What Devoured Glamorous Pakistan?

[Subodh Kansal]

 

An Indian asks, What devoured glamorous  Pakistan? 

  " A nation  created on the basis of Islam was destroyed by too much Islam. 
And a nation dedicated to democracy flourished because of too much  democracy."

Vir Sanghvi
Express News Service
http://expressbuzz.com/biography/what-devoured-glamorous-pakistan/204031.html

I wrote, a few weeks ago, about how much the  attitude to Indians had changed in the West. Once we were regarded as  losers, people who inhabited a desperately poor country, continually  ravaged by famine or drought, incapable of making a single  world-class product, and condemned to live forever on foreign aid. Now, we  have the world’s respect and, more tellingly, the West’s envy as more and  more jobs are Bangalored away from their high-cost economies and  handed over to Indians who perform much better for less  money.
That piece was prompted by a visit to  London. This one too has been inspired by a trip abroad and by saturation  coverage of the Pakistani cricket scandal in the press and on global TV  channels. But my concern this week is not with how the West sees  India.

It is with the transformation of  the image of the global Pakistani.
 
I was at  school and university in England in the Seventies and lived in London in  the early 1980s. This was a time when Pakistan was regarded — hard as this  may to believe now —  as being impossibly glamorous. The star of  my first term at Oxford was Benazir Bhutto. In my second term, she became  president of the union and was the toast of Oxford. Her father was then  prime minister of Pakistan and lucky students vied for the  opportunity to visit Karachi or Islamabad as guests of the Bhuttos. They  came back with stories of unbelievable hospitality and spoke knowledgeably  about Pakistan’s feudal structure, about landowners like the Bhuttos,  about an autocracy that had reigned for centuries  etc.
Even on the other side of the  ideological divide, Pakistan was all too visible. He had come down from  Oxford nearly eight years before, but a former president of the union, the  charismatic Trotskyite Tariq Ali was still the sort of chap who made  English girls swoon. For her first debate as president of the Oxford  Union, Benazir asked Tariq Ali to speak. He agreed but then, rather  inconveniently, he was detained by the police on a visit to Pakistan.  No matter. He phoned Benazir who spoke to daddy and — hey presto! — Tariq  was out of jail and on a plane to England. Pakistan was that kind of  country, the British chortled delightedly.

In those days, us poor Indians  hardly ever got a look in. The Pakistanis were dashing, far richer (they  spent in a week what we spent in the whole term), always going off to chic  parties or nightclubs in London and charming the pants off the  British (often, quite literally).

In that era, the Arabs had just  emerged on the world stage (following the massive oil-price hikes of  1973/4) and the Pakistanis were almost proprietorial about them. A  Pakistani graduate student at my college, even affected Arab dress  from time to time and bragged that he had taught Arabs how to fly  planes.

My college-mate was merely  reprising Z A Bhutto’s philosophy: the Arabs were rich but they were camel  drivers. They needed Pakistanis to run the world for them and to teach  them Western ways. It was this sort of thinking that led to the  creation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the  first global Third World bank, run by Pakistanis with Arab money. For most  of the 1980s, BCCI was staffed by sharply dressed young Pakistanis  who entertained at London (and New York’s) best restaurants, hit the  casinos after dinner and talked casually about multi-million dollar  deals.

Their flamboyant lifestyle was  matched by other rich Pakistanis. In his autobiography, Marco Pierre  White, the first of the British super-chefs (he was the original bad boy  and Gordon Ramsay worked for him), talks about the Pakistanis who  were his first regulars. Michel Roux, then England’s top chef (three  Michelin stars) would fly out to Pakistan to cook at private parties  thrown by wealthy individuals. In the late 1980s, a friend of mine  went to dinner in Pakistan and was startled to be asked to guess the  vintages of three different bottles of Mouton Rothschild, one of the  world’s most expensive wines.

In that era, Indians knew  absolutely nothing about wine or French food and the few Indian  millionaires who vacationed in London were vegetarians.

Pakistanis were sex symbols too.  The first international cricketing stud was Imran Khan (who finished at  Oxford the term before I got there) and his sex appeal was so legendary  that even Benazir joked about it. Told that Gen Zia-ul-Haq called him  the ‘Lion of the Punjab,” Benazir said, “Yes but Zia pronounces “Lion as  ‘Loin’ and this is appropriate.” Years later when Imran spoke about his love for Pakistan, a British columnist sneered, “His heart may be in Pakistan but his loins are in the King’s Road” referring to a trendy (and  expensive) London area.

Even Pakistan’s millionaires were  more glamorous than ours. In the Eighties when the Hinduja brothers (“we  are strictly vegetarian”) first emerged in London, the Pakistanis stole  the show with such flamboyant high-profile millionaires in Mahmud Sipra  who financed feature films and kept a big yacht in the South of  France.

So what went wrong?

It’s hard to pin point any single  reason but I can think of several contributing factors. First of all,  much of the Pakistani profile was based on flash and fraud. BCCI collapsed  amidst allegations that it was a scamster’s bank. Mahmud Sipra left  England with the Fraud Squad in hot pursuit even as he declared his  innocence from beyond Scotland Yard’s jurisdiction. Many big-spending  Paksitanis turned out to be heroin smugglers.

Secondly, Indian democracy came to  our rescue. The Brits who bragged about Bhutto hospitality and the  Pakistan aristocracy missed the obvious point: this was a deeply unequal  and therefore unstable society. When Bhutto rigged an election, this  led to his downfall.

Thirdly, Pakistan signed its own  death warrant by trying to out-Arab the Arabs with a policy of  Islamisation. This reached its peak under General Zia who declared a jihad  against the Russians in Afghanistan and invited Arabs such as Osama  bin Laden to come to Pakistan to fight the holy war. Ultimately,  fundamentalist Islam devoured what was left of glamorous  Pakistan.

Fourthly, the world just moved on.  Flash can only get you so far. In the end it is substance that counts. And  plodding, boring India came up with the substance.

It is hard to think, when you look  at today’s Pakistan team, that Pakistani cricketers were such sex symbols  in India in the 1980s that Imran Khan was able to brag to an interviewer  “Indian actresses are chickens. They just want to get laid” (In all  fairness, Imran later said he had been misquoted.)

Get laid by today’s team? You must  be joking.

Even the Pakistani playboys who are  still around no longer seem exciting or glamorous. Poor Imran just looks  tired. And the rest look like Asif Zardari — pretty much the archetypal  glamorous Pakistani of the Eighties — though perhaps not as  disgustingly sleazy.

Of all these factors, two remain  the most important. A nation created on the basis of Islam was destroyed  by too much Islam. And a nation dedicated to democracy flourished because  of too much democracy.