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PAKISTANI leaders demonstrate their patriotism by buying their retirement homes, in other countries.
It began in 1958, when president Iskander Mirza, ousted by Ayub Khan, spent his last years in a two-storeyed flat he had bought in London’s fashionable Exhibition Road. President General Ziaul Haq was known to have a plush flat in Knightsbridge which his progeny use more than he could.
President Asif Zardari can choose between a picturesque chateau in an unspoilt part of France, a sumptuous villa in Dubai, and, apparently, a warren of undisclosed, undeclared residences. And an offshore company linked to Hasan Sharif, according to one London estate agent, owns a gracious white, multi-storeyed building known as 1 Hyde Park Place, W2, facing Hyde Park.
W2 was once considered the less unfashionable part of London. It had one digit too many than the more salubrious W1, which included Mayfair and Park Lane, where the senior Sharifs now have their retirement homes.
Had I remained in London after qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1965, Hasan Sharif might well have had to buy 1 Hyde Park Place from me. The firm of accountants where I worked first rented that building, gradually took over upper and lower floors, then bought the freehold, and finally sold it.
Its lower basement flat was once the menial accommodation used by the owner’s staff. Today, from the pavement, one can look down into it and see sparkling chandeliers illuminate a luxury flat. One has been told that, in the bowels of the building, hovering precariously over the rumbling Central Line, is a subterranean swimming pool.
Could any Pakistani eyeing his future ask for anything more — except perhaps property in Australia, which is where retired Gen Ashfaq Kayani, it is rumoured, intended to eke out his retirement?
Great Britain has always been a magnet for immigrants.
It must be galling for Pakistani rulers not to be able to plan their retirement with equanimity. It is a predicament they share with many British businessmen.
Many British, confronted by an impending referendum on whether they wish to remain in the EU or not, are apprehensive that, should Britain vote to withdraw, it might be left floating in an ocean of irrelevance, somewhere between the continent of Europe and the American archipelago.
One forgets that Great Britain has always been a magnet for immigrants — the Vikings from Scandinavia in the 8th century, the Huguenots from France in the 17th century, the Jews between and during the World Wars, West Indians on banana boats in the 1950s, and of course Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who have converted Great Britain into one vast, irresistible curry centre.
Talk to an Englishman. In defiance of his own DNA, he will regard modern immigrants as interlopers. Talk to a Britisher, he will resent anyone who has migrated after him as an unwanted guest who refuses to leave.
Ask someone whose family fled Nazi Germany, he will see in the storm clouds that hover over the EU, a metallic lining. He expresses suspicion of the emergent rightist movements seeping through Austria, Germany and France, for he recognises in them the grey glint of authoritarianism, the incipient revivalism of Teutonic arrogance.
Talk to a former colonial, and his eyes will moisten at the recollection of the Commonwealth and its forgotten advantages.
Talk to a British Asian, and he will deplore the laissez-faire policies that permit a net inflow of over 300,000 migrants each year into the United Kingdom, putting an inordinate and unaffordable strain on its housing, social, health services, and job opportunities.
Some would even argue that, if during the post-war 1950s young British couples were paid to migrate to Australia, perhaps the time has come for the British government to pay foreigners to stay out of the UK. It might be cheaper in the long run.
Will the forthcoming referendum on Brexit be the augury of a fragmentation of the United Kingdom? Will the withdrawal from Europe be the first domino, precipitating the withdrawal of Scotland across Hadrian’s Wall, Wales into Celtic introspection, and Northern Ireland into a more rational, geographical contiguity? Who knows?
Pakistan’s policy towards migrants is over-generous by comparison. It enabled Osama bin Laden to enter and then reside in the country for years without a visa. It issued an ID card and a passport to the Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mansour, and never asked for a receipt.
It has, since the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, accommodated millions of Afghan refugees in and around Peshawar, and never asked them whether they possess return tickets. And it encourages its leaders to treat Pakistan as an economic opportunity.
Our leaders are not dissimilar to Lahore’s femmes de nuit. They ply their trade in the old city but retire in posh Gulberg. Likewise our political elite prefers to earn its living within Pakistan but retire abroad.
The writer is an art historian.
Published in Dawn, June 2nd, 2016
