Deep Field (7 page)

A BATTERED JEEP
with green Government of Punjab number plates pulled up outside the bus station in the town of Mandi Bahauddin and a henna-haired driver, apparently twitching with fleas, jumped out and announced that he would be with me twenty-four hours a day, touring polling booths. Pakistan’s local elections were taking place and I had been asked by the research organisation I was working for to go as an election monitor and report on how voting was conducted in the rural Punjab. I had tried to register formally with the government as an election observer, but a particularly intense bout of food poisoning following another of Imran’s lunches had prevented me from presenting myself before the authorities. This may have been quite fortunate, as it turned out. I had been living in Pakistan under largely false pretences on a series of short-term tourist visas that I would get renewed every few months. My regular appearances before the immigration officials in Islamabad had begun to cause much administrative amusement as I invented ever more outlandish tourist plans in order to justify yet another visa extension. ‘You must have seen almost all of Pakistan by now,’ said one of the officials as I turned up begging for another three months. For a nerve-wracking moment, as I envisaged my Pakistan experience ending in deportation, I struggled for an excuse that was in some way different from the last one and hopefully more plausible. As I coughed and stuttered in search of inspiration, the immigration official sensed my panic and gently suggested, ‘Perhaps you haven’t seen the mountains in Gilgit and Skardu yet—they are well worth visiting.’ With a wry smile he stamped my passport for three more months. Perhaps he knew and had maintained the charade: whatever the answer to the question ‘reason for visit’ on the visa form, ‘self-appointed international election observer’ was only going to get me kicked out. As I scrambled into the jeep, I was getting deeper into Pakistan’s political nightmare than I ever imagined: the local elections that year were marred by gerrymandering, government favouritism, and extensive rigging including ballot stuffing, intimidation and seizure of voting stations. Sixty people were killed and more than five hundred were injured.

Since its first military coup d’état in 1958, Pakistan has been ruled either directly or indirectly by military governments. Despite recurring elections, on no occasion has the incumbent political party been voted out of office, and transfers of power have always been preceded by military interventions. Pakistan’s last three elected prime ministers—Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif—were either executed or exiled. General Pervez Musharraf seized power in a bloodless coup from Nawaz Sharif in 1999 before being ousted himself following a crisis of constitutional legitimacy when he attempted to unseat the powerful and influential chief justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry. Perversely, Pakistan’s military regimes justified their takeover of power in order re-establish ‘genuine’ democracy. In his first address to the nation on assuming power, Musharraf stated: ‘The armed forces have no intention of staying in charge any longer than is absolutely necessary to pave the way for true democracy to flourish in Pakistan’.

In the first local elections since the last military coup, the process was designed not to choose democratically who would govern in local politics but sought to remove the power of provincial governments and to undercut the electoral basis for political opposition to military rule. Under a devolution plan, ‘grassroots’ democracy was presented as a substitute for democratisation at national and provincial levels. The purpose of devolution to local government was to depoliticise governance, create a new political elite that would undermine established political opposition, demonstrate democratic legitimacy to internal and external audiences, and undermine the federal principle in which the political, administrative and fiscal autonomy of the provinces was constitutionally guaranteed. Furthermore, the devolution plan also gave the military control of the administrative functions of local government, and extended military influence into the bureaucracy.

As the jeep roared off, its loose rear door swinging wildly every time we turned a corner, Imran and I carefully studied an electoral map of the town that had been given to me by the local police commissioner. On it were marked the council constituencies and, in red, the areas that were most likely to be politically and physically contested. Deciding not to waste our time on uncontroversial seats, we headed straight for the red zones—a slightly foolhardy decision, as it turned out, because one of Imran’s relatives was also running for office.

The elections were hot, dusty and marked by silent lines of patient voters and moments of bad temper. During the night we followed the campaign trail of Imran’s cousin as he and his father made their way through the town, holding court at an old cinema the family once owned (now closed owing to the government’s heavy-handed and puritan censorship) or on string beds set up under trees to catch the cool, sweet breeze of the Punjabi night. The process was interminable and was an exercise in patronage, influence and ultimately in the power of relationships that were as much intergenerational alliances as they were voting preferences—a far cry from the momentary and insincere pressing of the flesh at train stations and in shopping centres that passes for campaigning in the West. While it was the young men, the sons, who were nominally standing for the local mayoral positions, it was their fathers who were behind their campaigns, dispensing influence, staying out all night discussing life, family and politics at the various nocturnal rendezvous points around the city, and adding their personal and financial weight and gravitas to the political aspirations of the next generation. It was a dynastic system—the family business interests were clearly more important than entering politics, and so the male head of the household stayed out of the running to ensure that the more dispensable first sons would become their pliable government representatives. At the street meetings and in dealing with potential voters, Imran’s cousin, who was nominally running for office, would sit slightly behind and to the side of his father in silence, nervously fingering his newly grown moustache. Early hopes were high—he had selected a soccer ball as his symbol and it was thought, given the popularity of the sport, that this would give him an edge among illiterate voters.

After a night on the streets drinking sickly sweet milky tea and smoking innumerable cigarettes with the campaign supporters, I crashed into bed—a foam mattress on the floor—only to be woken a few hours later for another campaign meeting with the offer of a thick slug of Johnny Walker. As I wheezed back to life I felt more like a character in a hard-boiled political thriller than the diligent and impartial election observer that I had set out to be.

The crunch of my boots on the gravel woke the driver of the jeep and, suddenly conscious again, he started his eternal fight against the fearful fleas—constantly twitching, scratching and contorting even while at the wheel of the speeding jeep as it veered through crowded markets and down narrow backstreets. Most of the polling booths in the electoral red zone were segregated women’s polling stations. Allegedly, manipulation of men’s polling stations was potentially more violent and carried greater risk, so the various sides focussed on corrupting the women’s vote. The men’s polling stations were generally run quite well—long silent lines of men queued for their chance to tick a name on a list (or at least identify a face or a symbol if they could not read the name) and the proceedings seemed a model of propriety until, looking at the ballots themselves in a back room, I realised that a large number of them had already been filled in. The men were being given the opportunity to vote freely in a well-organised and respectful process in which the outcome had already been decided.

The women’s polling stations were considerably more chaotic. Imran was constantly questioned about his identity and was threatened with being kicked out despite being officially registered with the government as an observer. I had no trouble at all, however, despite having been too ill to fill out the official paperwork. ‘BBC!’ people shouted as I walked into the polling stations and was granted access to everyone and everything despite being a total imposter, while Imran, the official observer, struggled to get in. And, as a foreigner to whom the conventional rules did not apply, I walked straight into the electoral catastrophe of Pakistan’s women’s polling stations.

Progress was slow and long lines of women, some with children, formed in the growing heat of the day. Here, the authorities hadn’t bothered with prior manipulations of the ballots but used intimidation to ensure that people voted the ‘right’ way. The wife of the main mayoral candidate stood over the ballot box, interrogating each of the voters as they approached and examining their ballot. She was an intimidating figure, dressed in a red shalwar kameez and presiding over the ballot box. Each voter, after waiting interminably in line, had to walk up a short flight of steps and stand below the mayor’s wife—humbly offering their vote as a kind of subservient tribute rather than an instrument of political choice, power and expression. She ran the show impassively, having completely sidelined the electoral officer, who sat a nearby desk. When Imran and I asked what she thought was going on and requested that she intervene, the electoral officer shrugged her shoulders as if encountering a mildly irritating fly. The mayor’s wife was equally unmoved. At this electoral station, voting was not a expression of choice but an act of propriety, the main candidates seeing the votes of their constituents as nothing more than their due.

The process was interminable and, as the sun reached its zenith, conditions in the small, crowded, uncovered schoolyard began to deteriorate. People started passing out and were left where they had collapsed, or clutched their heads while curled up against the wall to get out of the sun. Unable to intervene because of cultural sensitivities around touching women, I went to get a member of the special all-female police force to lift those who had collapsed in the shade. For the rest of the time I ceased my electoral observation work and carried water to the voters who had crashed against the side wall, while trying to keep a eye on the antics of the mayor’s wife. Imran was enraged at the blatant fraud that was taking place before our eyes—this was his country, not mine, and the blatant manipulations and standover tactics were intolerable. A discussion with the local police officer followed, in which we both intervened and requested that the ballot boxes be protected from influence so that people could vote without immediate intimidation. The police were reluctant to intervene, at which point Imran took up the issue directly with the mayor’s wife, who wouldn’t be moved but did manage to hold up polling even more. As the argument developed, there was angry shouting from the gate and the mayor himself burst in to the compound, followed by his henchmen, as word had clearly got out that the polling station wasn’t quite the stitch-up he had imagined. There followed an enormous argument with the female police officers, who said he couldn’t enter the compound owing to the existing segregation principles. He ignored them and rounded on Imran, telling him to get out. The hairy accomplices leered at us both. For some reason, as the tension mounted, I decided to get out my camera again and start recording the moment—at this point someone else yelled out ‘BBC!’ and the intensity of the moment shifted. Strangely, the erroneous utterance of the broadcaster had changed the dynamic in the courtyard. We had gone from being on the verge of being beaten up to a steely but standoffish confrontation. Perhaps also the mayor had realised that his job had been done. Among the screaming children and the collapsed bodies of voters in the yard, no one would have been prepared to vote any other way than the prescribed one. Imran and I stayed on till the end. The mayor’s wife had long since disappeared, and while the rest of the election had proceeded relatively smoothly, the message about political power had been rammed home. Wherever it lay, it was certainly not with the female voters of the Punjab. The ‘BBC’ would come and go and, with the best of intentions, Imran and I had only brought the unspoken calculus of the political system into the open momentarily, and it had been vain to hope that we could have done anything else. In the counting, which we stayed on to witness, the mayor was re-elected almost unopposed.

But this was not the case at the men’s polling stations. By 2am most of the ballot boxes had been delivered to the district returning officer, and we stood around watching the count. After a short break for prayers and cigarettes the counting resumed, and this time the fathers gathered around the returning officer to see what fate their sons had in store. Heads shook and beards waggled as votes were counted in the heat of the night, and then the chorus of ‘bogus vote, bogus vote’ echoed into the evening—the returning officer had clearly come across the pre-filled ballot from the men’s polling stations. Tension mounted in the room and a roar went up among the supporters outside—the remaining ballot boxes had just arrived in a car belonging to one of the candidates, a soccer ball clearly visible on the outside of the car.