The Durrani Family Saga

The last house in our Pakistan Quarters Street, back in the sixtees, was occupied by the Durranis. The Durrani family saga was a strange and bizarre one, one which seemed like fiction or fantasy, but knowing the Durranis well, we knew that every word of it was true. The Durranis belonged to the royal Afghan family, who had to flee from Kabul, in one of the palace coups, details of which my mother remembers well, but escapes my memory, leaving behind a son who had been imprisoned. For years we heard this story about the separated son, and, one day he suddenly appeared in person a fully grown man, thanks to an amnesty, and. His marriage was promptly arranged, and he started his own business of renovating old jeeps and then selling them off.

The senior Durrani was a fine man, and his room which was covered with thick ornate carpets, was full of recording equipment, since he was an employee of Radio Pakistan, and he probably worked on producing Pushto and Farsi programmes, which were beamed across the Durand line, a part of the propaganda war going on between Pakistan and Afghan governments, and also a part of the bigger game going on since nineteenth century, since the northwest was a land which separated, not only two empires, but also two different ways of life and two different approaches to sort out problems of life. One deeply seethed in old traditions, the other in which traditions had lost their significance due to amalgamation of many local cultures and tempering by the western culture brought in by the British rule. Today the two worlds are still fighting in that barren piece of land. The antagonists are different but the war is more or less the same, between the same two conflicting ways of life.

The west in this war is helped by both Karzai and Musharraf, vying with each other to prove how indispensable they are in containing and eliminating the Talibans, and in the process of jostling for prominence, often indulge in bickering bouts. The Karzai government, which is new in this game, in spite of having the advantage of playing on a home ground, suffers from lack of teamwork, since the regime is nothing more than a rag tag ship of erstwhile rivals sailing together on the winds of opportunity. It is a little naive of the U.S. to hope that the Afghan government can deliver any long term solution to a problem which can still pose great dangers to its national security. The people who have been dealing with the Afghans for decades, say, by personal experience, that they have found them without any long term convictions, and have often been shocked by the way the Afghans switch sides for monetary gains.

So! be prepared for a Mulla Karzai, or Mulla Abdulla Abdulla one day declaring America to be the greatest taghooti power of the world. Osama, or Iran, for that matter, only has to come with the right price tag, besides, they are both tribal traditionalists to their inner core, caught between their loyalties with a tribal system, to which the Taliban are also inextricably linked . Anyway, the phenomenon of renegade allies is not new, remember Noriega! On the other hand, in Pakistan USA seems to be breaking new ground in its foreign policy implementation mechanism to find a long term solution to a problem which is going to plague the west, specially the U.S. in the days to come. Not only did it choose a person with some convictions, who had deep and lasting impressions from his early exposure , to a secular society like that of Tukey, an influence later reinforced at UK, but USA is also doing an effective succession planning exercise. What remains is a matching public —relation job to win the hearts of the Pakistani people, by increasing people to people contact, between the two nations. After all, the wave of hostility for the Americans is a recent phenomenon, brought in by the U.S. reaction to the nine-eleven, and is not irreversible.

The Pakistani population on the whole has always been a tolerant society, which, on a national platform, has never supported parties with religious agendas, or voted them to power. It is partly this exacerbation of the religious extremists, with the inability to muster national support, which led to the Jamia Hafsa incident in which a group of frustrated extremist clergymen gathered hundreds of young men, women, and children, escaping from poverty, indoctrinated them over a period of time, and then launched a challenge to the establishment which could not be ignored for the sake of assertion of the writ of the law. However, the incident has put a dent on the credibility of the government, and it has cast doubts regarding its moral right to rule the country. A regime that loses the moral justification to govern cannot last long.

To save the country from drifting further into anarchy and religious dogmatism, it is high time that moderate forces in Pakistan lay aside their petty differences and unite to form a coalition which has the credibility to run the country. The poor in Pakistan must be given an alternate to the clergy to take them out from the spiral of ignobility in which they are caught. At the same time, The faith of the people of Pakistan in democracy being able to solve their problems, has to be revived, by bringing in a team, which can deliver the goods quickly, and with integrity. There is a real threat that people of Pakistan, becoming completely disillusioned with the traditional politics of Pakistan, in which the feudal and the industrialists, play the key roles, in a mass fit of cynicism, go for the clergy option. After all it is easier for the poor in Pakistan to identify with the clergy which comes from their own class, rather than with the distant arrogant wadera, chaudhry, or the mill owner, the main players of the Pakistani politics.

A middle class leadership is a viable option, but the middle class has always been kept away from power, by the feudal-military alliance, and often forced to stay out of the country. The middle class leadership must be allowed to strengthen their political base at a national level, in order to take the country out of the political quagmire, the establishment is itself in. The middle class leadership has proven, although on a regional level only, that the poor and the exploited can easily identify with them. For the sake of saving the country from taking a self-destructing extremist path, the establishment must stop inhibiting middle-class leadership, and ecourage parties like MOM, Tehrik-e-lnsaaf, or any o party, which has closer roots in the middle and lower middle class, to develop a broader national support.

The feudal class must realize that their unnatural hold on power is out of place in the modern globally aware world. In Pakistan, people are becoming conscious of the fact that people in Urban areas are having more and more say in the matter of improving the conditions of their surroundings, because of less influence of feudal thinking in the cities, while in rural areas, people are just electoral commodities, which can be obtained by the landlords, at the time of elections, by biradri system, monetary incentives, or just by plain coercion, and then forgotten, until the next elections. Coming back to the Durranis, the Sons have all immigrated to Europe, mostly to Belgium, and I have no idea about the elders. Rolling stones gather no moss. Once uprooted from their homes, people are never able to form roots again. A fate that many Pakistanis can face if the politically frustratedpeople, are able to have their way in destabilizing the country.

“Na assi khedange na kisi hor noo khedan diange”