by Dr. Khalil Ahmad
Dear Mr President! I am eager to appreciate your efforts to effect national reconciliation. I know you first tried the ‘stick’ and now it is the ‘carrot’. I feel really thankful to you for this much-needed ordinance that will absolve Pakistan, among other misnomers, from the guesstimative reports of Transparency International, and we will be a corruption-free state. But as my humble reason sees, the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) has a flaw, which if our courts come to take cognizance of, they will be making use of it to annul it. There are also a number of bad-natured people who will be raising a hue and cry that the NRO is discriminatory, but in actuality what they want is its benefits accruing to them as well.
It is because of these misapprehensions that I request you to remove this flaw, otherwise a great opportunity of reforming Pakistan will be lost. Personally, I too feel that giving the NRO absolution only to public office holders is unjust. Be generous. Be forgiving. Remove this flaw and make the NRO absolution available to every citizen of Pakistan. You cannot imagine how immeasurably it will transform society. We will all be equal.
I realise you want to be convinced why not confine it to public office holders only. Here are some arguments why it should be available to everyone. First, in that case it will be termed ‘national’ in the truest sense of the word. Second, it is not the public office holders only who need to reconcile, every citizen of Pakistan needs to reconcile with one another and with you especially. Third, it will make the NRO court-proof also.
In addition, I would like you to ponder over my personal story, which I am sure will convince you of the urgency of removing this flaw from the Ordinance. Take this not as the story of one Pakistani alone, but as you are already well aware of the fact, it is the story of more or less every Pakistani.
I am a poor person like my parents were. They did what they could to make me an educated person so that I could live well. But I was caught using unfair means in the matriculation examination. That was the end of my education. Now my father got me the job of a helper at a general provision store. But soon the store-owner found items, money and me disappearing, and fired me. At the store, I learned an important thing: the amount of money that I got from the store job at the end of a very laborious month was much less than what could be made by stealing and defrauding. After all, at the end of the day what we come to have is money!
After a number of jobs here and there and firings, I started my own business. Another factor that forced me to do something of my own was that when after being caught I was sent to the police, my income was to be shared with them for nothing. So you see I was just helpless. My last job proved to be a turning point: the owners withdrew a sizeable amount from their bank to disburse salaries to their employees. I knew that and made a plan with two of my friends to grab that money. But we were caught and a big chunk of that money went not to the rightful owners, but to the police.
Now you know it takes time to be successful in every field, but finally we were at that. I told my people that I had got a job in Islamabad. As yet, we were not very good; sometimes it was a jackpot and at other times a loss since the police had to take its share of the booty no matter what the adventure was worth. However, I got our home renovated, built the upper portion, bought a colour television, VCR, tape recorder, washing machine, mobile phones and things like that. But my dreams were yet to be fulfilled.
I decided to take more risks to achieve my goals faster. Instead of thievery, we started doing robberies. It needed some homework, but was quite paying. Soon I was able to buy a reasonable home in a posh locality. My people shifted there. Now I flourished and recruited a number of disciples also. They were paying a percentage to me. I bought another one-kanal plot in the Defence Housing Authority (DHA), helped my younger brothers start their businesses, and was looking for good families to marry my sisters. All was going well, but during a bank robbery a guard shot at me. I too fired at the guard and he died. My leg was injured, thus I got caught. I am under trial and in jail now where I read about this NRO. It was such good news that I thought of writing to you.
My beloved President! You are known for your concern for poor people like me and this made me request you to remove the flaw that makes the NRO liable to be criticised by all and sundry. You know I am yet to build a house on that one-kanal plot and one needs so many things to transform a house into a home. I want to send my parents for Hajj, and arrange the marriages of my sisters. My brothers too expect me to help them expand their businesses. Being the eldest son, I have so many responsibilities on my shoulders to take care of.
In view of the above, I most humbly request making the NRO equally available to everyone. How nice it will be for all Pakistanis, whose circumstances are not much different from mine. How gracious this act of yours will be for the whole nation! We will all live happily ever after after the enactment of this universal NRO. When I imagine a Pakistan cleansed by a people’s NRO, I see a paradise befalling our earth.
But as I am good to everyone, I fear that even this baptised NRO may have confusions and complexities for so many people whose circumstances will not be taken care of by its wording. So I suggest allowing all the citizens of Pakistan to customise this NRO to suit their needs, interests, likes and dislikes. Ah, I feel extremely happy with this idea of a customised NRO. No doubt, it will prove a panacea for all the ills afflicting our society. Above all, it will reconcile all those with your person and paraphernalia who bear grudges against your rule on this or that pretext.
Yours in customised national reconciliation.
PS: Why confine its benefits to the limits of a time period, make it timeless. It will make us all live in eternal reconciliatory state of bliss and beatitude.
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Dr. Khalil Ahmad is associated with Alternate Solutions Institute, Pakistan’s first free market think-tank
This article appeared in The Post on October 25, 2007.
