The E-Sylum:  Volume 6, Number 27, July 6, 2003, Article 20

BUYING VOTES WITH COUNTERFEITS

  Bill Spengler writes: "I enjoyed your anecdote in the last
  E-Sylum about the Vietnamese man being paid off in
  counterfeit bills and, again, it reminded me of an analogous
  incident in my own experience.

  While I was serving in the 1960's as American Consul in
  Peshawar, in the wild and woolly Pushtun country of Pakistan's
  North-West Frontier Province, a tribal leader and friend of
  mine (call him Yaqub Shah) was engaged in a close electoral
  contest for a seat in the National Assembly.  It was an "indirect
  election" in which only locally chosen electors voted.  To clinch
  his victory, Yaqub went around to electors in his constituency
  -- many of them "maliks" or local tribal leaders -- the night
  before the election and purchased their votes for 500 rupees
  each in crisp, new 100 rupee notes.  It was not until the
  election was over the next day that the recipients discovered
  that their bills were bogus, skillfully counterfeited in
  unadministered tribal territory in the mountains outside
  Peshawar -- where tribesmen also replicate foreign firearms
  complete with the original manufacturers' marks and serial
  numbers!

  Needless to say, Yaqub won the election by a solid margin.
  And the bilked Pushtun tribesmen, inherently capable of
  taking a joke, just laughed it off.  I reported the incident
  back to Washington in a tongue-in-cheek dispatch entitled
  "The Present Price of Maliks".  As I recall, 500 rupees at
  the time were worth about US $25, a princely sum to a
  malik.  What a bogus bill would have cost I have no idea.
  Such was fun in the Foreign Service."

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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