As the PML-Q – a party that split from Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League N – faced defeat in the 2008 election due to its support for military ruler Pervez Musharraf, one family was confident of keeping its grip on its homebase, the Punjab town of Gujrat, and thus in the national political game. On a visit to their home I found out about the origins of their hostility to the Bhutto family and the PPP and their intention of staying in Pakistani politics. Portrait of a dynasty, written after that visit.
Gujrat 15.02.2008
In a small room at the back of a vast, white building in the centre of the Punjab city of Gujrat, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, former Interior Minister, president of the outgoing government party and leader of its group in the National Assembly, meets visiting journalists, party activists and family members.
A large, hawk-faced man, with a broad, bitter-looking mouth, he’s showing signs of age. He wears sunglasses indoors, presumably to protect sensitive eyes, and speaks in a faltering voice.
He says that his local party workers told him to attend to national party duties, rather than campaign in his own seat, so confident are they that he’ll be reelected.
The confidence flows from the Chaudhry family’s notorious hold on the town and its surrounding district. Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain’s brother, Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, is also an MP and expects to be prime minister if his party wins. Chaudhry Shufaat Hussein, who’s also in the room, is the district administrator, the nazim. “Me being the youngest brother”, he didn’t get a National Assembly seat, he explains. Pervaiz Elahi’s son, Moonis, is standing for a seat in Lahore.
“People like us, they keep electing us. What’s wrong with that?” says Shufaat. He puts that support down to their good administration of the town.
Shujaat agrees.
“I don’t want to boast or anything but for the last five years my brother was the nazim of Gujrat. He’s worked very hard. I’ll give you one example, Gujrat is the only city where in each and every village there’s electricity, roads and all the amenities.”
Shujaat’s son, Salik – yes, he’s in the room, too – explains that the family’s influence goes back to before the creation of Pakistan.
His great-grandfather went into politics before partition, while his great-uncle looked after the business side by running a handloom factory in India.
For the next generation, Salik’s grandfather, Zahur Elahi, carried on the political tradition. That was then the family’s hostility to the PPP seems to have begun. Zahur was jailed when Benazir Bhutto’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was prime minister.
“He was an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience,” both Salik and Shufaat report with pride.
Zahur was later murdered.
The Chaudhrys blame the Bhuttos for that, too. Benazir’s brother, Murtaza, was running a radical armed group at the time (“the first terrorist organisation in this region,” says Shujaat). They say that he claimed responsibility for the killing the same evening. Murtaza himself later fell out with his sister and was gunned down near his home in mysterious circumstances – a killing that his daughter, Fatima, blames on her aunt.
But Shujaat insists there’s no bitterness. As Interior Minister in the 1990s, he says he refused to bend the law so as to get her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, extradited to Britain and that he went so far as to allow Benazir and Zardari to stay together when they were jailed under Nawaz Sharif.
“After four or five days, the President of Pakistan Ghulam Issaq Khan, he called me in his office and he asked me that ‘Chaudhry Sahib, since when you have started this business of honeymoons?’.”
After the coming election, there could be a coalition between the two parties. “If they win, they should cooperate. If we win, we should cooperate.”
For my reports for RFI on the 2008 Pakistani election click here
