The biggies who violate traffic rules in Pakistan are bad news at home and abroad

Shaukat Aziz, the suave, has a green card, if not an American passport to protect him from being hassled at any port of entry in America. Plus, he is our current prime minister and is therefore exempt from a pat down by the security people each time he visits the US.

Now let’s talk of the 80 guys and gals he took along just for the ride, which of course we the taxpayers financed, when he visited Bush recently.

There must have been plenty of black sheep in the PM’s entourage. Why else would the Americans have thrashed through a thicket of 160 Pakistani legs and arms? What was the need to grope every limb, unless there was tip off?

The local Pakistani TV channels captured the delegation being frisked at New York. While viewers back home have not an iota of sympathy for these freeloaders, most of them lotas, being welcomed with a body search instead of a bouquet, Pakistan’s image has taken a beating yet one more time.

Ordinarily, on landing at JFK in New York, all Pakistanis whose names begin with Mohammad or end with Hussain or Hassan are usually told to step aside, go to an adjoining room and wait to be grilled. They are put through the so-called ‘secondary questioning.’ The Homeland Security staff in the US, idiotic as it is, suspects people with these names to be related to the Twin Tower bomber Mohammad Atta or Saddam Hussein.

If only the Homeland Security had the brains to ‘Google’ the name Mohammad. It would know that it’s the commonest name in the world. But who can drill sense into the Americans.

At JFK, Pakistanis who are sent for secondary questioning are screened for possible links with terrorist groups. But their bodies are not searched. Why then were the 80-member PM delegation put through a body search? Was someone among the delegation suspected of carrying contraband?

And if the story about the Pakistan ambassador to Washington, Gen (retd) Jehangir Karamat, putting out a red alert and asking the Americans to search the PM’s delegation when it arrived at JFK is true, then the ambassador and the prime minister have different national agendas. This is most serious. Somebody must answer for the frisking fiasco.

The 80-member team, I bet are not bothered by their bodies being searched. What’s the big deal if a pair of strange hands went through their person, they must have consoled themselves? They just went on a furlough and returned home with massive shopping bags from Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s.

I met a Pakistani cabbie in Manhattan recently who was so disgusted with his compatriots coming to New York. “I am fed up ferrying their begums to large stores. Their entire time is spent in shopping while their husbands attend stupid meetings that cost the nation so much and gets nothing in return.”

Shaukat Aziz, the suave, of course owns a brownstone in Manhattan’s most expensive residential area. It overlooks the UN Headquarters and is in Tudor City. But what input has the imported PM put in improving his capital city?

Negligible if not negative.

Islamabad during Musharraf’s raj has been pillaged of its most valuable asset: beauty. The Halaku Khans of Capital Development Authority (CDA) have cut asunder every tree they encountered on their assault on the city; they have left behind towers of piled up dirt and rubble.

The Margallas rise phantom-like, presiding over a city of dust, smoke, smog and cars. Only when the wind blows, do the Margallas seem to come alive. The rest of the time they lie in a white shroud of death.

Kamran Lashari has finally been stopped in his killing spree by the Supreme Court. In a case against the building of the mini golf course in F-7, Lashari and his minions were asked to produce the paper work related to the case.
Guess what? They told the court the papers had been lost.

If this had happened in America, Lashari and his band would have been sacked on the spot.

Shame on the leaders who allowed Islamabad to become a slum. Whose head should roll for such a heinous crime?

Shame on all the police chiefs who allowed a yahoo culture to thrive on the roads. Instead of pandering to the VIPs, they should have been driving on the roads as ordinary citizens to see the bedlam being allowed by their policemen. Savages drive around as if they own the roads. Traffic jams leave these cops unconcerned. They stand in pairs chatting merrily, looking the other way while drivers break every rule under the sun. These impotent cops have now been removed. Good riddance to bad rubbish. This may be a cliche we often threw around in school, but even after half a century, it works in this particular case.

The traffic police are smartly turned out and has given traffic tickets to wait — the rulers of the land. Three cheers.

Shame on the lawmakers and biggies who violated traffic rules.

What does it say of our leaders? They are a bunch of bad boys who break the law at home and can’t even be trusted to behave themselves when the prime minister takes them on jaunts to foreign lands. These people are bad news at home and abroad.

Islamabad has become a den of black money. There is so much of it going around that people are buying properties worth a million dollars without batting an eyelid. The retired and the serving army men and the bureaucrats have their hands in the till.

Try getting a phone line through proper channels and you’re promptly told that there are “no more pairs available.” At a PTCL (Pakistan Telecommunications Corporation Ltd) office in one of the newer sectors of Islamabad, the divisional engineer sat forlornly at his desk.

The man was suffering from an uncertainty crisis. “We keep hearing that PTCL is being privatized tomorrow, next week, next month... I really don’t care anymore because whoever is my new boss will have to pay me the same salary otherwise I’ll quit,” he said throwing his pen down.

Last week he went to get his passport renewed. He didn’t say that he worked for the government as he doesn’t really know who he is working for anymore! “But the clerk at the passport office insisted that I was a government employee when he read PTCL and refused to entertain my form without an NOC from my employers.”

The divisional engineer, apart from having no pairs for new phone connections, has no wire. “I have no telephone wire and don’t know when we’ll get it.”

PTCL was a golden hen that earned the government millions, said the engineer. “Now with its fate hanging in the balance, the army is interfering and wants to grab as much control as it can. It has become very greedy.”
Shame on NAB, the National Accountability Bureau, which has done a pathetic job in catching the greedy and the corrupt, who have a fairy-tale ending. They live happily hereafter in their grand palaces and walk with a royal carriage.

“See the poor on the road,” said a friend. She was pointing to a yellow cab driver whose Suzuki FX 1000 had broken down by the roadside. “These people too would have been living in comfortable homes and driving around in big cars; their kids would have been spoilt brats going to expensive private schools...”

So what stopped the poor from becoming rich? I asked naively.

“They never got a chance at being corrupt!”