[Sepia-toned images of sweeping train journeys occupy a central place in the Western imagination of the Indian subcontinent, from movie classics like “Gandhi” to the recent “Slumdog Millionaire.” In real life, the Awami Express possessed little of that romance. The 45-year-old diesel locomotive groaned as it belched pillowy black fumes. Fine clouds of dust entered through the open windows. The carriages jerked violently on the corners.]
By Declan
Walsh
 |
Andrea Bruce for The New York Times
Trying to fix the tracks near Lahore. Pakistan’s railways, which once linked
a fractious young nation, have been neglected.More Photos »
|
RUK, Pakistan —
Resplendent in his gleaming white uniform and peaked cap, jacket buttons
tugging his plump girth, the stationmaster stood at the platform, waiting for a
train that would never come. “Cutbacks,” Nisar Ahmed Abro said with a resigned
shrug.
Ruk
Station, in the center of Pakistan, is a dollhouse-pretty building, ringed by
palm trees and rice paddies. Once, it stood at the junction of two great
Pakistani rail lines: the Kandahar State Railway, which raced north through the
desert to the Afghan border; and another that swept east to west, chaining
cities from the Hindu Kush mountains to the Arabian Sea.
Now it was
a ghost station. No train had stopped at Ruk in six months, because of cost
cutting at the state-owned rail service, Pakistan Railways, and the elegant
station stood lonely and deserted. Idle railway men smoked in the shadows. A
water buffalo sauntered past.
Mr. Abro
led the way into his office, a high-ceilinged room with a silent grandfather
clock. Pouring tea, he mopped sweat from his brow. The afternoon heat was
rising, and the power had been down for 16 hours — nothing unusual in Pakistan
these days.
Opposite
him, Faisal Imran, a visiting railway engineer, listened sympathetically to the
mournful stationmaster. This was about more than just trains — more than the
decrepit condition of the once-mighty state railway service, Mr. Imran said. It
was about Pakistan itself.
“The
railways are the true image of our country,” he said, sipping his tea in the
heat. “If you want to see Pakistan, see its railways.”
For all
the wonders offered by a train journey across Pakistan — a country of
jaw-dropping landscapes, steeped in a rich history and filled with unexpected
pleasures — it also presents some deeply troubling images.
At every
major stop on the long line from Peshawar, in the northwest, to the turbulent
port city of Karachi, lie reminders of why the country is a worry to its
people, and to the wider world: natural disasters and entrenched insurgencies,
abject poverty and feudal kleptocrats, and an economy near meltdown.
The
election last weekend was a hopeful moment for a struggling democracy, with the
party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif winning a huge mandate amid record
voter turnout of nearly 60 percent. But the voting left undecided the larger
battle against popular disillusionment. In a country forged on religion,
Pakistanis are losing faith. People are desperate for change — for any
improvement their proudly nuclear-armed government could make, yet has not.
Chronic
electricity shortages, up to 18 hours per day, have crippled industry and
stoked public anger. The education and health systems are inadequate and in
stark disrepair. The state airline, Pakistan International Airlines, which lost
$32 million last year, is listing badly. The police are underpaid and corrupt,
and militancy is spreading. There is a disturbing sense of drift.
This
failure is the legacy of decades of misadventure, misrule and misfortune under
both civilian and military leaders, but its price is being paid by the
country’s 180 million people.
To them,
the dire headlines about Taliban attacks and sterile arguments about failed
states mean little. Their preoccupations are mundane, yet vitally important.
They want jobs and educations for their children. They want fair treatment from
their justice system and electricity that does not flicker out.
And they
want trains that run on time.
Peshawar:
The Scarred City
At the
journey’s beginning, policemen wielding AK-47s guard the train station in
Peshawar, on the cusp of craggy mountains that climb into Afghanistan — one of
about 40 such checkposts in a city that has long been a hub of intrigue, but
that now finds itself openly at war. Since the first Taliban attacks about six
years ago, the city has faced a relentless barrage of suicide bombings. No
place can claim immunity: five-star hotels and religious shrines, bustling
markets and the international airport, police stations and foreign consulates.
Hundreds of people have died.
The train
system has been deeply affected. Until a few years ago, the tracks stretched up
to the storied Khyber Pass, 30 miles to the west, where one of the last steam
trains chugged through the tribal belt. Now that line is closed, its tracks
washed away by floodwaters and too dangerous to run even if it were intact,
given the insurgent violence.
Khyber
also gave its name to the country’s most famous train service, the Khyber Mail,
immortalized by travel writers like Paul Theroux. It recalls the heyday of
Pakistan’s railway raj, when the train was an elegant, popular mode of travel
used by the wealthy and working classes alike, with liveried bearers carrying
trays of tea, and pressed linen sheets and showers in the first-class
carriages.
But the
Awami Express, which waited at the platform, had little of that old-world
charm. The carriages were austere and dusty. Porters scurried about in tattered
uniforms, taking modest tips from a trickle of passengers. Only one class of
ticket, economy, was for sale. The train company, lacking generators, could not
offer any air-conditioning.
“We are in
crisis,” said Khair ul Bashar, the Peshawar stationmaster, surrounded by giant
levers that switch the tracks. “We don’t have money, engineers or locomotives.
That’s why there are delays.”
The
decrepitude of the 152-year-old railway system has, in recent years, been
attributed largely to a Peshawar native: the previous rail minister, Ghulam
Ahmed Bilour. A classic product of Pakistan’s patronage-driven politics, Mr.
Bilour, 73, faced regular accusations of cronyism, using railway resources —
money, land and jobs — to look after his own supporters. Meanwhile, service has
floundered. Passenger numbers have plunged, train lines have closed and the
freight business — the lifeblood of any train service — has crumbled. The last
time the rail system turned a profit was in 1974.
Last year
the national anticorruption agency placed Mr. Bilour under investigation; a
court later jailed two of the railway’s top managers. The minister avoided
prosecution, and in interviews has insisted that a lack of funding was the main
problem. More recently, though, Mr. Bilour has become emblematic of another
aspect of Pakistani politics: the complex relationship with violent extremism.
When
Peshawar erupted in deadly riots last October over an American-made video clip that insulted the Prophet Muhammad,
enraged protesters attacked the city’s movie theaters, including one belonging
to Mr. Bilour’s family. A day later, the minister made a controversial offer:
he would pay $100,000 to anyone, militants included, who killed the offending
filmmaker. That gesture ingratiated Mr. Bilour with the Taliban, who offered to
remove him from their hit list, but deeply shamed his party, which had suffered
fatal militant attacks. In Peshawar, people viewed it with irony: the Bilour
cinema was notorious for showing racy films that the Taliban surely would not
appreciate.
But the
cinemas represented more than just Western culture; they were a rare form of
public entertainment in a city that is closing in on itself.
Khalid
Saeed, the owner of one of the few theaters left standing in Peshawar, the
Capitol, sat in the foyer of the once-grand 1930s-era building, surrounded by
tatty posters advertising old action movies. Invading rioters broke his
projector and set fire to the screen, he said, but mercifully the flames did
not spread.
Still, he
said, he understood the frustration. “This is about religion, but it’s also
about poverty,” he said, sucking on a cigarette. “There’s so much unemployment
here. Young people have nothing to do, nowhere to go. You can read it in their
faces. They get upset.”
The rattle
of Taliban violence has created a stronger curfew than the local police ever
could. Mr. Saeed said his son dared not venture out after dark, fearing attack
or kidnapping. And still the militants keep striking.
“Around
here, nobody knows what will happen tomorrow,” he said with an air of quiet
resignation. “What sort of life is that?”
In Mr.
Bilour’s case, the entire episode was for naught. A few months later, in
December, the Taliban assassinated his younger brother, the politician Bashir Bilour. As election campaigning got
under way recently, a Taliban suicide bomber nearly killed Mr. Bilour himself at a rally in Peshawar’s old
city. Then, last weekend, he lost his Parliament seat to Imran Khan — the
former sports star who has said the government should negotiate with the
insurgents, not fight them.
At
Peshawar Station, the Awami Express slowly chugged out, brushing against the
yawning canopies of gnarled trees and slicing through a crowded clothing
market. The clattering grew faster, carriage doors swinging open and shut, as
the train rumbled into the countryside. Its passengers — traders, government
employees, large families — stretched out on aged leather seats.
Muhammad
Akmal, a 20-year-old ice factory worker, was going home to Punjab for a
wedding. “Hope to get married myself, soon — perhaps to one of my cousins,” he
said. Hopefully, he added, the train would not be too late.
At Attock,
the train crawled over a spectacular bridge spanning the Indus River, passing
under an ancient hilltop fort built by a Mughal emperor in the 16th century,
now occupied by the Pakistani Army.
Sepia-toned
images of sweeping train journeys occupy a central place in the Western
imagination of the Indian subcontinent, from movie classics like “Gandhi” to
the recent “Slumdog Millionaire.” In real life, the Awami Express possessed
little of that romance. The 45-year-old diesel locomotive groaned as it belched
pillowy black fumes. Fine clouds of dust entered through the open windows. The
carriages jerked violently on the corners.
It was not
always so. Much as the American West filled out one train depot at a time,
Pakistan was forged on steel rails. The state-owned train system, over 5,000
miles of track inherited from the British at independence in 1947, helped mesh
a new and fractious country. Trains ferried migrants to the cities, provided a
moving platform for campaigning politicians and played a role in the wars
against India. It became — and remains — the country’s largest civilian
employer, still with more than 80,000 employees.
Today,
though, decades of neglect have taken a heavy toll. On paper, Pakistan Railways
has almost 500 engines, but in reality barely 150 are in working order. Most
Pakistanis prefer to take the bus. Those left on the trains are often
frustrated, sometimes mutinous.
Early last
year, dozens of protesting passengers laid their children across the tracks in
Multan, in southern Punjab Province. They were angry because a journey that
should have taken 18 hours had lasted three days — and they were still only
halfway to their destination.
In the
train engineer’s seat, Hameed Ahmed Rana, a taciturn man in a neat white shirt
and a baseball cap, tugged gently on a brass handle and grumbled. The
Japanese-built locomotive wheezed and shuddered. “There’s a problem with the
oil pressure,” he said. “Not looking good.”
Mr. Rana
guided the train into the garrison city of Rawalpindi, headquarters to
Pakistan’s military, where artillery pieces poked out from under awnings. Then
it pressed south, the landscape flattening as its colors shifted from stony
brown to rich green, rumbling past the rich irrigated fields and orange groves
of northern Punjab, the heartland of military recruitment.
Inside the
train, fans hung inertly from the ceiling as the day’s heat pressed in. The
carriages, filling up, were acquiring the air of a village tea shop. Men smoked
and chatted; small traders boarded carrying salty snacks and hot drinks;
families with women pulled sheets across their seats for privacy.
The
conversation, inevitably, turned to politics and religion. An argument about
the merits of various leaders erupted between a Pashtun trader, traveling to
Karachi for heart treatment, and an engineer who worked in a military tank
plant. “We’ve tried them all,” the engineer said with an exasperated air. “All
we get are opportunists. We need a strong leader. We need a Khomeini.”
A group of
jolly Islamic missionaries, known as jamaats, squeezed into a long seat,
offering a foreign visitor smiles, a snack and an invitation to convert to
Islam. “We’re not on this world for long,” said Abdul Qadir, a rotund man with
a gray-speckled beard, proffering a plate of sliced apple. “People have a
choice: heaven or hell. So they should work toward the afterlife.”
Lahore:
Class and Corruption
Almost on
schedule, the Awami Express panted into the grand old station at Lahore. A Hollywood
movie starring Ava Gardner was
shot here in 1955; today the yard is cluttered with empty freight vans.
Once the
seat of Mughal emperors who ruled the Indian subcontinent, Lahore is the center
of gravity for Pakistan’s cultural and military elite, a city of army barracks,
tree-lined boulevards, artists and chic parties. It is also the headquarters of
the 152-year-old railway empire. In the 1960s, Pakistan Railways was said to
own one-third of the city’s land, and today the company is still run from a
towering colonial-era palace, where clerks scurry between offices down polished
corridors.
Up close,
however, there is evidence of decline.
At the
Mughalpura rail complex — a vast yard of workshops and train sheds stretched
across 360 acres with 12,000 employees — workers were operating at 40 percent
capacity, managers complained. Electricity cuts bring work to a halt, while
entrenched unions, a rarity in Pakistan, stridently oppose any efforts to shed
jobs or cut benefits. Unions blame management for corruption; managers say the
unions are inflexible. Strikes are frequent.
Outside
the plant gates, Muhammad Akram, a railway blacksmith, wore a tinsel garland
that showed he was on a “token hunger strike,” from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. The system
was on the verge of collapse, he said: “It’s like sitting on the edge of the
sea, wondering when you will fall in.”
The
misfortune of the railways has, however, benefited Lahore’s elite.
Traditionally, the city’s wealth has stemmed from the surrounding countryside,
where feudal landlords live off the rents of poor peasants. For decades, the
landlords have epitomized Pakistan’s gaping divisions: paying no tax, treating
seats in Parliament like family heirlooms, virtually a law unto themselves on
their own lands. But things are changing. Of late, the landlords are being
nudged aside by a new elite, one that has found a home in a gilded country club
built on railway land.
The Royal
Palm Golf and Country Club, a lavish facility with an 18-hole golf course,
gyms, 3-D cinemas and cigar rooms, opened in 2002 at the height of the military
rule of Gen. Pervez Musharraf. The club, which costs $8,000 to join, has become
a showcase for new money: families that made their fortunes from property and
industry, contacts and corruption.
The Royal
Palm’s glittering social functions, attended by men in expensive suits and
women in ornate gowns, are a staple of local society magazines. The opening of
a local Porsche dealership was celebrated here in 2005 with a gala dinner
featuring exotic dancers flown in from Europe. Some events even offer alcohol,
although guests are encouraged to drop their wine glasses when the cameras show
up.
“This is a
family club, and a lifestyle choice,” said the manager, an architect named
Parvez Qureshi, sitting in his stained-wood office overlooking the golf links.
But the
Royal Palm was also built on the bones of the railways.
The rail
minister at the time was Lt. Gen. Javed Ashraf Qazi, an ally of General
Musharraf’s and a former spy chief who leased the railway’s land to a
consortium of businessmen. Critics accused him of giving the land away at a
sweetheart rate.
“It was
not a clean deal. Absolutely not,” said Nasir Khalili, chairman of the Gardens
Club, an officers social club with 1,400 members that had to surrender its
property.
The
National Accountability Bureau, which investigates official corruption,
concluded last year that the Royal Palm deal had cost the government millions
of dollars in lost revenue.
It was not
the first time that the military had chipped at the rail system. Back in the
1980s, the military ruler Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq diverted train freight
business to the National Logistics Cell, a military-run road haulage company
that cornered the market for transporting wheat and other commodities. Less publicly
it smuggled C.I.A.-financed weapons destined for mujahedeen rebels fighting the
Soviets in Afghanistan.
“With
freight gone, the railway was doomed,” said Salman
Rashid, a travel writer who has specialized in the train network.
One
evening, a raucous concert took place on the Royal Palm driving green.
Thousands of teenagers crowded onto the grass to see Atif Aslam, a popular
singer, in a performance sponsored by a cellphone company. Militant violence
has curtailed public events in Lahore; most take place in such cloistered
circumstances.
Before a
crowd of about 4,000 young people, some joined by their parents, Mr. Aslam,
wearing skinny jeans and a fur hat, bounded across the stage in a sea of testosterone,
fluttering vocals and crashing guitars.
To a
foreigner, many posed a rhetorical question that betrayed their wounded
sensitivity to Pakistan’s international image. “Do we look like terrorists?”
asked Zuhaib Rafaqat, a 21-year-old computer student. “The West seems to think
we are. But look at us — we’re just enjoying ourselves, like anyone else.”
Sindh:
Abiding Alienation
Charging
across lush fields of wheat and cotton, the train crossed into Sindh Province,
where it halted at Sukkur, on the Indus River. The Lansdowne Bridge, completed
in 1889, spanned the water — one of several feats of engineering by the British
colonialists who hacked through mountains, traversed ravines and cut across
deserts to make a railroad in what has become Pakistan.
The railway
project was foremost a tool of occupation: first to transport cheap cotton to
English factories, later to move troops toward the northwestern frontier to
guard against invasion from czarist Russia. Tens of thousands of construction
workers died on the job, perishing in blistering summers and freezing winters,
or from diseases like scurvy and malaria.
South of
Sukkur, waterlogged fields mark a modern calamity: the 2010 floods, which
inundated about one-fifth of the country, affected 20 million people and caused
up to $43 billion in economic losses, according to some estimates. Topsoil and
entire villages washed away in muddy waves, never to return.
In the
Awami Express’s grimy dining car, a cook named Amir Khan stirred a greasy
chicken broth over an open flame, then flopped onto a stack of soda crates. He
gestured to the flood-scarred landscape.
“Zardari
will show this to America, so that he can get some money,” Mr. Khan said with a
cackling laugh, referring to President Asif Ali Zardari, who comes from Sindh.
The cook wiped a mug clean, then paused reflectively. “Maybe if Benazir were
alive, things would be different.”
The assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 was a traumatic event
for Pakistan, but also for its railways. Enraged supporters attacked 30 train
stations across her native Sindh, burning 137 coaches and 22 locomotives in a
sulfurous protest at the failure of the state to protect Ms. Bhutto.
Still
today, the trains present an easy target for disgruntled Pakistanis. As the
Awami Express pushed south, the railway police passed through the train,
brusquely searching passengers and their luggage. The police increased railway
security after Baloch separatists exploded a small bomb at Lahore Station last
year, killing two people. More recently, ethnic Sindhi separatists have singled
out the train lines for attack.
Sindh is
the hub of Pakistan’s Hindu population, which, like other minorities, has
suffered from deepening intolerance in recent years. Stories of forced conversion of Hindu
women at the hands of
Muslim zealots have caused media scandals; last year some Hindu families,
complaining of prejudice, left for India. But they were an exception: most
Hindus remained behind, and some are quietly thriving.
At the
southern city of Hyderabad, a train branch line jutted into the desert, toward
the border with India. This was Thar, a desert region where, unusually, Hindus
are predominant. A rural commuter service — a train with open doors and a
handful of seats — ambled through irrigated farmland toward the desert. On
board were farmers, small traders and pilgrims returning from a Hindu shrine,
the bareheaded women adorned in gold and silver jewelry.
At the
district’s main town, Umerkot, the local colony of snake charmers lives in the
shadow of a clay-walled fort. The chief snake charmer, wearing a bright red
turban and playing a flute, entranced a cobra as it curled from a wicker
basket. Later, he produced a government certificate that attested to his
ability to “perform a dangerous act of passing three-foot snake from nostril
and mouth.”
“Half of
our people are in India,” he said afterward, pointing toward the desert and the
border. “But we feel ourselves 100 percent Pakistani.”
Karachi:
The Slum Patriot
Land is
gold in Karachi, Pakistan’s tremulous port megalopolis: a city of migrants,
filled with opportunity and danger, where space is at a premium that is often
paid in blood. Political parties, mullahs, criminal gangs and Taliban militants
all battle for land in the city, often with weapons. The railways offer an easy
target.
Slums
crowd the train lines that snake through the city, pushing up against the
tracks. Migrants have been coming here for decades, seeking economic
opportunity or, more recently, fleeing Taliban violence.
A short
walk from Karachi’s main train station lies Railway Colony Gate No. 10: a
cluster of rough shacks, pressed against a slope, bordered by a stagnant pool
of black, putrid sewage.
Among its
residents is Nazir Ahmed Jan, a burly 30-year-old and an unlikely Pakistani
patriot.
Mr. Jan,
known to friends as Janu, is from the northwestern Swat Valley, where fighting
erupted in 2009. After the Taliban arrived, his family fled Khwazakhela, a
village “between the river and the mountain,” which he described with
misty-eyed nostalgia: lush fields, soaring mountains and his family’s grocery
store, later destroyed in fighting.
In
contrast, Karachi is gritty and ugly, he acknowledged. He made his money
selling “chola” — a cheap bean gruel — as he guided his pushcart through the
railway slum. It earned him perhaps $3 a day — enough to feed his two infant
children, if not much else.
But Mr.
Jan was an irrepressible optimist. At least Karachi was safe, relatively
speaking, he said. And it had other attractions.
In the
corner of his home was a battered computer, hooked up to the Internet via a
stolen phone line. He used it to write poetry, mostly about his love for
Pakistan, he said, pulling out a sample. One couplet read:
“If you
divide my body into 100 parts /a voice will cry from each one: Pakistan!
Pakistan!"Mr. Jan’s face clouded. He had contacted national television
stations, and even the army press service, trying to get his work published, he
said, folding a page of verse slowly. But nobody was interested; for now the
poetry was confined to his Facebook page.
“I just
want to express my love for my country,” he said.
Distrusting
politicians, he harbored a halcyon vision of what Pakistan could become: a
country that offered justice, free education and health care, where leaders
made the people wealthy, and not the other way round. “That would be the
Islamic way of serving the people,” he said.
Mr. Jan
smiled and, clasping his hands across his chest, excused himself. He had to
work. The mountain migrant vanished down the street behind his pushcart,
children scurrying around him. He whistled a Pashto folk tune, his soup
jostling in the cart.
From the
distance came the sound of a hooting train, pulling into the station. It was
surely late.
This article was reported and written before Declan Walsh’s
expulsion from Pakistan by the Interior Ministry on May 10.
