With an explosive increase in the population, people’s lives have become harder in terms of livelihood and access to education, healthcare, and clean drinking water. They have developed an acute sense of apathy and have resigned themselves to living in poverty and misery, tolerating backbreaking hardships.
They live in awe and fear of the state’s coercive power. Their fundamental rights are trampled upon; their constitutional needs are callously ignored, but nothing moves them to protest. Is this the proverbial stillness before a tempest, or have they completely lost hope in the political leadership and the benevolence of the state?
Governmental allocations to social sectorsnespecially education, healthcare, housing, and public welfare development projects, have not registered any perceptible increase. Poverty has spiked; serfdom in the agriculture sector remains very much intact; the mortality rate in children, to our utmost shame, remains high compared to other countries in the region; education and human development remain the lowest priorities of the ruling elite; over 22 million children aged 5–15 are out of school; and over 20,000 primary and secondary schools in Sindh, completely or partially destroyed by the last floods, have not been made functional.
The tyranny of the police, with an increasing number of fake encounters killing or maiming persons in custody, shamefully involving senior officers of the DIG level, continues to stare us in the face. Democracy has turned into a farce and has effectively been replaced by oppressive autocracy, with the most powerful institution in the country pulling the strings from behind in matters of governance. The so-called mainstream political parties have accepted playing second fiddle in any political dispensation. The former Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi says he was allowed to act only as an employee and not as the chief executive of the country. This is what happened to Imran Khan. How shameful!
The economy of the country has been dependent on foreign aid and borrowing. No meaningful land reforms were carried out to ameliorate the condition of landless peasants and farmers. The land reforms of Ayub Khan and Z. A. Bhutto were an eyewash.
The industrial development witnessed in the Ayub era concentrated the wealth of the nation and productive capital resources into a few dynasties, bringing about no change in the lives of the common populace. The nationalisation scheme of Bhutto, though aimed at the welfare of the common man, proved a disaster. The private sector never recovered from this sudden and jolting shock.
There is no security threat to the country from anywhere except from our elite
The public-sector enterprises established by successive regimes are in a moribund condition and continue to accumulate circular debt. No regime has shown the guts to privatise these sick and loss-incurring enterprises. Our tax-to-GDP ratio is the lowest in the region, and tax collection has always been marred by lethargy, corruption, and bureaucratic incompetence. The country keeps accumulating foreign debt without any drastic cuts to overhead governmental expenditure. There is always an army of ministers, advisors, and special assistants, each with the protocol of a medieval king.
There has been no check on the growth of the bureaucracy. No regime has ever taken the galloping growth of the population seriously. While mouths to feed keep increasing, the productive capacity and resources of the country have been alarmingly shrinking. Data collection for planning and economic and social development has received scant attention from all regimes, irrespective of their complexion. Patchwork has been the order of the day.
The last two to three years have been an era of utmost despair and disillusionment. It seems the country is under siege from within. Voices of dissent are throttled; the media remains suppressed; political gerrymandering has scaled dizzying heights; and leaders of a defiant political party, from top to mid-ranking activists, have been subjected to the worst state coercion, with hundreds of criminal and terrorist cases registered against them in every nook and cranny of the country. We witnessed enforced disappearances of its activists and their sudden appearances in stage-managed press conferences to announce their disassociation from their party.
We have witnessed such coercive state power in the past, too, which, in the final analysis, backfired, and the suppressed political parties re-emerged like a phoenix and regained political power. No sane mind would think that the result this time would be different. But what can one do about our security establishment’s obsession with repeating absurd experiments to retain its supremacy in the political governance of the country?
This country has suffered a great deal at the hands of our elite. There is no security threat to the country from anywhere except from our elite. They are picking at its body like vultures. They have eaten its flesh and bones to satisfy their acquisitive and instinctive obsession with the accumulation of power and wealth. There is nothing left in this country for the common man.
The elite have their own separate schools, separate elite hospitals, separate sprawling housing schemes. Their children go for higher studies in famous universities around the world and settle abroad or return to take over the political heritage and industrial enterprises of their forefathers, enjoying power and wealth.
There is an unholy alliance between the establishment, bureaucracy, political dynasties, landed gentry, industrialists, and traders. They support and sustain one another in the loot and plunder of state resources. According to a UNDP report, some 6% of our GDP (300 billion US dollars) is devoured annually by the elite in undeserved concessions, facilities and privileges.
Let us keep hoping against hope. I believe that political ideals are bound to have the final victory over the sword; democracy over autocracy; people’s power over dictatorship; freedom over suppression; justice over oppression; and truth over falsehood. This is the hope that reanimates my faith in the country. But public apathy is the ruin of a nation.