Dr Abdul Wahid Soomro (MNA Pakistan Peoples Party)

It is chaotic. A blind woman assails him, touching his face and shouting her troubles. A mother drags him into a tent to see her sick son, who has no medicine. A turbaned old man yells abuse about the local landlord. An argument erupts. “You’re just a beggar!” one man yells at his neighbour. Dasti intervenes to make peace.

Otherwise, though, he works the crowd like a veteran – squeezing countless hands, listening to complaints, making promises, slipping 1,000 rupee (£7.50) notes into palms. Then he steps back into the car and leans out of the door. “I am here to bring change,” he shouts above the din. The people burst into applause.

Muzaffargarh in southern Punjab is Pakistan’s farming heartland, a fertile belt along the river Indus that produces a cornucopia of crops – wheat, rice and cotton, Pakistan’s main cash export. Now it is in crisis. Since floods devastated the area last month, the riverine economy has been decimated.

The floods inundated rice fields just as they were to be harvested. In many places the cotton picking season, due to start this month, has been cancelled. Weddings, which normally follow the cotton harvest, are also off. “Nobody has the money to get married. Or the houses,” says one man.

Dasti, a controversial 30-year-old political upstart, says this broken land is ready for political change. Muzaffargarh is dominated by several large landowning families, known as “feudals” in Pakistan. At the height of the floods, Dasti says, some feudals used their influence to divert the floodwaters away from selected lands, thereby inundating the poor. “They only care for themselves,” he says.

It is a politically resonant charge that, in the aftermath of Pakistan’s worst floods in decades, could cause the poor to reject their rural overlords, Dasti believes. “The feudals have enslaved the people for generations,” he says. “I am here to set them free.”

It is not likely to be so simple. Such accusations, which have also been made in Sindh, remain unproven and are mired in local rivalries. “Dasti is just an opportunist, an accidental politician. He only pretends to be poor,” says Ahmed Yar Hanjra, one of the feudals targeted by Dasti’s accusations.

Many feudals lost their land, even their houses, to the swollen Indus waters. A judicial commission has been established to investigate the claims; a high court judge is due to start collecting evidence in Muzaffargarh tomorrow.

What is certain, though, is that Dasti’s rhetoric is tapping into a powerful sense of disillusionment among hard-hit farming families. Not far from Hanjra’s house lies Chah Muslim Wallah, a 40-house village swamped by an overflowing irrigation canal. It now resembles a bizarre beach resort: the retreating waters left behind a deep layer of fine sand that covers the once-fertile land.

The bewildered villagers, living in tents pitched on the sandy plain, are wondering what to do next. “We had rice under here, about to be harvested,” says one man, poking the sand with a stick. “At dawn, I was a wealthy man. At dusk I was the poorest person, with no house, no wheat – nothing,” laments another.

The farmers say it could take several seasons to clear the sand and start farming again. In the meantime, they have no money or housing, just a couple of rope beds and cooking pots stowed inside the tents. Asked how he will survive, Riaz Hussain points a finger to the sky. “Allah,” he says.

The villagers say they feel abandoned. Soldiers and revenue officials came to visit and take photos, an old woman says. Nobody returned. Only the mail service is working, but that brings bitter news. One man, standing near the ruins of his home, holds up a newly arrived electricity bill. “It’s like a joke,” he says.

The villagers blame Hanjra, the local landowner, for manipulating the flow of water through the Taunsa barrage – a giant structure spanning the Indus two miles away – in order to save his lands, including a game reserve.

Now, they say, they will vote for Dasti. “He is the friend of the poor,” says one. “We’ll give him a chance.”

The son of a part-time wrestler, Dasti established his populist touch long before the floods. He set up a free bus service called the “Benazir bus”, after the late leader of his Pakistan People’s party. He has a reputation for listening to the woes of the poor, giving birth to his nickname, Rescue 15, after the local emergency hotline.

Unlike most upper-class Pakistanis, he does not speak English, and says he lives with his mother in the mud house where he was born. “I don’t have the money to move out,” he says.

And he is fearlessly irreverent towards authority. At one stop, an old man leans into his car to ask for his business card. “So that I can show it in case the police stop me,” says the man. “Screw the police,” replies Dasti.

“Everyone’s after me,” he says later as he drives at an alarming speed down the rutted road, weaving between lumbering rainbow-coloured trucks. “The judiciary, the media, the establishment. But these people love me. They are praying for me.”

The upstart is also shadowed by controversy. By his own admission he has faced 42 police prosecutions, including some for murder, six of which are outstanding. In 2001 he was jailed for 15 months. “It was a fake case and everyone knew it. The bigwigs pressured the police to prosecute me,” he says. Last March the supreme court disqualified Dasti from parliament for faking his degree – a legal requirement – although he was easily re-elected in the subsequent byelection. And for a poor politician he is mysteriously well funded. He borrows the shiny Jeep from a supporter, he said, while the 1,000-rupee handouts come from his parliamentary allowance.

His accusations against the feudals have touched a raw nerve nationally as well as locally. The power of the landed elite is often cited as a major structural flaw in Pakistani politics – an imbalance that hinders education, social equality and good governance (there is no agricultural tax in Pakistan).

In truth, though, the feudals’ influence has waned sharply in recent years. The rising force in politics is the urbanised elite represented by the opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, analysts say.

Southern Punjab, however, is a bastion of the old order. Speaking at his large farmhouse, Ahmed Yar Hanjra, Dasti’s rival and a member of the provincial assembly, says his father and two uncles control about 2,500 acres of land between them. One uncle was elected to the Punjab assembly five times in the 1980s and 90s; another was the district mayor. He scorns Dasti: “He is a most corrupt man, he just pretends to stand up for the poor. We don’t consider him an equal to us.”

Hanjra vehemently denies diverting the floodwaters to save his land. “Ninety-nine per cent of our land has also been flooded,” he says. He has thrown himself into relief efforts for the poor, he adds. But they are hard to satisfy. “In this area, if you give them again and again, they will still tell you they have nothing. They are not grateful.”

According to Asad Sayeed, a Karachi-based analyst, the floods are already changing the face of rural Pakistan. Farmers have migrated to the big towns; some are likely to renege on their debts to landlords. Disputes over land boundaries, some violent, are likely.

But whether the floods will change power structures, he says, depends on whether more populists like Dasti sprang up. But the conditions are right. “Whatever social change was taking place will now be accelerated as a result of the floods,” he says.
Economic cost

After inundating an area larger than England, the flood has crippled Pakistan’s agriculture, the heart of its teetering economy.

The waters swept away 2.4m hectares (6m acres) of crops – fruit, wheat, cotton, rice – while 1.2 million large animals, such as cattle, below, and 6 million poultry have perished. In the cities, food prices have soared, raising already high inflation.

And the floods wiped out the equivalentof 2m bales of cotton, a costly blow to the £12bn textile industry, which employs 10 million. The EU agreed in September to waive tariffs on Pakistani textiles, but only temporarily. Similar US measures have been blocked by politicians.

The flood has one silver lining: with the soil enriched by the flooding, some areas expect a record harvest in spring.

But there may not be enough labour. With so many homes destroyed, many people have left.