A photograph on the dashboard of a friend’s car attracted my attention the other day; he was himself at the steering. The friend is to remain unidentified on his request. The picture showed him shaking hands with Bill Clinton, former President of the US. I picked it up, smiled and asked if he needed this kind of projection.
He flashed a shining set of teeth and replied that keeping it in the car for all to see wasn’t his idea. The driver had put it there to ‘impress policemen when they check him’. I was told that police accepts the picture as evidence of the car owner’s status and ignores whatever may have been the driver’s offence.
There was a smart young man in his office that I hadn’t previously met. I noticed him and asked if business was picking up well enough to warrant expansion in the form of additional employees. The answer was ‘yes’ and ‘no’. The business had improved due to personal efforts and not because of any positive turn in events. As for the young man, he was there because good people were difficult to come by these days. There was more to his presence, however.
He had recently returned from the US where he had a decent job. Being a Green Card holder, he was under no pressure. He had not been sacked and there was no restrictions on his return to the motherland. But he had resigned and come back because he felt uneasy, indeed unnerved; the world he knew wasn’t there any more. The familiar ground had slipped from under his feet.
Things started turning difficult after 9/11, but remained manageable. But a cold attitude of colleagues was transformed into a frozen state when the process of the INS commenced. People who had worked with for quite some time distanced themselves from him. Conversations slithered into silence when he entered a room and at lunchtime, he was often all by himself as colleagues sat at a nearby table.
Nothing derogatory was said, and he wasn’t subjected to humiliating treatment. His job wasn’t threatened. His documents were in perfect order, and he did not visualize any problem in extending his stay in the US. But poison had seeped into the atmosphere. There were times when he felt that he had become a human being of a lower category, that he was some sort of untouchable. He was suffocated. A decision had to be made between the Green Card and the green passport. He opted for the later, for the barren pastures he had abandoned.
I visited a relative. Our conversation normally starts with pleasantries and exchange of information about other relatives and common friends. But priorities were different on this visit. The INS was top of his agenda, the War on Terror was pushed to a lower slot, preceded by speculations on Iraq that if there would be an attack on Iraq and when was that likely to happen.
Even the widely reported, and officially vehemently denied raids of the American agency, FBI, on some local’s homes, conducted with the support of Pakistan’s law enforcers were reduced to a secondary interest. But before we could really discuss what had become subjects of prime importance for us, the telephone rang.
The caller wished to know if there was any news from the US. This relative of mine is famous for knowing many Pakistanis in the US and for being constantly in touch with them. He is usually just a telephone call away from the land of the world’s sole super power. He narrated an incident on the telephone. I could not help overhearing the conversation.
A family that was settled in the US for years, more than a decade at least, had just purchased a house near my host’s residence. Some of its members were naturalized Americans. The family ran a pharmacy in a thickly populated locality and is said to have made a packet. Business slowed down after 9/11, but it could manage the slump. A further deterioration took place after the War on Terror. Still, there were no serious complaints, no cause for panicking. Then came the INS. It started hurting.
The pharmacy had customers from all communities. The number of locals had come down in the past few months, but they totally ignored the pharmacy after the INS rulings. The Indians, a large community in that locality, had always been partisan and preferred to patronize a compatriot. The Pakistani stood by the pharmacy and followed a collective approach, but it wasn’t big enough to sustain business. There seemed a little hope of return to good times.
Meanwhile, losses were mounting. The family was confronted with hard facts and had to decide whether to invest in the business and wait for the clouds to disperse or to wind up the business. It decided to sell the pharmacy at whatever price it fetched and to start life all over again in Pakistan. So, it reverted to the square it had left in the mid-80s, found itself a residence and is now looking for an opening.
The caller, my host said, was a colleague with a brother-in-law in the US, and he was perturbed about the relative. But he was not the only one concerned about some near and dear one exploring a future in the brave new world. Practically everyone I met during a brief recent visit to Karachi had a link that, he feared, may have twisted.
What has been happening in Lahore is known across the country. Two eminent doctors, one of them a reputed orthopedic surgeon, have been in the arrest dispatches of the FIA. One was released after a month-long incarceration and interrogation while the other continues to languish in some prison where he is reportedly being questioned. The Lahore High Court’s orders for producing him in the court were contemptuously ignored by the authorities.
Limitations of the law were never so crudely exposed as in the case of these two practitioners of the medical profession, not that one had a right to expect much from law in a country where the supreme law of the land is often dispensed with.
I haven’t been in Islamabad for a while but one can visualize the view from the Margalla top. Many officials, both civil and military have their children receiving higher education in some university of the US or the other. They also have relatives with the status of naturalized citizens and others who are pursuing the prime prize of citizenship. One presumes that they must also be concerned, because when a serving general accompanying the head of the state, a close ally of the US, can be told to take off his shoes, common people have little reason to hope for preferential treatment.
But they must be confident that the children and relatives would be permitted to stay in the US because of Pakistan’s track of faithfulness as a state, a policy to which many eminent people have contributed a great deal, even when it was at the cost of national interest. Efforts must be underway for getting services noticed in the right quarters.
Looking around and listening to George Bush, one feels that the INS may soon be overtaken by events and relegated to a secondary position. It is clearly a component of the scheme for bigger things and the greater goal called Iraq. The President of Pakistan has realistically drawn the attention of the Pakistani people towards the dangers that appear to have set to loom on our horizons. He has advised the people to tighten their safety belts because a bumpy ride could be ahead. He should be assured of the right response: successive non-democratic changes have virtually broken the backbone of resistance. They have been through different phases of Pakistan’s pro-US policies, somersaults in the country’s view of Afghanistan and its changing position on other issues. Submission and subservience have become the order of the day.
A photograph on the dashboard of a friend’s car attracted my attention the other day; he was himself at the steering. The friend is to remain unidentified on his request. The picture showed him shaking hands with Bill Clinton, former President of the US. I picked it up, smiled and asked if he needed this kind of projection.
