many contracts are at stake?
The GHQ may have bitten off more than it can chew. Zardari cooling off his heels in Emirates Hills sends out a wrong message to two constituencies: the rank-and-file and the public at large. For the GHQ, time is of the essence.
The PPP is down as well as out. Zardari has done to the PPP what the boots could not over the past three decades. Voters between Rawalpindi and Multan, with a hundred National Assembly seats, are not buying what the PPP is selling – martyrdoms and jail terms. Voters between Multan and Rahim Yar Khan, with four-dozen National Assembly seats, once a PPP stronghold, are also not buying what the PPP is selling.
The only region where Bilawal may have impact is the voters between Sukkur and Thatta (that region has some three-dozen National Assembly seats; low literacy and high poverty). To be certain, the PPP being down and out is not a good omen for the PML-N.
The Government of Pakistan, in the meanwhile, let 19 more of its citizens die from a hundred year old, grossly under-maintained, criminally neglected railway infrastructure. The Government of Pakistan is letting 5,000 of its own citizens die every year from traffic accidents; 5,000 more die from terrorism every year; 2,000 more die every other year from floods; 1,500 died in the heatwave and a thousand more from factory fires every year. None of this has anything to do with nature. These are all preventable deaths.
Budget 2015-16 allocated a colossal Rs326 billion for the “running of the civil government”. But, the government is letting its citizens die, blaming the deaths as nature’s will. If the affairs of the Government of Pakistan are to be run by nature then might as well save the Rs326,000,000,000.
Someone intelligent once said, “I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts”.
The writer is a columnist based in Islamabad. Email: farrukh15hotmail.com.
Twitter: saleemfarrukh