Pakistani nomads resist the call to arms

While southern Punjab has become a breeding ground for radicalism, one group is clinging to a centuries-old way of life.

HASILPUR, PAKISTAN // Impoverished native nomads of central Pakistan's desert region have been practically immune to concerted recruitment drives by militant groups over the past 20 years, a series of interviews has revealed.

The Seraiki-speaking nomads, an underclass in a rural, feudal society where position is determined by ownership of agricultural land, have instead clung to their centuries-old way of life, scratching a living in the desert as livestock herders and, often, as criminals. The nomads harmoniously share the region with ethnic Punjabis, mostly landowning farmers and sharecroppers who migrated from neighbouring districts of India upon independence from British colonial rule in 1947.

Residents said the nomads' preference for living on the margins of village communities and a general tendency of limiting their religious practice to visiting Sufi shrines have kept them apart from the Punjabi-dominated militant groups that have been fighting India in the disputed territory of Kashmir since 1988. The Roohi region houses the headquarters of the Jaish-i-Mohammed group at Bahawalpur, while the Lashkar-i-Taiba is well entrenched in Bahawalnagar. The two groups are responsible for some of the most audacious terrorist attacks in India, including a December 2001 attack on the Indian parliament and the November 2008 atrocities in Mumbai.

"Shared ethnicity and the comparatively conservative tendencies of the Punjabis made them more accessible to the militant groups," said Baber Rasheed, a dairy farmer from Chak 205, a village along the Murad canal that irrigates areas of of Bahawalnagar and Bahawalpur. "The nomads are gradually integrating into the settled communities, but they have retained their independent streak." Among the nomads of the area is an extended family, led by 55-year-old Faiz Mohammed, which settled 10 years ago into a clump of four one-room mud-brick houses about three kilometres into the desert from the village of Chak 182, also on the canal.

Mr Mohammed shrugged in response to queries about the effect of the militant groups' activities in the area on his community's lifestyle. "It has got nothing to do with us," he said, puffing vigorously on a cigarette as he reclined on a wooden cot, the local substitute for chairs. "Those people are aliens to the Roohi and could never succeed here because of our traditions." Matter-of-factly, he described a life that, until the border was fenced in the 1980s, was financed largely from smuggling prized Pakistani goods into the adjacent Indian district of Bikaner, which were bartered for cattle rustled in herds of about 20 from sanctuaries established there for the animals, reflecting their revered status in the Hindu religion.

The Pakistani nomads would also target camel-riding scouts of India's Border Security Force, stealing their animals to sell them to Seraiki-speaking landlord politicians, descendants of the area's erstwhile aristocracy, he said. "Back then, an Indian camel would fetch about 1,200 rupees, while the cost of an irrigated acre of land was 8,000 rupees. We would sell the camels to the landlords, while the cattle were sent to market," Mr Mohammed said in an interview.

However, when the border was fenced, the nomads turned to other means of making a living, with many young nomad men becoming "daakoo", or bandits, who robbed homes in neighbouring villages and stole motorcycles at gunpoint. The dakoo were eliminated in a 1990s campaign of extrajudicial police killings ordered by Shahbaz Sharif, the chief minister of Punjab province and the brother of Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan's opposition leader.

Among them was Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto - named after the executed former Pakistani prime minister - whose sister, Noori, has since married into the clan led by Mr Mohammed. She has got over the grief of her loss and spends her time brewing alcohol for the wayward sons of local farmers, protected from prying eyes by the sand dunes that stretch as far as the eye can see. The hooch is brewed in 40-litre plastic drums from a mixture of two-year-old rocks of raw sugar and wholegrain wheat farmed locally, mixed with the bark from the acacia trees that mark the banks of the Murad canal and borders of villages.

The contents are diluted with water and buried either for a week, during the scorching summer months, or two weeks during the cool winter months, until the fermentation process is complete. The outcome is a brown concoction that smelt like English apple cider, which was quickly transformed, with the use of a makeshift still made of a pile of cooking pots, into foul-tasting liquor that left the mouth numb after barely half a minute of swirling.

Finally, the hooch was transferred by plastic tube into 750ml bottles for sale at 1,000 rupees (Dh43) to a group of trusted local clients. Having remained silent throughout the process, as well as the interview of the family head, Noori finally broke her silence to comment on the "militant issue". "Do you think I'd be able to do this if the jihadis mattered around here?" she joked, as she interred another drum of the mix.