Day 15: The king of the poor

Location: Rahimyar Khan, Sadiqabad, Ghotki, Sukkur, Lakhi, Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, Larkana

(Click on images to enlarge)

I had planned the Motorcycle Diaries as a four-week long journey with two weeks in Punjab and one each in Balochistan and Sindh. But I had to start one week later than  scheduled as the candidates' scrutiny took longer than the usual delaying the start of the election campaign. The idea was to visit the countryside during the election campaign. So, one province was dropped.

Then, I had not anticipated the impact that the electricity load shedding had on my daily schedules. My backup battery system did not work fully as well. So I had to take a few unplanned breaks just to refresh and recharge all devices.

Now that polling day is less than a week away, myself and my editors have decided to conclude the series. This means that I pass through Sindh quickly and reach my destination, Garhi Khuda Bakhsh near Larkana in two days. So getting to know the political being of Sindh remains a dream for me. I will take these two days as 'a reconnaissance mission' for a future endeavour that shall focus on the areas that I could not do this time.

As now, just getting there became the objective, I decided to jump to Sukkur in a day and to Larkana in the second. I took the highway N5 from Rahimyar Khan. Its condition in many stretches is worse than village roads. The more annoying, however, were the passenger buses that blare painfully loud horns and mostly for nothing. At times it seems they are just announcing their existence.

The weather is much hotter now but I know that the 'worse' is yet to come.

Though I had decided not to 'work' while travelling today but you can't avoid seeing things. As I crossed the Sindh-Punjab border after Kot Sabzal, all other party flags disappeared except those of the PPP. This was in stark contrast to even Rahimyar Khan and Sadiqabad where the other two, Nawaz League and PTI, had an equally prominent presence.

I have always wondered about how the global divide between the rich and the poor become a north-south partition in geographical terms. But here in Pakistan, if you count party flags flapping at public places, the geographical divide looks like this. PML-N dominates the north and central Punjab, with PTI showing a matching presence and PPP a distant third. The PPP flags increase as you head south while the other two seem to struggle and as soon as you enter Sindh, they decide to give in to PPP. But surprising for me, was the fact that the JUI had the second most visible presence in the highway towns in Sindh.

The characters on posters also change. Bhuttos are omnipresent here, while you don't get to see some others, like Pir Pagaro and GM Syed, anywhere else. But this is just a 'visual summary', don't read too much into it.

I am not saying that the Bhutto beauty here is skin deep but if you talk to people here you come to realise that the party is threading on thin ice. How thin? That will be evident only after the elections but dissatisfaction with the party is writ large.

It is yet another irony of the electoral politics in Pakistan that the party that has served as the epitome of the struggle of the poor for their rights, thrives on the electoral strengths of the most exploitative of the ruling classes.

Some persons that I talked to here suggested that feudal lords have perhaps started to loose their hold over the ryot. They are now mixing carrots with sticks to manage another come back. One elaborated it as the candidates offering villagers cash for a vote and also threatening them with wadera saeen getting their houses, built on his land, vacated if he looses elections from their polling station.

As land ownership is concentrated in a few hands, the middle class is quite small. Far fewer motorcycles accompanied me in this over 250 kilometre drive than anywhere else, except perhaps Thal. There aren't many cars either but the number of 4x4 diesel guzzling monsters is disproportionately high and they all fly the PPP tri-color. That's my road side (or sarak chhap) measure for the size and composition of the Sindhi middle class.

I met this tomato farmer a few kilometres ahead of the Bhutto Mausoleum, while he was sorting and packing his produce for markets in Lahore and Rawalpindi.

Just before the Bhutto Mausoleum, in the dusty streets of Garhi Khuda Bakhsh there is an office of the Nawaz League, managed by 'a man of Murtaza Bhutto' (sardar ka aadmi). The estranged cousin of ZA Bhutto had merged his party into PML-N some months back. The men at the office talked about both their grudges against the Bhutto family and their unquestionable loyalty to Sardar Murtaza. Improvising further on the virtues of tribal loyalty, I asked them how they could indirectly pledge their support to Nawaz who is neither a Bhutto nor even a Sindhi. "But he is a Muslim," he quipped in almost a knee-jerk fashion. So the next best thing to being a Sindhi is being a Muslim. Maybe there is a reason behind the prominence the JUI flags are getting in the Sindhi election-scape.

Garhi Khuda Bakhsh is a dirt poor village, or you can say just another Sindhi village. The benevolent king who touched the hearts of the poor in the length and breadth of this country, did not touch their wretched lives. They continue to live in misery, struggling to make ends meets and somehow, keeping their dreams alive in the process.

 

The Mausoleum's own economy is limited to a few refrigerators full of cold drinks though the influx on annual occasions offers a generous bounty. I roamed inside the complex for an hour expecting to meet some devout pilgrims but instead saw families and groups of young men and women on excursion trips armed with cameras, shooting each other in various backdrops and frozen actions. That is perhaps their only chance to get up close and personal with the strongest symbol of power in Sindh.

Starting with Saeen Harra of Mozang, Lahore on day 0, I reached the anti-climax of my voyage at the mazaar of the saint of the poor.

My journey was planned to end at Larkana after a visit to the Bhutto Mausoleum. It had now become my habit to prefer the smaller village roads over the easier highways. I asked the flower seller sitting near the motorcycle stand about the shortest way to Larkana and as usual he advised me to instead take the longer but safer highway.

I had received similar kind advices a dozen times over the past two days. Are they just being too caring or is the threat real? I had a brief chat with this man to know exactly what harm I could go through if I took the 'no-go' road. They will snatch your bike and any other valuables and there is no recourse available to you.

I had locked horns with all of my friends from the provinces other than Punjab on the issue of security. They would try to scare me and I would attempt to laugh at them. It is important for me to separate threat perceptions from ground realities as I plan to go on such voyages in other provinces in future.

For the time being, I took the advice of the flower seller but could not avoid taking the road passing through the town of Nau Dero instead of the 'safer' by-pass. I saw that none of the motorcycles in this hometown of the country's two world renowned prime ministers has a number plate. That, for me, shows the extent of the writ of the state here. Your ownership is not guaranteed by the state. Everyone is on their own, which means they depend upon their personal power and on the web of their connections and relationships with the powerful. The electoral politics here is an opportunity to test, reassert your web or to expand or create a new one.

So how could I move freely here? One interesting suggestion was to remove the number plate from my motorcycle too. "This way you will become one of them and you can survive on the benefit of doubt."

Stay tuned for Tahir Mehdi’s conclusion of the Motorcycle Diaries tomorrow!