Over the past two decades, the CNIC has come to underpin all aspects of Pakistani life. Many have been reinstated but, as of March 2020, more than 150,000 identities remained suspended. In October 2016, NADRA revealed that it had been blocking an average of 225 CNICs every day since September 2013 - throwing, by that count, a grand total of nearly 660,000 lives into chaos. Gulzar’s predicament wasn’t an aberration. She could not survive without state support. “I walk two steps and I’m out of breath,” she told me. The infection festered, curdling into sepsis and debilitating her for life.
Years ago, she had been bitten by a pair of dogs. A widow who barely makes ends meet by cleaning rich people’s houses, she grapples with a number of long-term health conditions. The letter instructed Gulzar to visit a government office three miles away. In official NADRA parlance, it had been “digitally impounded.” Then, all three of Gulzar’s sons followed, along with a brother in Lahore. Quickly, her eldest daughter realized that her ID card had been suspended as well.
#NICOP WIN TO FLASH FREE#
Her cell phone stopped working and she was unable to access welfare programs that provided food rations, state-subsidized medicines and free schooling for her children.
Life is usually difficult for Gulzar, but NADRA’s decision to suspend her computerized national ID card (CNIC) made it impossible to do things most people take for granted. For the rest of the year, she fights off threats of eviction from Islamabad’s municipal authorities, staring down bulldozers dispatched to raze her house. She spends the monsoon months muttering Quranic verses, praying that the water rising in the garbage-choked sewers nearby will not wash her home away. She didn’t know it then, but the news would turn her life upside down and leave her living in fear for years to come.įifty-three years old and a mother to nine children, with a voice prone to swelling indignantly when launching into a story, Gulzar has lived in an informal settlement in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad for the past 40 years. That was the summer when, with the War on Terror as a dramatic backdrop, a woman named Gulzar Bibi received a letter from NADRA informing her that her ID card had been blocked. In response, a nationwide identity “reverification” campaign was launched to root out foreigners posing as citizens, forcing 180 million people to prove that they were, in fact, Pakistani.
#NICOP WIN TO FLASH REGISTRATION#
But he was survived by a shiny piece of mint green plastic, retrieved from the car’s charred remains: an identity card issued by Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) that identified him as Muhammad Wali, a Pakistani citizen.įor Pakistan’s government, the discovery that the leader of the Afghan Taliban had acquired this supposedly secure and unforgeable form of identification was a source of great embarrassment.
Mansour was killed in an instant, his death now a footnote to America’s 20-year misadventure in Afghanistan. In this collection of pieces, Coda Story’s inaugural Bruno fellow, Alizeh Kohari takes a deep dive into the benefits and pitfalls of Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority. To critics, they are overarching, inflexible and reflect what people in power believe society should look like, not what it actually is. According to governments and the organizations behind them, they provide safety and social security to millions.
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