The Economic Times
How May the Curtain Fall on Pakistan’s Political Circus?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
It’s hard to call it by any other name. What’s currently going on in Pakistan is a veritable circus, with a variety of stunts and antics and, no doubt at all, a plethora of risible acts of jocularity.
The antics and stunts come, day and night, from the clutch of political scamps, gathered under the canopy of PDM—an assortment of 13 political parties—headed by Shahbaz Sharif. In any law-abiding polity with democratic moorings, this man and his son, lording over Punjab, the largest province of Pakistan, would have been serving long sentences in a prison. But thanks to his peerless capacity to kowtow to those going around in Pakistan’s arcane political culture under the sobriquet of ‘kingmakers’, Shahbaz is the man picked up to lead a nation of 220 million people.
In ten weeks since Imran Khan (IK) was ousted the Shahbaz regime has burdened the people of Pakistan with loads of unprecedented price hikes—of basic commodities and essential utilities—besides crushing them under an avalanche of all kinds of direct and indirect taxes.
Behaving like churlish, unrehearsed, clowns, Shahbaz and his largely uncouth minions of the cabinet, have been jumping all over the space in the circus whenever the ring masters holler a demand or crack the whip. The most risible spectacle of this inane performance is the national budget, for the next fiscal year, presented to the parliament, last June 24. No debate has been held on the budget—because there’s no opposition due to PTI’s boycott of the Assembly—but changes, geared to burden the people of Pakistan with an incessant barrage of price hikes and increased taxes.
Miftah Ismael, the jocular stuntman masquerading as the financial czar of the Shahbaz clique of rogues, has emerged as the principal clown of the circus. He’s taking dictation, unabashedly, from IMF, not just on daily basis but sometime hourly. But IMF isn’t done with him or Pakistan, yet. In the latest command coming out from its glassy palace in Washington, is a call to Pakistan to ‘do more.’
The budget must be passed according to the specifications from IMF or, else, Pakistan will not be given the two tranches—7th and 8 th—of the six-year program of support promised to Pakistan in 2019 when IK was in control. Shahbaz had been promoted by his local, Khaki, handlers as being the man with a golden touch. But in the ten weeks that this clown has been calling the shots in the circus, he has made a hash of Pakistan’s economy.
IK had left office with a sterling performance in economic management. Pakistan’s exports were booming—to the tune of 32 billion dollars in the last fiscal year. Remittances from overseas Pakistanis, fond of IK and eager to lend him a helping hand, had ballooned to 31 billion dollars. Overall, Pakistan’s economy was galloping ahead at the rate of 6 percent growth, annually. It was an extraordinary achievement, given the blanket of Covid-induced depression, in most economies of the world, including the highly developed ones, too.
In two months of this cabal thrust over the people of Pakistan, the economy has tanked. The foreign exchange reserves—standing at a healthy 18 billion dollars when IK was forced out—have dipped down to around 8 billion dollars. The Pakistani rupee—which had a par value of 180 to one US dollar—has plummeted to its lowest ebb, with a par ration of rupees 215 to one US dollar.
All economic indicators are sounding alarm bells. Pakistan is close to defaulting on its international obligations and debt servicing. It’s edging closer, by the day, to the kind of precipice that has knocked the bottom out of Sri Lankan economy and plunged it into an unprecedented calamity.
A long summer is ahead of the Pakistanis, but its natural misery is going to be compounded, manifold, by the sheer myopia of an incompetent government thrust on them. Long and enervating power blackouts have become a norm in all major cities of Pakistan, not to mention smaller cities and villages. But instead of providing succor and relief to a harassed populace, the bunch of nincompoops are, instead, serving warnings to the people to brace for longer power outages because this corrupt and self-serving cabal has been unable to procure shipments of badly needed LNG from any source. Shahbaz has thrown up his hands but makes no apologies for his criminal failure on this account.
Misery heaped over suffering, compounded by blatant disregard of their basic interests, is what the people of Pakistan have in their basket from what they decry, with one voice, as a nincompoop government.
Who has imposed this bone-corrupt cabal of carpet-baggers on the people of Pakistan is, by now, an open secret. It’s the ubiquitous clique of Bonaprtes of the ‘establishment’ who are better known in the outside world as Pakistan’s ‘deep state’ or ‘state-within-the-state.’
IK was found to be too independent and self-asserting to the taste of the Khakis. They were used to the likes of Nawaz and Zardari, bone-corrupt but unquestioningly loyal and submissive to diktats. A clean as a whistle IK, self-confident and competent to hold his own on any stage, national or international, local or global, wasn’t going to be a lapdog. Hence, his falling from favor.
Now, the incompetent clique dressed up as rulers, are well on course to make Pakistan a perennial basket-case. They have lived up to what was expected of them.
But IK is still uncontrollable. He’s perched on the highest trapeze of the circus and is keen to carry through with his high-wire act. He has to his comfort a safety net underneath: the safety-net of public approbation, of unremitting popular support.
How would the curtain fall on this macabre circus?
It’s either that the ringmasters would bring the circus down themselves or the popular uproar of a harried spectators, fed up to their eye-balls, would draw the curtain. And it wouldn’t be long before the curtain comes down. - K_K_ghori@hotmail.com
(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
