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We shared morning tea, served from an elegant silver service, as he spoke fondly of his homeland and candidly of his political ambitions. 'My family did a lot for this place,' he said. 'Frankly, I am cashing in on it.'
Alas, the seat was won not by the Wali Ahad (crown prince), but by Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP), as part of a national landslide. It must have been a bitter defeat for a man born to rule.
Aurangzeb's grandfather's grandfather was a man of such piety and learning that he was accorded the title of Akhund or, give or take a nuance, Living Saint. The honorific enchanted Edward Lear, who penned a nonsense verse which started: 'Who, or why, or which, or what / Is the Akhund of Swat?'
In 1917 the Akhund's grandson, Miangul Gulshazada Abdul Wadud, emerged as the new strongman, and was acclaimed Badshah, or king. Clan feuding continued, even after the British Raj recognised him as Wali, or ruler, but gradually a kind of calm settled on the district.
The rule of the Walis was brief but on the whole beneficent. The Sharia justice system was observed, but it bore no relation to the savage obscurantism favoured by the Taliban. Education was a priority, for girls as well as boys, and the two Walis, father and son, dispensed even-handed judgements in settling disputes. (Even in 1988, when I visited, the compound of Aurangzeb's spacious bungalow was thronged with maybe 50 or 60 men waiting for an audience, in the ancient way of the durbar).
Swat was incorporated into Pakistan in 1969. Aurangzeb's father handed over power without resistance, though he must have felt keenly the loss of his right to a 15-gun salute — always a matter of jealous pride among the assorted rajahs, maharajahs and nizams of old India.
The old fighting spirit of the Walis was readily diverted into politics. Aurangzeb, the first of the line to go in for monarchy on the new elective system, easily won a National Assembly seat for the Muslim League in 1970, the year after his inheritance of kingship evaporated. To his intense annoyance, he was defeated in 1977 by his younger brother Amirzeb, who ran for the PPP, then run by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, with the apparent blessing of the old Wali.
'My father was pressured by Bhutto. What a swine that man was,' said Aurangzeb.
When Bhutto pere was brought down in a military coup by General Zia ul-Haq, Aurangzeb did not mourn unduly. But nor was he an unqualified admirer of Zia. 'He was a bit of a blunderbuss, you know; an idiot to close down the National Assembly and the provincial assemblies when they were perfectly loyal to him. Still, after eight years you go a bit nutty. I expect that's why they don't let American presidents go on longer,' he said.
Earlier, the army was good to Aurangzeb, though he only rose to the rank of captain. He was aide-de-camp to General Ayub Khan, the country's first military dictator, and had the good luck and judgement to marry one of the general's daughters. Brother Amirzeb, even then not to be outdone, married another.
By the time we met, Amirzeb was broken in health and no longer a rival. That role had been taken by a young man called Aman Room, also — inevitably — part of the wider royal family. As Aurangzeb explained patiently: 'His father is my uncle, who is only year older than me. His mother is my mother's half-sister, and in addition he is my son-in-law.'
The dynasty will survive, for Aurangzeb has five sons, and goodness knows how many other younger relatives. But the old ways have gone for good. The family were autocrats, as he readily acknowledged, but they belonged more to that wonderful landscape than ever will the bearded bigots of the Taliban. Swat was once, rather fancifully, known as the Pakistan's Switzerland, with its splendid mountains and lakes. The population is not entirely Pashtun, for there are Kohistanis and Gujars too, as well as a fair sprinkling of fair-skinned folk with startlingly blue eyes, who proudly claim descent from Alexander the Great's army. All conflict is dreadful, but however irrational it may be, it seems especially wicked to turn such a magic place into a charnel house.
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