Some good news that may cheer up lots of Pakistanis in the maze of uncomfortable news; the Pakistan-born Sabir Sami is set to take charge as global division chief executive officer of KFC by Yum! Brands Inc, from January 1, 2020. Sabi will take charge of the position after Tony Lowings had decided in September to step down by December, according to a statement issued by Yum! Brands.
Contrast this with the rise of the Indian-origin Americans within the corporate sector;
1: Google Inc.holding company, Alphabet Inc is Sundar Pichai
an Indian-American business executive.
2: Satya Nadella is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft
3: Arvind Krishna is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of IBM.
4: Parag Agrawal is the CEO of Twitter.
And let us not forget the Indian soft power in the US politics. At the moment at least 43 Indo-Americans are either members of the US House of Representatives and Senate or serving as ministers/advisors in various capacities in the US legislature, various state departments and individual states across the US.
President Biden has at least 50 Indo-Americans in key positions around him. Kamala Harris tops the list which includes other prominent names such as Tulsi Gabbard and Nikki Hailey, former envoy to the United Nations.
All these names reflect the soft power that India wields abroad. This is what has actually blunted Pakistani narratives in Americas and Europe in general. These executives are an indirect source of the negative image projection that Pakistan gets abroad.
Same is the case in Canada, Australia, and Germany where Indian origin executives experts hold politically important positions.
This phenomenon hardly figured in the reckoning of Pakistan’s civil-military bureaucracy. They remained focused on conventional security and at the same time kept scapegoating failures and shortcomings by looking for the enemy abroad i.e. India,
They visibly failed in noticing the gradual rise of Indian diaspora and its role in the UK and USA in particular. And this is what has turned into a huge challenge for correcting Pakistan’s perception in the global arena.
