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Washington Post.com
Letters to the Editor Opinion
An inaccurate portrait of Pakistan’s election
Supporters of Imran Khan, head of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, celebrate in Karachi on July 26. (Rizwan Tabassum/AFP/Getty Images)
A July 27 front-page photograph with youths chanting and waving flags in the streets with something burning in the background, an article headline of “Pakistan braces after vote,” and words including “turmoil” and “fraud” in the subhead are how The Post chose to announce Pakistan’s recent elections.
When the negative is news and the positive is ignored, is it any wonder that we have people who think that entire countries are “s---holes”?
The people pictured were actually celebrating democracy. A nation of 205 million had elections with a 52 percent voter turnout, despite extremists targeting political rallies and a bomb at a polling station killing at least 31 people on the day of the vote. Women voted in droves, in some places for the first time. The religious parties yet again failed at the ballot box. An ex-prime minister returned voluntarily to the country from the luxury of London to face a prison sentence. The young son of another political dynasty stepped into the political arena despite the murder of his mother by extremists. And allegations of voter fraud? A European Union organization monitored the elections, but the article did not deem it necessary to discuss the validity of fraud allegations.
If you went into the article thinking that democracy and a majority-Muslim country cannot coexist, nothing in the article disabused you of that notion. And the picture itself could just as easily be extremists menacing world peace in another street of a s---hole country.
Uzma Qureshi, Gambrills
Letters to the Editor Opinion
An inaccurate portrait of Pakistan’s election
Supporters of Imran Khan, head of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party, celebrate in Karachi on July 26. (Rizwan Tabassum/AFP/Getty Images)
A July 27 front-page photograph with youths chanting and waving flags in the streets with something burning in the background, an article headline of “Pakistan braces after vote,” and words including “turmoil” and “fraud” in the subhead are how The Post chose to announce Pakistan’s recent elections.
When the negative is news and the positive is ignored, is it any wonder that we have people who think that entire countries are “s---holes”?
The people pictured were actually celebrating democracy. A nation of 205 million had elections with a 52 percent voter turnout, despite extremists targeting political rallies and a bomb at a polling station killing at least 31 people on the day of the vote. Women voted in droves, in some places for the first time. The religious parties yet again failed at the ballot box. An ex-prime minister returned voluntarily to the country from the luxury of London to face a prison sentence. The young son of another political dynasty stepped into the political arena despite the murder of his mother by extremists. And allegations of voter fraud? A European Union organization monitored the elections, but the article did not deem it necessary to discuss the validity of fraud allegations.
If you went into the article thinking that democracy and a majority-Muslim country cannot coexist, nothing in the article disabused you of that notion. And the picture itself could just as easily be extremists menacing world peace in another street of a s---hole country.
Uzma Qureshi, Gambrills
