Shameless elite

The power that comes with being part of the elite creates a situation where the rich can get away with anything while the poor are imprisoned and taken off the streets on the flimsiest of pretexts. This great divide is being felt more than ever in Pakistan. A very small manifestation of it is the incident involving former Senate chairman Nayyar Bukhari and his son. The two men roughed up a police officer who tried to search them before allowing them entry to the Islamabad district courts. Even though CCTV footage of the incident exists, the PPP’s opposition leader Khursheed Shah said the incident is ‘needlessly’ being made into an issue and bar associations have come out in favour of Bukhari. Just last month, the wife of a NAB official had the staff at a beauty salon in Karachi beaten up because she suspected them of theft. There too action was only taken because security camera footage emerged. This is the consequence of tolerating an elite – be it political, bureaucratic, feudal or industrial – that has come to believe, with much justification, that the rules do not apply to them, nor do the simple norms of human decency.

The VIP culture in Pakistan goes far beyond handing privileges like protocol, exemptions from the law and a sense of entitlement. It can – and has – cost lives. When every politician demands a motorcade and the closure of roads so they can feed their outsized egos, ambulances end up being stuck and patients die. Last year, there was a brief furore when a young girl could not be taken hospital and died because Bilawal Zardari had decided his security needs were greater than the public’s right to movement. Yet the controversy died down after a few days and nothing changed. CM’s Shahbaz Sharif’s daughter and son-in-law had an employee at a bakery beaten up – and what happened? In this age of social media we are more aware than ever of how the elite treat the country as their fiefdom and its people as their personal slaves, but there are still no consequences for such blatant lawlessness. Are the elite waiting for a ‘slave revolt’ to correct them?