Page 295 - James Caan - The Real Deal

29 · Getting to Know Pakistan

could make such an enormous difference? Guess what, James. It
took me six years to pass the legislation. Six years.’
‘Why did it take so long?’
‘How much time do you spend in Pakistan, James?’
‘I visit every six weeks or so.’
‘And when you come, look at the people you mix with. If you
are doing business here, you are meeting the educated classes, the
people with money.’
By and large, this was true.
‘You are only seeing 0.1 per cent of the country. The other 99.9
per cent are poor and live in villages. There are fifty million people
in Pakistan without electricity. That is the real Pakistan, where
people live traditionally with Islam as the only law that counts. If
it says in the book that a woman must produce three witnesses,
then how can it be right to introduce a law that says she does not
need to? People believe what they have been told since birth, not
what an official in the capital tells them to believe. So you think
it’s simple to make changes, in a country this big, with this much
poverty? You have no idea how hard it is. Getting the middle
classes and the media to support you is easy; getting the country
to is another matter.
‘In Pakistan a tiny proportion of the population has the loudest
voice and their needs are easily catered for. The majority of
Pakistanis still live in villages where the entire population is largely
employed by one landowner. Those landowners have no interest
in educating their employees, because then they’ll leave for
better-paid jobs and the land will no longer be as profitable. And,
of course, because these landowners are the employers, they have
power and influence over the entire village, which means local
legislators will never take decisions that affect the landowners
detrimentally, and so the status quo never changes.
‘So when you ask me why things are not changing in Pakistan,
I cannot give you a quick answer,’ he said.

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