A tourist visa to Pakistan, priced at Rs 15, roughly the same as a local bus or Metro ticket in Delhi, sounds like a deliciously tempting bargain but getting there, at this twisted juncture in India-Pakistan relations, is not a joy ride. There is only once-a-week PIA connection between Delhi and Karachi. Writers like Fatima Bhutto, who is promoting her family memoir Songs of Blood & Sword in India this week, or the literary critic Muneeza Shamsie who is the regional chair of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize to be announced in Delhi in later this month, have to travel to Delhi via Dubai. Everywhere I went during the five days I spent in Pakistan last week, friends, acquaintances and colleagues complained of the hardship in getting Indian visas. Fehmida Riaz, the country’s leading feminist poet who spent several years of exile in India during Zia-ul-Haq’s regime, spoke of the tedious paperwork involved including translated and attested copies of ID cards.
Karachi is not reputed as a sub-continental beauty spot. Jihadist battles, gang wars and gunfire are familiar street sights and sounds, drug trafficking in its vast slums, kidnappings and political violence between Sindhi nationalists and MQM, the muhajir party of immigrants from UP and Bihar, are the stuff of everyday life. The horrific kidnap, torture and beheading of Daniel Pearl by Al Qaeda operatives in 2002 certified Karachi as the bad news capital of South Asia. Kolkata, with its slow-moving strikers and fading hammer-and-sickle graffiti or Mumbai with its “maximum city” appellation of overall wretchedness, seem vaguely hopeful in comparison.
Full report here Business Standard
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