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50pc Pak mission staff say adieu to Delhi

Rohit Bansal

New Delhi, Jan 4: Five officers and 50 support staff is what the 50 per cent cut in Pakistan’s mission staff in New Delhi will translate into.
These 55 staffers and their families, adding up to some 165 diplomatic passport holders, will be airlifted by a special A-300 Pakistan International Airline (PIA) ferry on Saturday afternoon. The move follows marching orders served by the Cabinet committee on Security (CCS) last week to Pakistan to cut its mission staff here by 50 per cent.

The CCS announced a similar cut for the Indian mission located in Islamabad.

At first a terse 48-hour deadline was slapped to carry out these cuts. That was extended to January 5, owing to dislocation issues involved on both sides. Who to select, and who to leave out was left to the discretion of the respective nations.

“The apprehension by your newspaper, (to external affairs minister Jaswant Singh in a televised press conference) whether Pakistan would exploit this to retain all the Inter Services Intelligence operators, and, in turn, send all the sundry staff evoked much interest in our mission,” a Pak official said!

High commissioner Ashraf Jehangir Qazi eventually picked out those who had put in three years in New Delhi already, and when that wasn’t enough, cut the political, cultural, media and defence sections in the mission by 50 per cent. Since Pakistan can afford to bring in its own clerks, drivers, and qasids (messengers) in the mission in New Delhi — in Europe or America they would typically have local support staff, and that too at much lower scale — the 50 per cent axe fell more on the support staff than officers.

The official, who did not wish to be quoted, said franctic distress sales of white goods, cars, and motor-bikes greeted the 55 families selected by Mr Qazi and his deputy Jalil Abbas Jilani. That’s because ‘transfer of residence rules’ are pretty stiff in Pakistan, and all that a staffer can carry back free of duty is a refrigerator and an air conditioner! Also, kids, most of them studying in the inhouse school within the high commission queued up for school leaving certificates, and refunds of caution money. “India is a very comfortable posting for us. That makes it all the more painful,” the official said.

55 staffers in the mission, including envoy Qazi, his deputy Jilani, and the minister for press and tourism, and political counsellors and the defence attaches stay in New Delhi.