Straight Talk
Who is Afraid of Overseas Pakistanis?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Canada
Pakistan is agog. The nation’s excitement has good reason. The people of Pakistan are going to get a chance to make them heard, after five long years, at the polls, come May 11, the date slated for country-wide elections.
But poor us, the so-called overseas Pakistanis; we’re still in a pickle. We’re hobbled in a cul de sac, caught in a limbo, because of the petty shenanigans of an inert establishment that has regularly lost is marbles—if not its feeble nerves---when it comes to our right to vote in Pakistan’s national elections.
As these lines are being written the writing on the wall on the overseas Pakistanis’ right of vote is getting fairly legible. What it says has been known to pundits like this scribe for a fairly long time. The powers that be get cold feet when it comes to franchise for Pakistanis abroad. NADRA, the government agency tasked with arranging the logistics for this purpose has just come up with ‘technical reasons,’ the euphemism for a fig leaf to beg off on the issue.
NADRA’s justification for not letting overseas Pakistanis into the election game is simply risible, betraying the visceral bankruptcy of its big-wigs.
Until a few weeks ago, NADRA had boasted of its technical prowess and hi-tech wizardry. It claimed to have mustered a soft- ware to work flawlessly to enable overseas Pakistanis to vote with as much ease as those in Pakistan in the upcoming elections.
But then NADRA had second thoughts and started to fudge. Soon enough it hit a blank wall. It now says it’s risky to use its masterly soft-ware for voting from overseas. Why? Because, it argues, a hitch could develop to compromise the entire voting process from overseas. End of argument, end of debate. And it’s back to square one for us, poor overseas.
It’s not a big thing for NADRA and its patrons that 4.5 million eligible voters among overseas Pakistan, in 15 countries, have been left holding the can because of its inability to have the paraphernalia in order for them to cast their vote.
It also cuts no mustard with those robber- barons of Islamabad— who lorded over the country for five years and left an empty treasury before vacating their offices—that poor overseas Pakistanis bore much of the burden to keep Zardari’s gang of thieves rolling in luxury by filling Pakistan’s coffers with their hard currency remittances. As much as 16 to 20 billion dollars pour into Pakistan treasury, each year, from Pakistanis’ remittances. This figure doesn’t include another 6 to 8 billion dollars sent through unconventional sources.
Money sent from hard working Pakistanis abroad is very welcome in Pakistan’s official circles. Every two-bit government functionary and flunky bends over backward in praise of the Pakistanis enriching their coffers with hard-earned fruit of their labour. But the same ‘grateful’ politico or leader starts dodging the issue when the voting right of overseas Pakistanis is raised as a question.
So what it does it make us, overseas, in the eyes of the denizens of power corridors?
Let me rifle through my memories of the day when I was part of the so-called ‘establishment’ before answering my own question.
The issue of voting rights for overseas Pakistanis is not of recent provenance as some, with little insight into the power game, might think.
Of course the subject has gained limelight since the Supreme Court got into the act and jogged the government to do the necessary spade work and facilitate voting for overseas Pakistanis. It’s, interestingly, the same apex court which had, inadvertently, hung a question mark on every overseas Pakistani’s ‘loyalty’ to Pakistan in its exuberance to grill Allama Dr. Tahirul Qadri on his dual-nationality. Realising that it had dealt a bad hand to overseas Pakistanis, the apex court has since been in the vanguard of the effort to get them their franchise.
But the battle to gain the voting right to overseas Pakistanis didn’t originate with the Supreme Court. It had begun early in the 1990s. The movers of it—not that there’s any intent to seek self-recognition or belated glory---were people like me, then in harness on diplomatic assignments abroad for Pakistan.
I remember Benazir Bhutto, then in her second stint as PM, had summoned us, ambassadors, from a number of countries, to a conference in Doha, Qatar, in 1994. I was then ambassador in Kuwait. It was a good meeting, with BB in full flow. We did a lot of brain-storming. And one of the issue we knocked heads together was precisely this: voting facility for overseas Pakistanis who had started grumbling that they weren’t getting enough in return for all the money they were pouring into Pakistan.
Some of us, emboldened by BB’s indulgence, had the audacity to suggest that we shouldn’t be using our overseas Pakistanis as ‘milking cows.’ They deserved more, and the right to vote would be some reward to assuage their feeling of hurt and neglect.
It was after the conference that I was accosted by one politico who feigned proximity to BB. He took me aside in the lobby and said, ‘but ambassador, you know where the milking cow should be kept: in the barn, don’t you? You don’t let your cow into the drawing room of your house.’ I walked away from him to register my disgust over his crass insensitivity to the class of people working their hearts out for Pakistan.
So that’s the answer to my own question: insensitivity, if not hostility, of Pakistan’s traditional politicians to the rights and interests of overseas Pakistanis hasn’t abated much since then.
Why are our status-quo politicians allergic to giving voting right to overseas Pakistanis isn’t a brain-teaser, either.
The voting history of Pakistan has one recurring feature: votes are cast, in both urban and rural Pakistan, on the centuries-old Baraderie connections. Clan loyalty is the name of the hackneyed game there. Status quo politicians, steeped in the comfort of their ‘vote bank’ cannot count on this method holding fast among the overseas Pakistanis, whose exposure to free and open societies of the west, has unshackled them of the old system.
That’s where the rub is. Traditional politicians are afraid of overseas Pakistanis’ ‘unconventional’ voting habits and scared that their fabled ‘vote bank’ would become a damp squib abroad. So, their book tells them, it’s better to keep these troublesome overseas Pakistanis at a safe distance, lest their bad habits misled the real milking cows—their docile vote-bankers’—too.
‘Where does it leave us, poor overseas?’ you might ask. ‘Do we just sit out, in the cold, and watch the whole, unfolding, electoral scene in Pakistan, from the side-lines as dumb and mute spectators?’
No. You don’t have to suffer in silence, with your hands tied and your mouths gagged.
You can still become part of the election mela by putting your money where your mouth is. Use your donations—which Imran Khan, the lonely crusader with the vision of a ‘New Pakistan’ is asking for—to beef up the election campaigns of those young candidates that Imran has fielded to battle old foxes from Pakistan’s hide-bound political parties.
Give your dollars to Imran’s novices, those young, green, fresh faces that don’t bear stains of previous sins, as so many stalwarts of traditional parties do.
Imran’s young team, his callow entrants into the political arena, are not loaded with money. Unlike the jaded robber-barons from PPP or PML(N) these rookies have no bulging pockets loaded with ill-begotten money. So empower them with your money. Enable them to take on these fire-belching dragons and slay the monsters. Their day of reckoning can be brought nearer with your money levelling the playing field for the young rookies of Imran’s Tehrik-e-Insaf. If you did that, it would be your sweet revenge against those who didn’t want you to take an active part in the arcane business of Pakistani elections.
(The writer is a former career diplomat and ambassador of Pakistan. He can be reached at: K_K_ghori@hotmail.com)
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