(L-R) British Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth and Home Secretary Alan Johnson meet with PM Gilani. While it is good to see the British government act with alacrity to defuse the fury generated by the quite stupid actions of one of its agencies by sending two senior officials to Pakistan, it will take years to repair the damage done to Britain’s good name. –AFP Photo/Farooq Naeem

Somebody made the point the other day that it was the prerogative of the mission of a country to issue or not issue visas to whom-ever. Absolutely right.

But a mission certainly does not have any right to sit on the passport of an applicant for months on end as the Brits have done in the case of, as it turns out, tens of thousands of Pakistanis. This is not only highly unfair, it borders on the insane.

I have a personal story to tell in the rather long saga of how certain Brit bureaucrats treat Pakistani applicants’ visas, this present ‘Abu Dhabi clearance’ nonsense only being the latest paragraph in this shameful saga. In 1993, when I was posted in our high commission to London, I invited my dear departed friend Col Farhatullah Khan, then retired from the army, to visit and stay with me. He was a hunting and shooting aficionado and I had promised him several shoots and hunts in England and Scotland.

The long and the short of it is that whenever I asked him when he was coming he would fob me off with some excuse or the other, promising to come the next month or the month after. When I got back to Pakistan at the end of my posting and asked him why he hadn’t come he told me that he was not granted a visa. When I asked him why he had not told me for I would have requested the British High Commission in Islamabad to issue him a visa which they would have done, Farhat told me he was ‘ashamed’ to tell me.

This is his story: He applied, along with substantial bank statements et al, but was sent back to bring the details of his landed property, houses etcetera, duly attested by the revenue authorities and amounting even in those days to over Rs30m.

Farhatullah went to the high commission on the appointed day, and after waiting in the cattle shed, which was the waiting area in those days, for an interminable time, was called to the window.

The curious thing, he told me, was that both the times that he appeared at the high commission, the Brit lady behind the counter refused to address him in English, but chose to speak to him through the Pakistani staffer present there. Farhatullah probably spoke better English than herself, but there it was, utter disdain for a respectable applicant; and a perfect gentleman. Even when he addressed her directly in his own impeccable English she would turn to her assistant and say, ‘Tell him….’
At that time too, I had written about this matter and after recounting Farhat’s story, sent the woman a ‘curse’: ‘May the United Kingdom soon have diplomatic relations with the Taliban in Afghanistan (please recall that in those days Dubya’s Texas was playing host to a delegation of Taliban and Hamid Karzai was a lowly employee of Unocal, the American company which was feting the Taliban in exchange for transit rights for oil from Central Asia), and may you be posted there, O’ Nameless, Voiceless bureaucrat. And may you wear a thousand veils!’

But seriously, while it is good to see the British government act with alacrity to defuse the fury generated by the quite stupid actions of one of its agencies by sending two senior officials to Pakistan, it will take years to repair the damage done to Britain’s good name. Also as already said in this newspaper it is highly inappropriate that Pakistani applicants’ visas should have to be vetted in Abu Dhabi. If the Americans can do the job in this country why can’t the British?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, it certainly does not behove Mushahid ‘Mandela’ Hussain who was such an important cog in the Commando’s set-up to stick his tongue out at the present government for kowtowing to the Americans. I mean, for God’s sake, has he forgotten what used to happen when a joint secretary-level American official happened to drop into Islamabad when his own party was in untrammelled power as the dictator’s handmaiden?

Also, whilst it is extremely preposterous of Ms Fauzia Wahab, so well described by Babar Sattar as ‘the incomprehensible Fauzia Wahab,’ to lecture the Supreme Court on the do’s and don’ts of jurisprudence, Mushahid ‘Mandela’ Hussain has absolutely no right to lecture the People’s Party. How, pray, did his own party behave when Musharraf destroyed the superior judiciary? By defending him, that’s how. Of course, the night that the dictator struck ‘Mandela’ was himself off on a freebee junket to China. That’s how much that lot cared for the rule of law.

Finally, the Kerry-Lugar Bill is just the ticket for Pakistan. I have long held the view that the strictest milestones should be set down and aid delivered only when those milestones have been reached. Indeed, we can again hark back to the time that the Chaudhries and their closest adviser ‘Mandela’ were sharing power with an army dictator and something like $10bn poured into the country as aid. The Americans are still trying to add up the figures and it is said that close to three billion are unaccounted for. Well, no wonder the aid this time is going to be supervised.

PS: I have walked in Lahore’s Lawrence Gardens after a break of about three months two days running now. It is in terrible shape with litter spread all over and not even the jogging track maintained, even swept, like it used to be. There has always been a turf war for this jewel of a park, first between the forest and the agriculture departments; and now that we have one, between the Parks and Horticultural Authority and the agriculture department. Whilst it is right and proper that the PHA should look after all the parks, Lawrence Gardens should be handed back to the agriculture department if the PHA is not up to the task.

kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk