The road to recovery for Pakistan following this summer’s devastating floods will be long and watery – but how will its dispossessed citizens react to their new lives in the already-fragile state?
FOR AS LONG as he can remember Saghir Mugheri has spent Independence Day watching grainy footage of the turbulent days and weeks of 1947 when the subcontinent ruptured to form two nations. He has seen countless harrowing images of the millions who fled to the freshly minted state of Pakistan, bedraggled and bewildered as they crossed the newly demarcated border to begin another life with only the things they carried. Mugheri never imagined he would witness similar scenes six decades after partition, but the scale of the devastation wrought by the floods that have washed through Pakistan is such that it is the only comparison he considers apt.
For the past few weeks Mugheri, a police officer in the southern province of Sindh, has manned a checkpoint in Shikarpur, one of the worst-hit districts in what Pakistani authorities now say is the worst affected province. The River Indus, which gives Sindh its name, has swollen from what used to be its widest, at a kilometre or so, to almost 30km in some places.
From the ravines of Pakistan’s mountainous northwest to the flat plains of Sindh, the Indus has raged along a distance of some 1,000km, churning up land, washing away homes and sweeping away precious livestock and crops on which millions depended for their subsistence.
The road that passes by Mugheri’s tented post peters out just metres away, disappearing under the greyish murk of the floodwaters that have swallowed fields, a nearby railway line and a power station. “The day the floods came there were several women whose children drowned as they tried to escape,” he recalls. “Those who survived had to leave everything they had in order to save their own lives. Before, they were the poorest of the poor. Now they have nothing but their lives.”
As the magnitude of the deluge that first struck Pakistan more than a month ago became apparent, government officials and aid agencies scrambled for comparisons to convey the horrifying extent of the crisis. At first the floods were said to be the worst in a generation, then the worst in memory and after that the worst natural disaster in Pakistan’s history. But it wasn’t until the UN calculated that the number of people affected – up to 20 million – was more than the Asian tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the Haiti earthquake put together that the world finally began to sit up and take notice. The flood-ravaged regions add up to an area the size of England, some say, while others compare it to Belgium, Austria and Switzerland combined.
But in Pakistan, where the legacies of partition still needle the national psyche, comparisons with 1947 resonate deeply. So when the country’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, earlier this month summoned the memory of the year thousands of families were torn apart as 10 million refugees crossed the new border, he did so knowing the impact it would have. In Sindh, many offer the parallel unprompted.
“In terms of the number of people affected it is just like 1947, even worse,” says Mugheri. “But also, when you look at how much damage the floods have caused to homes, livelihoods, agriculture and other economic sectors, you could say it has brought us back to where we were in 1947. We will have to start all over again.”
For Ishfaq Ahmed, one of the millions whose lives have come undone because of the floods, the challenge of starting over is almost too daunting to contemplate. A sharecropper with one child, he has seen his entire means of support disappear – and remain – under water. “I will never forget the night the floods came,” Ahmed says as he waits for a boat to take him to his deserted village through what were once rice fields. “We were sleeping when suddenly an announcement came from the mosque loudspeaker telling us we should leave as quickly as we could.” He is anxious about the scale of the damage that awaited him in the village. “Those who have returned say everything is lost. Only Allah can help us now.”
Ahmed’s is one of the millions of individual tragedies that together constitute a disaster that continues to unfold, with the deluge threatening even more towns and villages in low-lying areas of Sindh as floodwaters make their way to the Arabian Sea.
In the cruel arithmetic of this crisis, most of the figures run to the millions: eight million in need of emergency assistance; four million homeless; six million children affected, 3.5 million of whom are at risk of diseases such as cholera, diarrhoea and skin infections; millions of hectares of cultivated land drowned, sundering the backbone of Pakistan’s economy. The spectre of famine looms after the destruction of much of this year’s harvest. The price of food, having already rocketed, will continue to rise, hurting a much wider circle of the population beyond those who bore the brunt of the flooding. As aid agencies struggle to cope with the scale of the disaster, the fate of the millions displaced, many of them desperately roaming the roads in search of food and even the most basic shelter, remains uncertain.
It all adds up to what many fear could turn to serious unrest and instability in what was already a fragile state, one with innumerable fault lines, led by a weak and unpopular government. In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, Daniyal Mueenuddin, author and Sindh mango farmer, offered a pessimistic forecast. "The corrupt and impoverished Pakistani government cannot possibly make these people's lives whole again," he wrote. "It's not hard to imagine the potential for radicalization in a country already rapidly turning to extremist political views, to envision the anarchy that may be unleashed if wealthier nations do not find a way to provide sufficient relief. This is not a problem that will go away, and it is the entire world's problem. It is said, the most violent revolutions are the revolutions of the stomach."
Ayesha Khan, a fellow at Chatham House, echoed these sentiments, warning of the consequences if sufficient international aid fails to materialise and Pakistan’s civilian government falls short of its responsibilities. “Predatory, non-state grassroots actors are likely to fill the void and galvanise the sentiments of people who, in these desperate times, could be ‘three meals away from revolution’,” she said.
Bubbling under the suffering is the widespread perception that some of the worst of the flooding could have been prevented or at least reduced. Rumours abound that powerful “feudals” and officials diverted floodwaters to save their own lands at the expense of more populated, impoverished areas; that government aid efforts, already considered inept, have been largely focused on important constituencies; and that flood-defence infrastructure, fragile and insufficient to begin with, was poorly maintained or neglected.
Some have wondered if Pakistan’s all- powerful military, with its long history of staging coups, will intervene beyond the extensive relief efforts it has been conducting in the most ravaged areas. A call last weekend by Altaf Hussain – the London-based leader of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, which forms part of the ruling coalition in Islamabad – for the army to “take any martial law-type action against corrupt politicians and feudal lords” prompted much speculation. Most, however, believe a coup is unlikely.
In Sindh, Hamir Soomro, the architect scion of one of the province’s big landowning families, predicted much turmoil ahead. In the weeks and months to come, he told me between overseeing relief efforts for the thousands who had fled his sunken estate, law and order are likely to deteriorate as the seething mass of displaced grows increasingly desperate for food and shelter.
In the longer term, he predicted, the trauma of being uprooted from all that is familiar could prompt deeper political and social upheaval as the newly dispossessed take stock of their plight. “I think we are talking about a change in mindset, because those most affected will start questioning things,” he said. “I personally think these events will lead to something of a soft revolution.”
Whether the future brings revolution or not, one thing is certain following the catastrophic floods that have washed across Pakistan this summer: when the muddy floodwaters eventually recede, they will leave behind a country that will never be the same again.
