ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has nominated 20 members of parliament — 16 of them from his own Pakistan Muslim League-N — as special envoys who will lobby for the Kashmir cause in important world capitals.

The special envoys have been nominated to “highlight Indian brutalities in India-Occupied Kashmir and to lobby for the Kashmir cause,” said an announcement issued by Prime Minister Office here on Saturday.

Interestingly, out of the 17 MPs nominated from the ruling party and coalition, seven belong to southern Punjab, indicating that the underprivileged region has been given preference during the selection process.

Nawab Ali Wassan, the Pakistan People’s Party MNA from Khairpur, is the only member from the opposition in the list of envoys. He has been nominated as envoy to Moscow (Russian Federation) along with Junaid Anwar Chaudhry (MNA from Toba Tek Singh) and Raza Hayat Hiraj from Khanewal.

According to the announcement, the envoys will perform their tasks in 12 cities in nine countries and the United Nations.

The selection criteria are not clear and interviews with some of the nominated envoys reveal that they had not been consulted before the nominations were made.

When contacted, Information Minister Pervez Rashid simply said the nominated politicians were “parliamentarians and Pakistanis” and they would go abroad to present the government’s viewpoint on the Kashmir issue.

He said there were many other parliamentarians who were already lobbying for the Kashmir cause because of their positions.

When his attention was drawn towards the representation from southern Punjab, he said the nomination of legislators from the region should be welcomed as they had been entrusted with an important national task. Moreover, he said, for the outside world, they were all Pakistanis and they would not be treated as representatives of Sindh or southern Punjab.

PML-Q Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed — who is head of the Senate Committee on Defence and has been nominated as special envoy for Washington (US) and New York (UN) — said he came to know about his nomination through one of his journalist friends. He, however, termed it a good move by the government.

He expressed the hope that because the Kashmir issue was above political considerations, there would be no objection from any party over the nominations.

However, vice-chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) and former foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, expressed disappointment over the nominations and said the list of nominees showed the “government’s seriousness towards the Kashmir cause”.

Mr Qureshi expressed surprise at his own exclusion from the list, saying the rulers did not choose a parliamentarian who had served as foreign minister and who had raised the Kashmir issue at the UN, OIC and Arab League. He said that only those people should have been selected who could raise the issue in an effective and articulate manner.

Others who have been nominated are Ijazul Haq and Malik Uzair (for Brussels, Belgium); Khusro Bakhtiar and Alamdad Laleka (for Beijing, China); Senator Ayesha Raza Farooq and Rana Afzal Khan (for Paris, France); Maulana Fazlur Rehman, retired Major Tahir Iqbal and Muhammad Afzal Khokhar (for Riyadh and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia); Mohsin Shahnawaz Ranjha and Malik Pervaiz (for Ankara, Turkey); retired Lt Gen Abdul Qayyum and Qaiser Sheikh (for London, UK); Dr Shezra Mansab Ali Khan (for Washington, US, and New York, UN); Awais Leghari (for Geneva, UN); and Abdul Rehman Kanju (for Pretoria, South Africa).

In a statement, Prime Minister Sharif said: “I am standing behind these special envoys to ensure their toil for highlighting the Kashmir cause resonates across the world so that I can shake the collective conscience of the international community during my address at the UN this September.”

He said Pakistan would remind the UN of its long-held promise to help grant the people of Kashmir their right to self-determination and would make it clear to India that it was the country that had approached the UN several decades back over the Kashmir dispute.

Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2016