Importing foreigners by the dozens to rule Pakistan is one of the biggest threats to Pakistans stability that emerged in the past decade. The ruling coalition parties, PPP, MQM, and ANP deserve credit for inadvertently highlighting this flaw in our system. Key members of these parties have ruled Pakistan for five years based on deliberately lying under oath to the Election Commission of Pakistan by concealing their allegiances to foreign governments while pretending to be Pakistani citizens. This has to be one of the biggest scandals in the name of democracy in Pakistan after the billions stolen from this country under the same heading.
The constitutional amendment that ruling coalition parties plan to introduce to allow foreigners to rule Pakistan is tantamount to playing with the fundamentals of national security. The way these parties have propelled this issue to the top of their policy agenda speaks volumes about the competence of these parties to govern the country.
Since 2002, a large number of politicians have been imported from mainly the United States and the United Kingdom. The icing on the cake was Musharrafs secret deal in 2006 with Benazir Bhutto and later Asif Zardari, directly brokered by the then American and British governments. That deal continues to be a big source of Pakistans instability. The deal fathered such gems as the Memogate, networks of CIA-hired saboteurs like Raymond Davis, and the incumbent government itself of course.
The inept politicians are trying to mislead the nation by invoking the rights of migrant Pakistanis naturalised in their adopted countries. The naturalised Pakistanis have all rights in Pakistan but cant and shouldnt have the right to occupy offices of legislation and government unless theytake a fresh oath of allegiance. In Egypt, a leading candidate was disqualified because his mother was foreign citizen, in this case American. In the UK, a future king cannot have a foreign parent. Obama faced a lot of criticism and possible impeachment had his birth certificate been foreign.
Our security has been a special target in recent years for anti-Pakistan foreign elements. This makes the need to purge foreign implants in our system a necessity. Just consider the scope of foreign interference in our system. Aside from the infamous deal, a US military contractor, DynCorp, recruited freshly retired officers from our armed forces and created a training base for a private militia on the outskirts of Islamabad before being busted in 2009. The US government continues to pay proxies to plant propaganda in our media. The US government is directly protecting offenders of our national security, like Husain Haqqani and Shakil Afridi.
The last thing Pakistan needs is presidents or lawmakers who have taken the oath to renounce all allegiance to any foreign state like President Zardaris press secretary and MNA Farahnaz Ispahani had done in Washington DC and later concealed it while submitting her papers to run for an elected seat in Pakistan. If you can lie about his, you can lie about anything.
We need a host of amendments in the constitution but not the ones proposed by the ruling coalition. We need a law to ban formation of Pakistani political parties overseas, like Musharraf did with his APML. We need a law to ban meetings of any Pakistani political party outside Pakistan. MQM, PMLN, PPPP have done this. A law is required to ban anyone from heading a Pakistani political party of he or she is not living in Pakistan. The election commission should have the power to cancel party permits on these and other violations.
And these are just some of the ideas that have been inspired by the ruling coalitions attempt to fiddle with the constitution.
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