Should Pakistani writers and columnists living abroad criticize their country just for the heck of it, or should they also try and see the glass half-filled?
WILL no one rid us of these hacks from far? Such often is the pesky sentiment of readers in Pakistan who must suffer the weekly or daily outpourings of scribes settled in America or England.
Darn, but the hacks rhetoric does get overheated at times.
Living on the other side of the world, the First World that is, columnists and reporters hogging space in Pakistani papers, sitting atop premium real estate in newspaper world, do tend to waft off into a gauzy expanse of their own.
And to expect readers sitting in Peshawar or Sukkur, Gujranwalla or Sui, to get excited when they read about how we pass our days glorifying life abroad that most Pakistanis don’t get to taste, is a bit blase of us.
Living the foreign dream on paper only, we take ourselves too seriously: every opinion slung is meant to fall ponderously on paper, expecting to pierce like a laser and bust the brains of the poor readers back home.
Does living abroad then put us on a higher plane than the writers back home? Certainly not. But, in truth, we take it upon ourselves to shore up a greater role in chomping any form of information that we possess, passing it off as a high-minded treatise hot off our computer’s keyboard.
Here’s some gas, we the writers in the West, give off as learnedness, and your response in parenthesis: a columnist writes about the ‘lady wife’ taking the dog for a walk in the snow (get lost!) or how cold we are nowadays because it’s snowing (go take a hike!) or what we ate in a fancy restaurant and then describe the menu or what our friends said about Pakistan (end the claptrap!) ...
Some others (me included) pride in bringing exotica in the living rooms of our readers back home, who at that moment could be sweltering under a heat wave or suffering a water outage while we gush about the great weather in the West, the abundant lifestyle of the rich and the famous and the latest gizmos doing the rounds in the stores.
I respect your criticism of us. If we can criticize others, why are we wary of being censured?
It took a woman to take the wind out of the stuffy wisenheimers from the West! Now angry sparks fly around in letters to the editor column at Dawn. Casting the first stone, Saadia Ahmed Khan chided us in her March 1 letter to the editor: “I am sick and tired of Pakistanis who have left home and hearth to settle abroad and yet find time to analyze, criticize and ridicule developments at home. Especially tiresome are those who are based in the US, who find fault with almost everything that is happening in Pakistan and at the same time have neither the courage nor the will to analyze what is happening to their kinsmen in America.”
Let me stop right here. Saadia speaks the truth about the shabby treatment Pakistanis get in America. And yet, there’s been niggardly reportage from here on this subject. Bobby Khan, a human rights activist, has helped many of his compatriots in the New York/New Jersey area, who got on the wrong side of the law with the American immigration authorities.
He’s bitter with the Pakistani media in the US, which, according to him, has mostly ignored the whole issue.
Granted some Pakistanis are bad eggs or have committed petty crimes. Does that mean we ditch and leave them and all others at the mercy of American authorities, who after 9/11 have terrorized many Pakistanis? Former attorney-general Ashcroft was scrutinized and condemned for unleashing FBI hounds on Muslim immigrants under the USA Patriot Act which stipulates: “Uniting and strengthening America by providing appropriate tools required to intercept and obstruct terrorism act of 2001.”
The Patriot Act, many Americans say, is one of the most sweeping acts in modern American history because of its potential impact on the civil liberties of US citizens and non-US citizens residing in the United States.
Hundreds of Pakistanis were imprisoned and kicked out of America under Ashcroft’s orders.
And now back to Saadia Khan: “Isn’t it surprising that you have all these people who write letters, make documentaries, post articles and generally comment about what is happening in Pakistan and yet do not wish to discuss how they are being treated as second-class citizens in the US? Most of them arrived on western shores on a Pakistani passport. And the most unkind cut of all is the fact that no matter what accent they adopt or what nationality they claim, the question they are invariably asked is — yes, but where are you from originally?”
The letter writer’s observations are unfeigned. I have lived in America for over five years, speak the same English I brought along with me from Pakistan, bear the same mien I was born with, so the first thing I get asked is: “Where are you from?”
Happily I say: “From Pakistan.”
Another letter writer, Khalid Ahmed from London, in his riposte to Saadia’s letter, has taken it personally, saying it saddens him and breaks his heart to hear such criticism: “In spite of their hectic daily routines (they) struggle to find time to keep themselves abreast of events in Pakistan and have not forgotten their roots.”
Saadia’s guns, I think, are aimed more at columnists and reporters and not so much at the Pakistanis writing letters from abroad criticizing their homeland. Make no mistake, their grousing against Pakistan is perfectly valid. But that is another story.
Another breed of so-called experts anchored in America woo the New York Times and its ilk by washing their dirty linen abroad. They know exactly what sells in today’s jingoistic climate and are quick to deride their own country.
Husain Haqqani — media maverick to both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif — has embedded himself with the prestigious Foreign Affairs magazine, devoured devotedly by the American intelligentsia, including the Harvard University, which recommends Haqqani’s articles in its “Human Rights and US Foreign Policy” course.
HH is so ‘politically correct’ that the New York Times was delighted to give him space on its op-ed page when he lashed out at Pakistan and Musharraf soon after Daniel Pearl was murdered. His opportunistic streak was writ all over the article and it fitted NY Times Pakistan bashing agenda to a T.
Having quickly morphed into an ‘expert’ on Pakistan and its ills, HH’s hand wringing on the mushrooming Madressahs in Pakistan and the threat they pose to the world at large, is an example of how assiduously he courts the West with his souped-up version while beating up Pakistan.
Such stuff is egregious, warns the World Bank: “Bold assertions have been made in policy reports and popular articles on the high and increasing enrolment in Pakistani religious schools. Madressahs account for less than one per cent of all enrolment in the country and there is no evidence of a dramatic increase in recent years. It is troubling that none of the reports and articles reviewed based their analysis on publicly available data or established statistical methodologies.”
Still, who will Washington policymakers, American academics and scholars (such at Harvard) believe — HH or the World Bank study?
Should Pakistani writers and columnists living abroad criticize their country just for the heck of it, or should they also try and see the glass half-filled? 
