Twelve years old, weighed down by his magnificent, golden, and august regnal name, Sayyid Sibghatullah Shah Al-Rashidi II, the sixth Pir of Pagaro, ascended to the throne. Two decades later, in 1942, the Pir’s anger, fanned by the spirit of the freedom movement, led his Hur clansmen to set the desert on fire. Trains were attacked, and canal dykes were bombed. The Nazim of the Khairpur police, hated for having seduced the wife of one of the Pir’s men, was hacked to pieces. To crush the rebellion, historian Aftab Nabi writes, the British Indian Army sent in elite forces, backed by airpower.
Like in all colonial counter-insurgency, the rage of the Raj was savage. Frontier Force soldier Alistair McKeith used traditional camel-trackers, or Paggis, to detect the location of attackers, and dynamited their entire villages. Fleeing villagers were strafed from the air.
The Pir was hanged in 1943, and secretly buried on the island of Astola. This location was specially picked since there was no fresh water to draw visitors, and only scorpions and snakes to guard his bones.
Earlier this week, the distant descendants of those Hur rebels—gangs of dacoits operating in the badlands between the Koh-i Sulaiman mountains, the Indus and the Cholistan desert—ambushed and killed 12 police officers. The bandits have been resurgent for more than a year, burning down crops of the rich, kidnapping the wealthy and storming entire villages. The government has tried using military force to stamp out the bandits since at least 2016, but with little success.
The persistence and power of the Indus bandits bring to light important things about the structure of Pakistan—today at risk of a profound unravelling into anarchy. Even though similar bands once ruled large swathes of India, political scientist Yugesh Kumar has written, changes in the structure of the rural economy, political life and the deepening reach of the state erased large-scale banditry.
Pakistan’s failure to eliminate violence from its heartlands, at the junction of Punjab, Balochistan and Sindh, reveals the nation-state’s fragility. And it raises questions about its ability to fight larger threats like jihadists.
The world of the bandit
Fighting for election from the key seat of Haripur, while facing a rising tide of support for the newly formed Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf party, Pakistan Muslim League—Nawaz (PML-N)’s Babar Nawaz presented his winning argument to the voters: “I come from a family of robbers and dacoits…This is not a joke, but a fact. We have been doing this for years and we will continue doing this till death.” The language wasn’t widely understood in urban Punjab. To his supporters, the politician was laying claim to a centuries-old tradition of resisting feudalism through the gun, and sharing wealth robbed from the rich.
The decade between 1984 and 1994—the first half of which saw power consolidated under military ruler General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq—saw the sunrise of bandit empires. These empires were unprecedented in their scale, scholar Imdad Hussain Sahito has recorded in the only thoroughgoing work on the gangs. According to Sahito, in 1986, dacoits even overran Sukkur central prison, freeing 34 bandits on death row, who went on to set up new gangs.
From Sahito’s work, it’s clear the bandits drew on large numbers of clan groups, among them the Chandio, the Khosas, and the Jatoi. Elements of these groups had practised banditry since the Mughal era. The historian Nazer Aziz Anjum has recorded that Mughal power proved unable to stamp out threats to trade caravans across the Sindh, forcing merchants to hire private militia.
The Mughals often unleashed barbaric violence to crush the bandits—the colonial traveller Peter Mundy, for one, saw over 200 minarets bearing the heads of thieves, which were covered with mortar and plaster. But it had little effect in the absence of state institutions that could engage with mutinous communities. Local officials were often fined to make up losses suffered due to bandits. It was, simply, cheaper.
The easy availability of modern weapons after the jihad in Afghanistan increased the lethality of the bandits significantly, Sahito notes. In 1987, a former officer from Pakistan’s elite Special Services Group, Tahir Naqash, began supplying modern military training to bandits. Factories to repair weapons and stores for ordnance, various contemporary accounts suggest, were also set up around this time.
Like the Mughals and the British before them, the Zia state sought to crush the bandits. Late one night in 1983, the charismatic bandit leader Muhammad Parial Chandio was brought to Shah Panjo railway station, an inconsequential stop along the line from Karachi to Quetta, and shot through the back of the head. His gang members Ali Gauhar Chandio and Ghulam Nabi Chandio were executed soon afterwards.
From just days after the killing, though, mourners carrying handwoven Ajrak shawls began appearing at Parial’s grave, to offer their respects. The slain bandit became remembered as a kind of protector-saint of the poor: There was even a hit film made about his life.
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A culture in the mirror
From the accounts of the marauders that Sahito interviewed, the freewheeling mores of the bandits stood at some distance from the conservative, middle-class values of Pakistan. “Each dacoit vied to array his boyfriend in expensive clothes,” Sahito writes, “with Rado watches, gold rings, necklaces and so on. These boys were not allowed to sit in the company of the other dacoits and sometimes became the cause of gun battles among them.” In some cases, bandit commanders would ensure their lovers’ names were included in police records, to ensure they could not leave them.
This kind of concubinage, Jan Willem de Lind van Wijngaarden and Bushra Rani have written, was common across Pakistan and Afghanistan, and sometimes served as a means for young men from poor homes to gain some degree of economic mobility. Efforts by Islamists and the state to stamp out the practice had only marginal success.
Even though pederasty was commonplace, more conventional relationships also existed. Wives would visit their husbands in the forests, while many bandits also kept mistresses. Large-scale rape routinely accompanied bandit operations.
The bandits also cast themselves as protectors of local cultural tradition. Folk singer Imam Bux Zardari, for example, was paid generously by Parial for one performance at a Sufi saint’s shrine.
Local and foreign videos about crime and sex were very popular among bandits, as they were in the community. The bandits would also entertain themselves by playing the fife, guitar, and Sindhi harp. Gangs would sometimes compete in playing choupar, in which one person plays a bear and the others play the hunting-dogs.
These public cultural engagements were not without risk. “On 1 August 1985, the gang of Ali Gohar Deprani passed through the village of Faqir Jan Muhammad Buriro, where the marriage of a petty landlord, Ghulam Haider Channa was being solemnised,” Sahito records. “Gajjan Ode had come to sing at the festivities. Before he started, the dacoits asked him to sing their favourite numbers, which they wanted to record. In the meantime, the police arrived, which resulted in a bloody encounter lasting for several hours.”
Even though the bandits served no stated ideological cause, it’s impossible not to read them against other movements fighting for space in the same physical terrain: The jihadist movements of southern Punjab, such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, or the far-Right Sipah Sahaba Pakistan. “Fortunately,”, the scholar Ayesha Siddiqa noted in a brilliant essay on the religious Right in southern Punjab, “they have not succeeded in changing the lifestyles of the ordinary people. This is perhaps because there are multiple cultural strands that do not allow the jihadis to impose their norms.” The bandits, however inchoate, represented one of those strains of resistance.
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The hammer against the mosquito
Ever since 2016, though, the Pakistani state became increasingly concerned that the bandits were allying with groups like the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, bartering safe-haven in return for modern weapons and tactical training. Even though actual evidence for these claims remains thin, the concerns were linked to fears over Chinese-funded infrastructure projects in its heartland. In 2005, bandits kidnapped 12 Chinese engineers, though they were released without ransom after intervention from elders of the Mazari tribe.
In 2016, Pakistan’s armed forces deployed helicopter gunships to hunt down Ghulam Rasool Chhotu, a one-time waiter at a hotel in Kashmore, and his 300-strong band. They lost some seven police officers, with 24 held hostage, for just two bandits killed. Ghulam Rasool eventually surrendered to the army, but it had little long-term impact on banditry in the area. Kidnappings and extortion continued. Among the kidnapped was 72-year-old businessman Mukhi Jagdish Kumar, who said his captors kept him in chains, but politely ensured he was offered vegetarian food.
The use of the sledgehammer to squash the mosquitos returned last year, with police launching operations involving armoured personnel carriers and drones that claimed the lives of 278 bandits.
Even the massive use of force has done little to degrade banditry. In India, the rise of new political forces, which represented marginal communities, and the ability of the system to accommodate claims by new contenders for power, helped still banditry in regions from Bundelkhand and the Chambal Valley to Karnataka. Though force was necessary to confront violence, ensuring peace remained came through politics.
The slaughter playing out on the Indus illustrates, again, the lessons English counterinsurgency learned the hard way: Force can win wars, but it cannot ensure peace.
Praveen Swami is a contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)
Read about this in Dawn earlier this morning. A fascinating world, leaves our Chambal dacoits in their ravines in the shade. Apart from RPGs, also anti aircraft guns.