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VIEW: Visit Pakistan and be leered at — Kamran Shafi

The starers were not only your ordinary man on the street but also policemen, and in one case army soldiers travelling in the back of an army truck on the GT Road behind which we got stuck. You name ‘em, and they stared; oh, how they stared

I am taking up the thread from Mr Khalid Hasan’s piece ‘Visit Pakistan in 2007 — and get shot’ (Daily Times November 12, ‘06), and am adding to what he said. This article could well be titled ‘We are Yahoos’; ‘Visit Pakistan and be undressed by the naked eye’, and so on and so forth. In short, the Land of the Pure is as inhospitable a place as any in the world for women tourists, particularly farangi women tourists. Let me look at it through the eyes of my old friend Katrina, and new friend Jo, who visited us from New Zealand just two weeks ago. For myself, I can’t even begin to tell you what a difficult time I had taking the two around in the Islamic Republic.

There was no place we went: Peshawar or Lahore or Islamabad the Beautiful where the two ladies were not stared at incessantly. The starers were not only your ordinary man on the street but also policemen, and in one case army soldiers travelling in the back of an army truck on the GT Road behind which we got stuck. You name ‘em, and they stared; oh, how they stared.

In almost every case, and I have upset fellow columnist Angela Williams saying this once before, the leerer’s hand strayed you-know-where; there to stay until my companions and I were out of sight. Complimenting the straying hand was the look on the Yahoos’ faces, bordering on something between insolence and vulgarity and tawdriness, a small mocking smile playing on their lips. (If someone says this is due to feelings against the West, post the all-out attacks on Muslims after 9/11 I will scream: this lascivious leering and other loutish behaviour has long been practised in the Fatherland, which has only become more backward with time. Why, I recall I was only a little boy — must have been 50-some years ago — when my mother slapped a chap senseless in Murree when he shouted an obscenity at her). It is to be specially noted that my friends’ discomfiture was heightened because they had come in to the Islamic Republic via Bangkok where no one looks at you twice. Are you listening, letter-writer, and disappeared correspondent Asad Siddiqui?

The difficulty is what do we do about it. Not that there is dire need because there aren’t any tourists, particularly women tourists, flocking into the country; but what do we do so that the few personal friends of people, like two sets of my friends who came here within a few months of each other, are not turned off and dissuade others from visiting? Precious little, if you ask me. For, how do you get a government to apply the rule of law — in this case under the Goonda Act — when it will not apply the writ of the State anywhere at all? Except when it comes to, and I have said it before, matters that are personally important to the rulers.

But let us try, particularly because several hundreds of millions are soon going to be spent on the headless, tailless ‘Visit Pakistan Year — 2007’ in which Western free-loaders of every description will be invited to Pakistan, be put up in our particular version of 5-Star hotels, be feted by the High and the Mighty, receive their gifts, and jet off home on, you guessed it, the same free, gratis and for nothing PIA Club Class seats upon which they came. Will even one of them add even a measly Dollar to the country’s tourist trade? You can bet your bottom Paisa they will not.

Here goes anyway. For one, a well-paid, well-trained (while its standards are fast falling, the Motorway Police is a case in point) Tourist Police force could be set up. The Thais have it, and it is deployed at all the airports, train stations and places that tourists visit. Its officers are polite and well spoken in English and they are always on the lookout for people who harass tourists. Returning to Bangkok from Penang by train (a great journey; and no, our fare was not paid by Royal Thai Railways, letter-writer Asad Siddiqui Sahib) a beggar was pestering us for money when in an instant a Tourist Police officer appeared and gently told the beggar to move on. When I say “gently” I mean it: he did not take out his truncheon and split the fellow’s head in two like our puls would.

In our context, this police could be stationed at the airports where taxi-drivers and other leerers make it so very unpleasant for arriving passengers; they could be stationed outside hotels and in tourist attractions such as Taxila and Moenjo Daro and Takhtbai and in our many attractive bazaars such as Qissa Khwani in Peshawar and Bohri in Karachi; even in Swat (once the roads are repaired so that people can get there!) and the Northern Areas. It is to be noted please, that I should not have included the Northern Areas in times past and before the advent of the dictator Zia when outsiders were settled in the NAs to foment sectarian trouble and when the orgy of killing started in that gentle, gentle area.

For another, why can’t the country become less suffocating for foreign visitors? Why, for example, can’t tourists go into Foreigners Only bars in hotels and ask for a drink? We may think nothing of hiding and drinking in our homes and closeted in hotel rooms but people who travel the world and who live in countries where there is nowhere near the level of hypocrisy as that found in the Citadel of Islam feel claustrophobic and plain bloody silly drinking surreptitiously. Let us face the fact that barring the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Iran, every other country in the Ummah allows foreigners to drink openly in hotels and restaurants. Why are we holier than everyone else please?

Because we are Yahoos, my friends, complete and utter Yahoos!

There are more suggestions, but another time.

And why do we do the completely inappropriate thing, always? A recent report in the press: ‘State Minister for Cabinet Division and Tehrik-e-Takmeel-e-Pakistan chief Mehmood Ali was laid to rest at the Islamabad main graveyard on Saturday while his funeral prayers were held at the Faisal Mosque. Floral wreaths, on behalf of President Gen Pervez Musharraf, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz and Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, were laid on the grave’.

Mehmood Ali, if we recall, was a pro-Pakistan politician from East Pakistan who stayed on here after Bangladesh came into being. If it was important to make him yet another unelected “State Minister” why did none of the above named wreath-senders attend his funeral?

Because we are Yahoos, my friends, complete and utter Yahoos.

Bushism of the Week: “One has a stronger hand when there’s more people playing your same cards” — President George W Bush -Washington, DC, Oct. 11, 2006

P.S. Readers have asked me to stop writing ‘Bushisms’ since Dubya is not relevant any more after getting a drubbing in the mid-term congressional elections. Oh yes, he is — just you wait until he, foolishly again, bombs Iran. Just you wait, folks; the world is still in mortal danger.

Kamran Shafi is a freelance columnist. He can be contacted at kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk

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