Good foresight is very important for successful leading of a nation. Sadly, soon after the no confidence motion against Imran Khan, the national leadership allied under the PDM banner could evince no understanding of where to take the country.
Shahbaz Sharif was as brash in taking the top position as he was foolish to keep it going. He was filled with some divine purpose of liberating the nation from the throes of underdevelopment, poverty and all that was wrong with us.
How could have he succeeded in turning the fortunes of the nation since his himself was a questionable conduct. He was no leader with a vision or with a quality for statesmanship. He was a poor clown who was very bad at the act of playing funny tricks. He was always a jugular. This time around too he thought that he will juggle his way out of the national crises and emerge as the saviour centaur of Pakistani nation. Somebody should have had advised him that better men before him had tried and failed.
The state of the country right now is like a rod that has been pushed so beyond its plastic capacities that it is going to break anytime now. There is no sense of order in the country. There is no one to take the leadership role. There is no one to come forward and act like a statesman. There is no one who could offer a compromise. The military establishment has receded into the coop to see if it can lay any more eggs. The wolfs of the unhinged markets coupled with state power are roaming the streets while bleeding dry the strength of a waning economy.
There is no sign that multilateral creditors will come to our aid. There is no indication that the King will be generous again. There is pressure piling up on the Western border since we were too dumb to understand that we had a position of strength after defeating and routing the TTP. We squandered that opportunity to hammer out a surrender from them. And now they are at our throats again strong-arming us into giving them undue concessions at the border regions.
What a mad world we live in!
People are dying every other day in flour stampedes. The current coalition government has passed all the limits of violating the sanctity of human dignity. It has failed to successfully distribute flour among the people. What could be more disheartening than this, that our governments do not have the capacity to successfully organize a flour distribution campaign?
It is a long-time tactic of the cheapest political group to ever come on the stage of Pakistani politics. They distribute free food and give jobs for political gain, thinking that they are building a nation. PMLN and their likes have normalized such an atrocious pattern of human and infrastructure development that the state of Pakistan is stuck in the middle of a muddle where the only way out seems is falling down and being carried off by any kind-hearted rescuer.
There is no sense of leadership left in the strongest institutions as well. They play such a convenient and outstanding role for themselves that nobody in uniform concerns themselves with the general state of life that people lead in Pakistan. They, too, need to have a session of introspection where they must realize that their power is trust of the people of Pakistan into them and not a license to act the bully of the street.
How come they can resort to such acts of wanton privacy breaches, bullying, kidnappings, fake FIRs and false cases, and unhinged beatings of the people in custody beyond the shame of human imagination? What got into these people? Where is their mission of protecting the national ideology? Where is their mission of helping and protecting the weak? Where is their mission of protecting selflessly the nation of Pakistan?
They must understand that their methods have brought more death and destruction to this country than India could have possibly done in a hundred years. They must understand that they are not as smart as they think they are. Their support for political families and dynasties of the country has eaten away at the foundations of the country.
Our culture is in shambles, our society is in shambles, our economy is in shambles, our politics is in shambles, our national coherence is in shambles, our relations with our neighbours are in shambles, our state of infrastructure is in shambles, our state of security is in shambles, our state of human development is in shambles, our state of education is worse than being in shambles, and above all our people are hungry, frustrated, angry and hopeless.
Such a situation is not helpful for democracy and development. Political class along with all the other faces of ruling elite have failed to identify with the poor of the country. They have failed to recognise the need for development, peace, satisfaction of the basic human condition and the protection of human dignity. They have pushed the country to the precipice. It is a long fall to the bottom. All belongings will be lost during the fall and coming on hard ground will end our fantasy of being invulnerable.
There is a storm gathering from all sides. Our leadership is fiddling while the country is burning. In the same way that you cannot expect a thief to be honest, you cannot expect a swordsman to act like a politician and vice versa. It is such a tragedy that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, established after so many sacrifices and for so elevated purposes is seeing its people fight in the mud for a few kilos of flour. Our lives are tragic; our circumstances are tragic; our hopes have met with tragedy; our effort have met with tragedy. Will there come a saint who will dress our wounds and soothe our seething hearts or are we condemned to be always in the lowest hell of the dustbin of history?
There is still time.