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The Pir Pagara Phenomenon

Looking back on the life and times of Syed Shah Mardan Shah II (1928-2012).
By Khaled Ahmed Posted on Jan. 11, 2012 | From the Jan. 20, 2012, issue.

Illustration by Minhaj Ahmed Rafi for Newsweek Pakistan

Syed Shah Mardan Shah II, the seventh Pir Sahib Pagara, died on Tuesday night. Pakistans elder statesman, spiritual leader of the Hur tribe in Sindh, and head of the Pakistan Muslim League (Functional), Pagara had been flown from Karachi, on Jan. 5, to care in London, where he passed away, after it was discovered that he had smoked away his lungs. He was 83. Called Pir Pagara in Sindhi, the politician-cum-saint traced his bloodline to Islams Prophet, whose turban (pagaro) he inherited. Pagara was born in his ancestral village of Pir Jo Goth near Sukkur in 1928, his spiritual writ running from Sanghar to Ghotki, near the Punjab border. His father, Pir Sibghatullah Shah Rashidi, had revolted against the British Raj with an armed uprising of his Hur tribesmen and was executed for terrorism in 1943, his body arguably disposed of in the Indian Oceanlike that of Osama bin Ladens. Pagara and his brother were first exiled from Sindh within India, at Aligarh, and then taken to England to avoid another Hur disturbance for the British. After Independence, Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistans first prime minister, finally reclaimed him from Liverpool. Pagara was soon attracted to the Muslim League and was underestimated as a powerful man of Sindh by his contemporaries, at their own cost. He had millions of disciples in interior Sindh who were armed to the teeth and lived only to seek his pleasure, eating crystal sugar touched by his hand for their health and good fortune. In 1965, pitted unequally against India, the Pakistan Army needed paramilitary help. Pagara obliged by supplying his disciple army of 20,000 in that war and in later conflicts, thus giving himself the GHQ connection he never tried to conceal. The power he had, supervising national politics over the last half century, is familiar today. It was based on the sharing of the territorial writ as well as the monopoly of violence of the state, more or less like the nonstate actors of later times whose leaders too enjoy immunity from the normal political vicissitudes of life. But Pagara had the politesse of the prototype Sindhi: courteous, nonthreatening through avoidance of conflict, and posing as equal even with those decidedly his inferiors. The Sindhi noblesse oblige contrasts with the Baloch custom of sayal, or social peer, requiring the use of insult to establish tribal superiority. After Zulfikar Ali Bhutto violated this law of Sindhi politesse, Pagara formally became his rival. (Bhuttos son-in-law President Asif Ali Zardari tried a patch-up, much facilitated by the fact that an aunt of Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani was married to Pagara. And one of Gilanis sons is also married to Pagaras granddaughter.) The Pir Pagara version of the rivalry with Bhutto goes like this: Bhutto had returned from England more or less at the same time as him and was getting a social leg-up in the Sindhi power game under the tutelage of politician and intellectual Pir Ali Muhammad Rashidi. Bhutto was introduced to Pagara as a young lawyer with no practice, which Pagara redressed by directing his disciple litigants to the young Bhutto. He invested in Bhutto further by introducing him to Pakistans first president, Iskander Mirza, who sent him to the U.N. with a government delegation. Soon, Bhutto got to Gen. Ayub Khan through Mirza and joined his martial-law government. Pakistan Muslim League adjusts to military rulers by splinteringeach splinter death-resistant until one splinter detaches itself like a leg of the eight-legged octopus and disappears into the vast ocean of Pakistans political oblivion. It adjusted to Ayub. Then, when it adjusted to Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, Pagara was its president, and the vendetta with Bhutto had ripened over the post-1971 separation of East Pakistan which saw Bhutto as a martial-law administrator for some time. Bhuttos turbulent rule was full of threats to his rivals, including Pagara, from the vantage point of his two-thirds majority in Parliament, supplemented by such constitutionally dubious, coercive police outfits as the Federal Security Force. Pagara first led the United Democratic Front against him in 1973, then the Pakistan National Alliance formed to parlay with Bhutto until Zia overthrew his government and hanged him in 1979, partly on the advice of Pagara. Pagara got even with Bhutto but maintained his Sindhi noblesse oblige. He cooperated with Gen. Pervez Musharraf while the Bhuttos Pakistan Peoples Party was in the wilderness. Today, his PMLF has a mere four seats in the National Assembly and eight in the Sindh Assembly and is cooperating with Zardari instead of taking him on. (Zardari gracefully offered to transport him abroad for treatment during Pagaras last illness.) Pagaras disciples, who showered money on him in return for his benign surveillance over their welfare, thought him clairvoyant, which he took in his stride and used as a part of his political panache. There was humor in his political crystal-ball readings. And he didnt spare the state-empowered religious parties that usually scare off most politicians.

He was a deflator par excellence in a Pakistan harassed by the braggadocio of intellectually sterile politicians. In 2004, when the clerical alliance Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal was dominant under Musharraf, he produced his usual nugget: Khabrainquoted him as saying that the MMA was like ablution before prayer which could break any time. (Ablution becomes null and void if one breaks wind.) He was capable of more sustained political allegory. To Nawa-i-Waqt, he once complained that he had eaten the extremely sweet condiment of the MQM, was stricken with stomach pangs, and was forced to refer the matter to an Army hospital in Islamabad which took care of him and the dysentery was about to subside. Pagara said he was looking for stomach medicine from Gen. Naseerullah Babar, retired, to safeguard his guts from the offerings of the MQM. It was doubtful if the Army hospital would be able to cure the dysentery of Pagara since it was not able to cure its own in Wana. It goes to Pagaras credit that he never reacted to the wags who dared to match wits with him. At 80-plus he married a young wife and was able to sire twins from her in short order, miraculously coinciding with the birth of a baby by his sons wife. Punning on his partys name, observers marveled at his capacity to remain personally functional. He was at the center of national politics at Kingri, his residence in Karachi, with politicians humbly soliciting his mediation after bouts of internecine intrigue. Had he lived, he could have bound the leg-shedding octopus of the Muslim League. The challenge of the PPP was no longer a vendetta for Pagara because Zardari shared with him the Sindhi politesse as well as the Sindhi capacity to survive enmity. Ahmed is a director at the South Asian Free Media Association (SAFMA) in Lahore. [Editors Note: The version of this story which appears in our Jan. 20, 2012, issue was closed hours before the news of Pagaras death. In an earlier version of this piece, we had incorrectly stated that Pagara led the United Democratic Front against Bhutto after the 1977 elections. He actually led the Front before then.] To comment on this article, email letters@newsweek.pk

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