated by the world’s foremost democratic power actively supporting its military ruler. The US role in procuring his deal with Ms Bhutto offers a disconcerting parallel to the ISI role in politics! On another plane, many secularists reject a global corporate culture.

Why assume orthodox tribal Muslims or urbanised defendants of madressah schooling are pro-terrorist? This is not to deny that a resurgent Islamism is entwined with the war on terror; and religion is deeply entwined with Pakistan’s own saga of violent clandestine politicking. But those manipulations favour vested interests.

The demands of America’s first Afghan engagement were coincident with sanitising and stabilising General Zia’s usurpation. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto whom he overthrew had been contending with a massive wave of protest at electoral rigging.

General Zia exploited the context to create an opposition between the workings of parliamentary democracy and egalitarian Islam. Dissent was branded un-Islamic and democracy a secular value. He extended a clerically-led party base through expanding the maulvi’s social scope — rather as General Musharraf used the PML-Q and the doctrine of enlightened moderation.

In the war on terror, America, too, finds an innate opposition between democratic pluralities and ‘Islamic’ exclusivity. Local hostility to pre-emptive interventionism or cultural makeovers in America-moulded matrices is confounded with xenophobia and fanaticism.

If such Muslim reaction is halfway to terrorism, the American attitude is halfway to an invitation. And the question still remains: why should the quite kosher local democratic aspirations be over-ridden? No elected Pakistan government, whatever its hue, would support terrorism.

It should not be that hard for Nato or the western public to understand that Pakistan’s citizens are both bewildered by and resentful of strikes as at Damadola. The one thing Pakistan does not lack is an institutionalised military machine. If the US thinks this machine is no longer monolithic and has ominous dualities, territorial violations and fiats on the ambit of dialogue with Fata elders only make Pakistan’s government lose face and reinforce rather than weaken the subconscious grounds for Al Qaeda mindsets.

Unimpassioned Pakistanis apprehend America and Pakistan’s consciously distorted projection of Talibanism; as well as some genuine blunders in handling fundamentalism in and around Afghanistan aggravate sectarian violence and terrorism. Quite as much as Pakistan needs to keep religion clear of politics, America needs to keep clear a separating boundary between the war on terror and a Pax Americana.

SEVERAL writers, including myself, have argued in these pages whether or not there is ‘feudalism’ in Pakistan.

Rather than personalise the debate, I wish to make four points. Firstly, draw a difference between ‘feudalism’ as an analytical category and a metaphor.

Secondly, list some of the vernacular terms that convey more appropriately and accurately the nuanced nature of the social world of contemporary Pakistan rather than the misleading and blanket category of ‘feudalism’.

Thirdly, situate the figure of the so-called feudal lord on the continuum of ruling elites with the help of Syed Ali Mohammed Shah Rashdi and Nasim Kharal, the two men who knew a thing or two about the dynamics of power relations in Sindhi society.

Lastly, point out the contradictory logic of the argument of those analysts who are proposing the abolition of ‘feudalism’ as a necessary step towards making the changes they desire in society.

Even proponents of the view that Pakistani society is feudal acknowledge that it is mainly so in attitudes rather than in essence, and they accept that feudalism, as commonly employed by social scientists, doesn’t exist in Pakistan. In other words, they are using ‘feudalism’ more as a metaphor or an umbrella term to refer to assorted forms of power and practices as prevalent in much of rural Pakistan.

Using ‘feudalism’ as a catch-all word for all such practices may be intellectually convenient but quite misleading; therefore, I suggest and offer some examples for vernacular words commonly dumped in the ‘feudal’ bag.

‘Jagirdari nizam’ is the term that comes close to what is described as feudalism. Travel the length and breadth of today’s rural Pakistan and one would be told that jagirs and jagirdars are a thing of the past. While discussing Sindhi agrarian power relations, terms like ‘wadera’, ‘rais’ and ‘pir’ are all conveniently, but incorrectly, translated as feudal.

Being a wadera, rais or pir does not necessarily imply ownership of large tracts of land. ‘Wadero’ and ‘rais’ are honorific male titles used for Sindh’s non-Baloch and Baloch communities respectively. Thus, Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi is addressed as ‘rais’ and Shah Nawaz Junejo as ‘wadero’. Their title has little to do with how much land they have as there are a number of landless men in my native village addressed as ‘wadero’ or ‘rais’ simply by virtue of their community background.

In the complex social world of the village, these people discharge many functions including serving as arbitrators in dispute-settlement processes. This is also the case with the notion of jirga in Pakhtun society. Jirga has evolved to serve as the forum of taking up concerns of a given community through collective (albeit mainly male in composition) means and is a far cry from feudalism. The dynamics that sustain the biradari system in central Punjab cannot be reduced to landlords or to the sterile and obsolete term ‘feudalism’.

Let’s turn to the introductory chapter in Pir Ali Mohammed Shah Rashdi’s book Uhay Dheenhan, Uhay Sheenhan (roughly translated “Those were the days!”) titled ‘Waderay ji Autaq’ (‘Inn of the elder’); and Nasim Kharal’s, who by some is considered the equivalent of Manto in Sindhi, short story titled Paras (a stone with the Midas touch).

One situates a Sindhi wadero on the continuum of the power bar during the colonial period and the other during the postcolonial period. Rashdi shows our over-zealous ‘feudal lord’ busy ordering people at his command to put up the best marquee for the visiting angrez bahadur (English officer) who is expected to arrive in the evening. The pomp and language of this man has the trappings of power and reveal a tint of superiority vis-à-vis neighbouring zamindars because the angrez bahadur has consented to stay overnight at our host’s.

As the day draws to a close, the waiting zamindar becomes anxious. We hear galloping horses. The excited host walks up to the horses to welcome the Englishman but is disappointed to find native functionaries of the Raj who have come to convey that the angrez bahadur had changed his plans and would not be visiting our host. The landlord is left behind literally biting the dust of the horses racing off.

Nasim Kharal’s story is set in post-1947 Sindh. A local zamindar’s son leaves his village for the city in pursuit of education. During a visit to the village, he tells his father that he has decided to marry a city girl who studies with him. The father throws a huge fit and gives a long lecture saying he can’t allow his family honour to be compromised by his son’s rash action and so forth. The story ends when in his rage the father asks the son about the profession of the girl’s father. The son in a nonchalant manner says something like ‘deputy commissioner’.

The answer drains the landlord’s anger and is followed by a question that any compassionate father would ask: “What is her name, son?” “Paras,” answers the son. “Her arrival in the family would certainly make us all gold.” That is how the father joyously approves of his son’s match.

Lastly, some among those who argue there is feudalism in Pakistan in the socio-political realm — even though the economic characteristics deeming a particular social organisation as feudal have either disappeared or are in a state of decline — also say that to put an end to feudalistic cultural and political practices the land should be expropriated from big landowners. The logic of the argument does not hold. If existing practices have little to do with the social organisation of labour and the material bases of the economy then, logically, making changes in property relations would be no guarantee that the people’s culture would change as desired by some analysts.

The writer teaches at the School of International Studies, Simon Fraser University, Canada.

hnizamani@hotmail.com

HUNGER has become one of the enduring features of the global landscape, sparking food riots in several Asian and African countries. The current high food prices have hit the poor people hardest, particularly urban net food buyers and rural non-food producers. Long lines of people outside utility stores show how the PPP government has failed to provide roti, even if we do not talk about its kapra and makan pledges.

There should have been an abundance of food for the people. Unfortunately, Pakistan has joined the ranks of food-deficient countries. Families who used to eat meals thrice a day are eating twice a day now and those who ate twice a day have had to cut down their food to one meal a day. Why has this happened in a country possessing the best lands and the world’s largest irrigation network? The present government is passing the buck to the previous one. That is a half truth.

No doubt the previous government sold 1.5m tons of wheat in the international market to allow exporters to earn some dollars. But the present government which claims to be an awami one has failed to act.

The price of flour is Rs18.50 per kg in Punjab, Rs30-32 in Sindh and Rs30 in Balochistan and the NWFP. Wheat flour is being sold in the black market in the federally-controlled tribal and northern areas. Why is a basic commodity being sold at different prices in one country? Isn’t this injustice?

In other countries, food prices increased in response to many factors, including higher energy and fertiliser costs, demand for biofuels and drought. But in this country, food prices have gone up because its own government sold off its wheat stock without calculating the risks.

Former prime minister Shaukat Aziz was so naïve that he sold wheat when he saw its price rising in the international market; he could not grasp the repercussions his move would have. Now the country is importing wheat from the international market at higher prices, increasing the trade deficit.

In 2004-05, the trade gap was three billion rupees. It is now $16.8bn. Surging crude oil and food prices in the international market pushed Pakistan’s trade deficit in the first 10 months of the current financial year, up by 50.78 per cent from $11.17bn recorded last year.

In 2004, oil price crossed the $50 a barrel mark for the first time. Today, it is $138 a barrel. The trade gap has widened as the import of consumer items like wheat, edible oil and fertilisers witness their highest increases.

There are very difficult days ahead for the poor. According to some figures, annually 100m tons of food crop are used for producing biofuel for rich people. Global warming, droughts, desertification, changing diets and expanding populations are the main factors driving up the prices of essential commodities throughout the world.

The poor are paying in the shape of food inflation for rich individuals who own oil-guzzling automobiles and industries. The import of luxury items like mobile phones and cars have also contributed significantly to the deficit. The flight of wheat from the country now is affecting low-income families who find it difficult to make two ends meet.

The use of vehicles has put more stress on oil resources and degraded the environment. The elite are consuming more oil than the poor people. There is a need for a fundamental, structural change in the food supply and agricultural production to end the crisis.

Also, there is need for building local agricultural capacities as most of the farmers are still using their bare hands and oxen to plough and harvest crops. Transporting harvests from villages to marketplaces is tough enough.

The government has to realise that farmers toiling from dawn to dusk will never be able to produce sufficient food without technological use and more tractors. They should be provided subsidised agricultural inputs for producing more food crops instead of cash crops. The farmers’ outputs should be procured through support prices. This would not only increase food availability but also bring some hope for the poorest of the poor. The budget should also provide some sort of relief to the most vulnerable ensuring that no child in this country goes to bed hungry.

manzoor.chandio@dawn.com