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THE other day I was pleasantly surprised when I boarded a Number 10 bus in central London, and saw it bore the garish colours and designs of a Karachi bus.
True, it wasn’t really authentic as it didn’t have passengers clinging to the doors and stacked on top of the roof, but it still brought a smile to my lips. A few painted London buses carried signs like ‘Land of beautiful places’ and ‘Land of highest peaks’, and must have cost tens of thousands of pounds.
Although the initiative was the brainchild of our high commission, it was largely paid for by a corporation to celebrate 70 years of independence. However, apart from pleasing Pakistani expats and visitors, I doubt these buses did anything to motivate Brits to book flights to our shores.
Don’t get me wrong: our country has much to offer visitors in terms of ancient civilisations, colonial architecture, great food, warm hospitality, and stunning landscapes. But the sad truth is that no travel agent in his right mind would recommend a holiday in Pakistan.
There was a time when Pakistan was firmly on the tourist map as foreigners from around the world came to admire sites from Shalimar Gardens to the necropolis of Moenjodaro. European hitchhikers came by road across Iran to Lahore and then on to India, Afghanistan and Nepal. Pakistan was very much a part of the hippy trail.
No one in his right mind would recommend a holiday here.
I was in Lahore in the late 1960s, and with bachelor friends would often visit Falletti’s Hotel to try our luck with the girls stepping off tourist coaches. These were pre-prohibition days, we were young, and Murree beer was cheap.
In those days, PIA, the national airline, and the tourism corporation advertised heavily in the foreign media to attract foreigners to Pakistan. When I last passed by, the PIA office in London’s upmarket Mayfair area wore a seedy appearance, and faded posters from decades ago adorned its windows.
After the 1971 war, the border with India became far more restrictive for tourists, and the Iranian revolution of 1979, as well as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the same year, virtually stopped all overland traffic from Europe. In Pakistan, Zia and his vicious public flogging and draconian laws put off foreign tourists.
Now, of course, years of unrelenting terrorist attacks have taken a heavy toll on Pakistan’s image abroad. Out of preferred foreign destinations, we are probably near the bottom of the list.
Sri Lanka, during a quarter century of civil war, still attracted tourists. Now, with the war finally over, over two million visited the lovely island last year. India pulls in nearly 9m. Pakistan welcomed half a million last year; but bear in mind most of these were visitors of Pakistani origin.
During an English cricket team’s tour of Pakistan in the 1980s, Ian Botham said: “Pakistan is a country I’d send my mother-in-law to as a present.” This crack caused outrage among more literal-minded Pakistanis, but it contains an element of truth from a foreigner’s perspective.
When visitors ask what I would recommend as evening entertainment, I must confess that all I can suggest is some restaurant. Movies? Theatre? Nightclubs? Bars? Sorry. The best I can do is to give them a bootlegger’s number. True, we cannot order our society to accommodate foreign tastes, even though other Muslim countries do make it possible for visitors to get a drink in their hotel bars and restaurants at least.
When some documents surfaced to show that the Chinese visualised a string of coastal holiday resorts as a peripheral part of the CPEC initiative, noisy protests from the right wing caused strenuous back-pedalling. But surely providing some entertainment for Chinese visitors would be no bad thing.
In our eagerness to prove we are the most devout Muslims in the world, we forget the hypocrisy at the dark heart of our society. Alcohol consumption has soared since prohibition was imposed four decades ago; drug addiction has ruined millions of lives; prostitution is rampant in some of our most prestigious urban areas; and many fortunes have been built on drug smuggling and corruption.
Everybody in Pakistan is aware of these realities, and yet we pretend that they don’t exist. The bars of the wealthy are well-stocked with smuggled booze, yet hundreds of people are killed and blinded by home-made hooch every year because prohibition does not give them access to properly distilled liquor.
Similarly, the fiction at horse races is that no betting takes place. And yet bookies thrive while the state is deprived of the taxes on gambling collected in other countries. Clubs for the elites have card rooms where millions are won and lost every day, but small-time gamblers are regularly busted.
Having grown up in a liberal, tolerant Pakistan, I find its slide deeply depressing.
Published in Dawn, September 2nd, 2017
