A bond broken

A classic demonstration of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing was evident when Prime Minister Imran Khan appealed to Overseas Pakistanis (OPs) to donate generously to his PM Relief Fund for Covid-19 while leaving thousands of OPs from Britain, Canada, USA, EU, etc running around in circles trying to get a flight back to their home countries, right under his administration’s nose.

Salman Tariq, a prominent Canadian-Pakistani who has contested parliamentary elections in Canada, is one of thousands stranded in Pakistan. He notes that the “complete abandonment of overseas Pakistanis by Imran Khan has made all of us realize that though over the years we have supported him with donations, funded [the] PTI with overseas memberships and helped raise [the] PTI’s profile internationally, there is nothing new in Naya Pakistan. The same old system of patronizing friends and family is at play.”

It was an unprecedented situation. Pakistan’s airspace was closed to foreign airlines. The only option for OPs and expatriates wanting to go home was to book via PIA which promptly cancelled all regular flights ‘due to Covid-19’ choosing, instead, to miraculously operate ‘Special Flights’ to the same destinations. The only difference being the eye-watering one-way fares. Around $3000 per person for North America – a whopping $12000 if you happen to be a family of four trying to make your way home; 1000 euros for Europe.

Not content with this predatory behaviour, PIA also charged foreign governments thousands of dollars per flight to operate its ‘Special Flights’. For PIA and the government Covid-19 seemed to be less a global pandemic and more an opportunity to profit from the miseries of travellers – running out of cash and medicines for the elderly, for ill-health or special needs, separated from families, or just desperate to get home.

For most people, these costs were exorbitant. PIA’s justification for these extortionist prices was the cost of in-flight social distancing (empty seats) and operating on humanitarian grounds (running empty return flights); but photos shared by OPs who were forced to travel on these flights showed not a single empty seat in either direction as PIA happily fleeced families and business travellers trying to get home.

So, despite claims to the contrary from PIA and the PM’s adviser, not one flight for OPs was operated on humanitarian grounds or in line with social distancing requirements.

Relief only came when British MPs raised this issue within the UK and arranged with Qatar Airways to evacuate British Pakistanis – from Pakistan – at half the cost. Following Dr Christian Turner’s (British high commissioner to Pakistan) announcement of these flights, PIA promptly reduced its fares to GBP525 per person a far cry from the GBP750 previously announced by Zulfiqar Bukhari, the PM’s Special Assistant for Overseas Pakistanis and one of his closest friends.

Lessons from Taiwan are pertinent here, especially the government’s imposition of huge fines and in some cases jail terms for price gouging on face masks. Will the Pakistani government take any action against PIA’s blatant price gouging? Does it have any compassion for its distressed citizens?

Imran Khan’s social contract with the Pakistani diaspora has been shattered. They have finally experienced first-hand how his under-qualified but handpicked advisers are ruining the country. They couldn’t (or wouldn’t?) organize a simple evacuation plan despite having all the levers of power under their control. Horror stories of their incompetence and the government’s callousness towards its citizens are being shared across dinner tables of Pakistanis all over the globe; everyone is aghast that all the PM’s advisers seem to care to do is profess regret over lives lost in foreign countries apparently unable to help stranded Pakistanis in any practical way.

At the time of writing, many British Pakistanis were booked to travel on the special flights arranged by the British High Commission. Imran Hussain an MP in the UK parliament while speaking to the writer said “it’s good that [the] Foreign and CommonWealth Office has arranged flights” and he as an MP he “will continue to press the UK government to arrange additional return flights so that everyone who calls Britain as their home is able to return back”. Others such as Canadian Pakistanis are still in the lurch with PIA refusing to honour their return tickets, pay them refunds and forcing them to buy the expensive new one-way fares instead.

So, the prime minister shouldn’t be surprised that the response to his Covid-19 appeal has been, to put it mildly, lukewarm. Under the delusion that it would be business as usual and that his overseas supporters would as always rush to fund his appeal, he seems not to have realised that what they have been supporting was the illusion that the PTI would govern by an establishment rooted in justice and meritocracy. They have been clinging to the belief that once this happened, the country would come under rule of law. What they have is rule by Imran Khan’s blue-eyed courtiers.

After just under two years in government, Imran Khan has reached a fork in the road. Now he needs to decide whether he wants to deliver on the social contract he forged with Pakistanis home and abroad, or not. If he does, he must make root and branch changes to his team. If he cannot make these changes, he may well complete a full term but will be remembered as just another in a long line of failures who could not give his people access to the justice, equality and good governance for which they have spent decades waiting.

No one has a monopoly over the public mandate. If another indigenous leadership rises up to claim that it can run the country on the principles of justice and merit, there is no reason to think that expatriate and local Pakistanis will not support them – especially if Pakistan’s very survival hangs in the balance. To avoid such a fate, Imran Khan must work fast to repair the trust he has broken with his ardent supporters.

The writer is a London-based analyst on South Asia.

Twitter: @SiddiquiAftab