The Pakistani Spectator

South Punjab is increasingly a focus of attention. It has been something of a backwater for decades and some may think that little has changed there since the State of Bahawalpur merged into the “One-Unit” in 1955. There has been consistent underinvestment by successive governments; and international NGOs and development agencies have largely ignored it. India lies close across the border, and a very large military presence in Bahawalpur sits ready to counter any threat from that direction. But it is another direction from which a threat is emerging that has sparked interest in the area. The threat that comes from the north and west and is the by-product of the conflict raging across much of the NWFP and the Tribal Areas.

The area has long been the playground of rich sheikhs from the Gulf, and the two airports at Bahawalpur and Rahimyarkhan were both built with Arab money. The state has reciprocated by allowing our friends to the west to turn large parts of Cholistan into a private hunting ground. It is also fertile – or at least the land to the west of the watershed is. The land to the east of the watershed is to varying degrees saline, and less productive. It is a triple-cropping zone and produces some of Pakistan’s finest mangoes. There are large feudal landholdings and the small farmer is in decline as his holdings are too small to generate sufficient income to feed a family. Villages are depopulating as the men seek work in the cities, field sizes are increasing as farming becomes increasingly mechanised. The people are poor, some of them very poor. But change, albeit slow, is coming. Also coming, some say, are the Taliban.

Bahawalpur and Rahimyarkhan are both home to a range of so-called “jihadi madrasas” – madrasas that promote extremism, and in recent months are rumoured to have become the strategic planning bases for the Taliban fighting the government to the north. Concern has been expressed that south Punjab is perhaps ripe for the same sort of takeover by the Taliban as we have seen in Swat and Buner, with all the chaos and bloodshed that go with such an upheaval. Some commentators have suggested that the Taliban may be able to destabilise the society of south Punjab in the same way that they destabilised Swat by challenging and eroding the feudal infrastructure. Perhaps – but there again, perhaps not, and for several very good reasons.

The culture of south Punjab and the Swat valley could not be more different. Swat is part of the Pakhtoon belt, south Punjab the heart of the Seraiki belt. Pakhtoon culture is dominated by Pakhtoonwali, the honour-code that dominates all of Pakhtoon life. Families live in walled compounds and the blood feud is alive and well. It has no parallel in south Punjab, which has its own cultural codes but nothing like that practiced by the Pakhtoons. Women work unveiled in the fields, come and go about their daily business, and are increasingly involved in the political and civil life of the region. There is a strong pacifist Sufi tradition. The feudalism of south Punjab may be as corrupt and resistant to change as anywhere else, but it is also viewed as (relatively) benign. There is poverty, but there always has been, and the majority of poor people manage to keep their heads above water most of the time. Not fertile ground for revolution.

Another significant difference lies in the fact that south Punjab is not an armed population. To be sure, there are guns, but the Kalashnikov culture that is so much a part of life in the NWFP and FATA is no longer a part of life in south Punjab – if indeed it ever truly was. Death by shooting is not uncommon, but it would be rare for families or criminal groups to possess heavy weapons. There would be little opportunity to promote armed insurrection, and for such a move to be made possible the population would need to be weaponised on a very large scale.

Thirdly, terrain. Punjab is mostly flat. The NWFP and FATA are mountainous, with the fertile valleys providing food and income – and security. The mountains are also “fighting country” in a way that the plains are not. The Taliban make use of the folds and caves to fight from, and fighting in open country is a very different prospect – if only because there are fewer places to hide.

Is south Punjab ripe to be Talibanised? Parts of the cities, perhaps, and there are anecdotal reports of threats being issued to barbers and video shops in Multan, and of NGOs promoting women’s empowerment in Dera Ghazi Khan being harassed. As pressure increases on the Taliban to the north, and if they begin to buckle under the military onslaught a small proportion of them may gravitate south. But south Punjab is not “natural country” for them, and they are unlikely to find a receptive population welcoming them with open arms. This does not mean that the area could completely escape the curse of extremism, and the fact that militant groups are so well-established in south Punjab suggests that somebody, somewhere, allowed that to happen. Well established they may be, and local populations afraid of what they may bring; but this does not mean that local populations are likely to fall prey to wholesale extremism – and we should not fall into the trap of imagining that they are.