In the early months of my fieldwork a common topic of discussion with people at the bazaar, particularly those who I knew from my previous fieldwork in this area, was the extent of change that happened through post-earthquake reconstruction. In one of our conversations I reminded Ali Naqvi, whom I had interviewed a year after the earthquake, that he had said it would take more than five years for things to get back to normal. I also told him that most people at the time had said the same and quite a few said things would never be normal again. He thought about it for a while and after having a sip of his tea replied that I had asked that question too early, too close to the earthquake. “After the earthquake we felt our lives moved 50 years back, but now we
realise that we in fact have moved 60 years ahead. A lot of things have improved. We are becoming modern.”
Ali Naqvi’s positive outlook on the legacy of the earthquake was reflected in my conversations with other informants as well. The motto of the Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Agency (ERRA)64 – ‘Building Back Better’ – went beyond physical reconstruction in most people’s minds. It was internalised in people’s narratives of post-earthquake life, with ‘better’ becoming the equivalent of ‘modern’: better planning, better houses, better jobs, better life.65 The earthquake and the outsiders it brought were seen as the main agents of modernisation, with PaK often portrayed in people’s discourse as a static, unchanging region before the earthquake that had been frozen in time since 1947.
It is worth remembering at this point that ‘modernisation’ is not a neutral concept, but is, rather, value-laden. While for many being modern was something to aspire to, for many others it was an unwarranted and negative consequence of the earthquake. In PaK the latter group of people would claim that the exposure to the outside world had had an impact on morality: people (especially women and the youth) were becoming individualistic, materialistic, and less religious. This they saw as the destruction of (their) society’s moral fabric. Others though, were grateful that by opening PaK to the world the earthquake had accelerated their progress along the path to being modern.
64 The civilian organisation set up by the Government of Pakistan to plan, coordinate, monitor and regulate the reconstruction and rehabilitation activities in the earthquake-affected areas of PaK and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP).
65 The word most often used was pakka, literally meaning ‘solid’, but used colloquially to mean ‘formal’ or ‘better’.
Despite decades of migration to Pakistan and the Gulf and interacting with ‘the world’ through consumption, most people in PaK felt that the region had been boxed in until the day the earthquake struck. As Raza, a teacher at one of the private schools in the bazaar who had never migrated said, “no one knew where PaK was. The earthquake
opened up this place to the world. Most people in Pakistan thought there was only one Kashmir, on the other side [in India].”
Part of this positive discourse on a traumatic event was based on the fact that before the earthquake, the direct interaction between people from PaK and the outside world was mostly unidirectional: men went from PaK to Pakistan, the Gulf and the rest of the world.66 The presence of foreigners was rare and even the number of Pakistanis coming to PaK was small, mostly consisting of a few traders, civil servants, the armed forces and, since the late 80s, militant groups. To the outside world – as most of my informants would say – there was only one Kashmir, the Indian one. After the earthquake, however, a stream of people and organisations stepped into PaK, many for the first time, in response to the humanitarian emergency. Some compared this flow of assistance to the Pukhtoon invasion and chaotic ‘assistance’ during the 1947 Poonch Revolt. Sardar Zulfiqar, a retired artist and son of a former prime-minster of PaK with whom I conversed regularly while in Rawalakot, was one of them. “People came from
Pakistan to help just like in the Poonch Revolt, he said. “They came with aid, but didn’t know how to do it or who to help. There were no logistics.” However, to most of my
other informants, these outsiders were largely a positive force that brought with them change. From this flowed a discourse of modernity.
In people’s narratives the outsiders were roughly divided into two groups: the ‘formal outsiders’ who belonged to organisations, like NGOs (both national and international), donors and the Pakistani private sector, and the ‘informal outsiders’, mostly Pukhtoon labourers working in road and housing reconstruction. In Chinati bazaar, and throughout much of the region, the term ‘NGO’ was used to identify both local and international NGOs, as well as donor projects, and sometimes even projects that were implemented by the state. The sudden, large and unprecedented presence of NGOs and donors gave rise to a discourse that focused on people’s relationship with the state. The fact that these organisations were perceived to be more efficient and richer than the Pakistani
66 Indirectly, however, the interaction occurred in both directions, after the migration boom of the 1970s, mostly through consumption.
state allowed a neoliberal narrative on development to develop, whereby my informants envisioned a PaK where the state would be rolled back. “Soon the government is going
to be completely phased out”, said Kashif, the pakora seller at the bazaar “It will be only NGOs and donors [providing services]. Since the earthquake this is happening; the government doesn’t have their capacity.” Many people in Chinati equated NGO
presence with better living. They would talk about the improvements in health, education, and capacity building. Some, such as an informant at the Bank of Kashmir in Bagh city, also pointed out that NGOs had impacted the local economy through the infusion of money and the creation of jobs.
Not all local narratives about NGOs were positive though. While some saw NGOs performing better than the state, others pointed out how they too had mistargeted assistance and were as riddled with nepotism, corruption and incompetence as the state. In some places, particularly in urban areas, a male-dominated discourse appeared blaming NGO presence for the destruction of the region’s morality. Several shopkeepers in Bagh’s main bazaar equated the arrival of the NGOs to an increase of “vulgarity” among locals. By this they were referring to the fact that in most NGOs women were working together with non-mehram67 men, which many (men) deemed un- Islamic. Rumours abounded in the bazaars of rising incidents of the elopement of female and male NGO staff. People’s perceptions of the moral impact NGOs had in the region developed into a discourse where certain aspects of consumerism and taste68 became branded as part and parcel of an ‘NGO culture’, where the physical world was more important than the spiritual.
NGOs, donors and the ‘NGO culture’ were not the only new arrivals post-earthquake that gave rise to a new discourse. New ethnic groups also arrived as part of the massive reconstruction effort and created new dynamics. The largest of these groups were Pukhtoons from KP. Before the earthquake the Pukhtoon population in PaK was limited to a few traders and truck drivers living and working in the urban areas. During the reconstruction stage many more came, inflating their numbers in trading, transport and construction. In urban centres, the Pukhtoon population started to dominate the transportation sector69 and setting up new stores. The Pukhtoon though, were not a
67 Although the literal translation of mehram is ‘forbidden’, as it means a kin with whom a person cannot have sexual intercourse, in South Asia it is often used as ‘male guardian’.
68 In a Bourdieusian sense.
uniform group; while some were wealthy businessmen who had enough capital to trade, many came from poorer villages in KP, willing/having to work for lower salaries and becoming the main daily wage labourers working in road and housing reconstruction. Soon ethnically-segregated Pukhtoon neighbourhoods started to develop in urban areas, as they would live together sharing food, accommodation and language. One such neighbourhood was a new adda that appeared in the outskirts of Rawalakot post- earthquake, uniquely Pukhtoon, which eventually became the main adda. In the eyes of the local population they were seen as a homogenous group, with their own culture and language. Local post-earthquake narratives painted the Pukhtoon as hardworking, business-minded individuals with a strong sense of community. These characteristics were seen as the opposite of what people in PaK had become following the earthquake. In fact some even hinted that one of the reasons why locals were now less hardworking and more individualistic was precisely the arrival of the Pukhtoon. “After the
earthquake lots of outside labour came and people have changed, they help each other less.” With time, more negative views of the Pukhtoon developed, characterising them
as uneducated, barbaric and materialistic. “They would sell their own daughters for the
sake of business”, said a shopkeeper in Bagh city. Soon the Pukhtoon were seen as ‘the
root of all evil’, blamed for introducing modern clothing and beauty products and even crime to the region. Khalil, the local metre-reader for WAPDA, the national electricity company, with whom I occasionally met while he did his monthly rounds in the bazaar and some of the neighbouring villages, was adamant that “before the earthquake there
were no issues, but since then crime has increased, because people came from outside, especially from KP.”
In people’s stories of change at the bazaar we can see the earthquake as a point of rupture from which the collective memory of the bazaar dates its movement towards ‘becoming modern’. However, as I have already alluded, the earthquake was not the only event that disrupted their lives. The closely intertwined event that was the arrival of humanitarian and development assistance was to play a key role in their stories of the earthquake. This role was not always a positive one; as seen elsewhere (Oliver-Smith, 1996) the arrival of people and goods can be as stressful as disasters themselves. In Bhuj after the 2001 Gujarat earthquake people referred to the disruption caused during the reconstruction stage as the ‘second earthquake’ (Simpson, 2007). In the following section I describe the arrival of these ‘actors’ on the post-earthquake ‘stage’ and the
impact that their ‘scripts’, often rehearsed for other theatres and other audiences, had on the storytellers of Chinati bazaar.