Daily Times

An avid reader of poetry, I am always baffled at the range of thought of our great poets, some of them equating their poetry to holy verses. Take for example Shah Abdul Lateef Bhitai, who says, “Je to bait bhaainya se aayatoon aaheen, niyo mann laaeen priyaan sande paar de” (What you consider poetry is in fact holy verses, connecting you directly to the Beloved). Or, Ghalib, when he says, “Aate hain ghaib se yeh mazaameen khayaal mein/Ghalib sareer-e khaamaa nawaai Sirosh hai (These ideas come to the mind from the Divine, and what feels like squeaking of the pen on the paper is actually the voice of Gabriel). And poetry like that of Nostradamus contains a lot of premonitions and prophecies. For centuries now, Roomi, Saadi, and Shah Bhitai’s books are being used. Girhorree’s poetry in Sindhi is considered to contain a number of prophecies.

However, considering the contemporary situation in Pakistan, no poet beats Mir when he forewarns the ‘Shaikhul Islam’: “Donon haathon se thaamiye dastaar,/Mir Sahib zamaanaa nazuk hai”(Hold your cap of honour with both hands Mir Sahib, these are delicate times). I sincerely wish the learned doctor in question, who I am sure has read the lines, had listened to the prophet of poetry of his times and saved the honour of the fancy cap he proudly puts on.

But not listening to the wise counsel, the revered Maulana (if he gets annoyed at the use of the term for him, I am willing to take it back and call him Allama or doctor, or even Shaikhul Islam), has landed millions of expatriate Pakistanis, living abroad willingly or out of compulsion, in tremendous pain.

Driving a taxicab thousands of miles away from his country of birth in the dark, deadly streets of Detroit, or Dresden, a Pakistani considered himself to a be a first class citizen of the country of his origin with all his rights, except for the right to run for election, intact, when all of a sudden, from out of nowhere someone appears in Islamabad and deprives him of his roots, his identity and his pride. The driver must have thought who could dare take away his birthright in the presence of the courts of law. But ham ne sochaa thaa keh munsif se karenge faryaad/woh bhi kambakht tera chahane waalaa niklaa’ (We thought of petitioning the judge, he too, alas, turned out to be your admirer).

May I, with great respect ask my lords, who heard the case of Dr Tahirul Qadri, what they were thinking when they, pouring their verbal vexation on the over-acting Allama, not only renounced the foreign living Pakistanis — most of them economic exiles — but put a big question mark on their claim on the land of their ancestors? The majority of them are more loyal than some of the judges, generals, bureaucrats, and politicians gnawing at the county’s flesh like vultures surrounding a dying animal, waiting for the day all the meat is gone and the animal is left with bare bones, only to fly away to the lands where they have stashed millions. Until the day, my lords, in their supreme wisdom, rendered millions of Pakistanis living abroad — who open a Pakistani news website first thing they turn on their computers — homeless, I was under the impression that the expatriate Pakistanis constitutionally enjoyed equal rights. While in Pakistan there are folks not finding a way to leave the country in search of an honest living in order to support their families, how many families survive solely on the dollar or euro or riyal sent by their foreign living sons?

In a country where even a widow has to grease palms to get her late husband’s pension, and a paltry job of a primary schoolteacher is sold for hundreds of thousands of rupees, a dollar, which when converted to rupees means 100 rupees, means a lot. Did my lords consider how many students subsist using the money sent by their foreign living brothers or fathers, how many widowed sisters, how many ailing fathers and mother? Did they consider how many sisters would have gone without marriage in the absence of a decent dowry had their brothers not sacrificed their youth to serve in restaurants, gas stations and butcher shops in foreign lands? How many youth are wandering in the streets of Karachi, Islamabad, or Lahore looking for decent employment matching their training and education? What option other than to leave Pakistan do they have if they find employment in a foreign land? If the honourable judges cannot provide jobs to unemployed youth in Pakistan, do they have the right to insult those who find them abroad?

Who would have liked to leave his country had things been conducive for everyone to live respectably in his homeland? I wonder how many Pakistanis would have accepted foreign nationalities had they known that a day would come when they would be written off the register of their birth in Pakistan by the judges, again very respectfully, with absolutely no right to write the constitution of the country that guarantees it.

And can the court be consistent, please? While the case was being heard of the disqualification of parliamentarians, one of the defending lawyers raised the question of dual nationality held by some of the judges, to which, reportedly, one of my lords responded, “Judges are a different matter. They cannot be discussed.” Why are judges a different matter, my honourable lords?

Similarly, why the highly respected Supreme Court converts a letter from a Canadian citizen to a petition in the infamous memo case and takes suo motu action, but when Dr Qadri approaches the court he, holding the dual citizenship of the same country, is not eligible to petition? Why, all of a sudden, all the foreign living Pakistanis have become pariahs? Where is the consistency?

This court is being accused of encroaching into the realm of other constitutional institutions — NAB, the Election Commission, the National Assembly, etc. Not being a constitutional expert, I cannot say rightly or wrongly. However, this recent decision of the court, in the presence of a constitutional recognition to expatriates as Pakistani, is not understandable to me. This is a decision that will probably be listed among the Maulvi Tameezuddin case, the Z A Bhutto case, the approval of Zia martial law case, and the case where Musharraf was granted three years to rule unconstitutionally by this very honourable court.

The writer is an independent political commentator