The ruling mafia is rubbing salt into the wounds of the farmers growing a bumper crop by its refusal to buy the home-grown wheat from those who toiled hard in their fields against an unfriendly climate of no-support from the government

 

Scandals Galore Pakistan!
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

 

It can’t be ‘the Land of the Pure’ if there isn’t a scandal or two stalking Pakistan’s landscape.

But before getting down to the nitty-gritty of the latest scandals making the headlines in the news media—and much more than mere headlines in Pakistan’s vibrant social media—let’s just focus on what could easily be the joke of the decades, if not the century.

Addressing the passing out parade at the Pakistan Air Force Academy at Risalpur last week, General Asim Munir asserted that the army knew its Constitutional limitations. He didn’t stop at that bragging but went on to hector that he and his army expected ‘others’ to know their limits, too!

It’s ironic, also risible in the extreme, for the head honcho of the institution that has been making a mockery of the law of the land—the Constitution—and brazenly and consistently violating it for the past seven decades. Asim Munir must be delusional to expect the world to believe his saintly piety and innocence in as far as the Pakistan Constitution is concerned. But the world isn’t a mute spectator like the Pakistani news media, browbeaten into silence by the general and his cohorts.

It’s precisely the military-implanted gang of bone-corrupt political actors—in place since the military-engineered and orchestrated downfall of Imran Khan (IK)—that’s at the heart of the latest ‘Wheat Scandal’ that has a basically agrarian Pakistan’s farmers up in arms.

Pakistan is a wheat-growing land. Wheat constitutes the lion’s share of Pakistani farming. The crop just harvested, in April, with the onset of spring has lived up to agricultural experts’ expectations. It’s a bumper crop.

However, corrupt politicians of the type patronized by the military junta of Pakistan are in politics to make money and loot the country’s resources to line their own pockets.

So, the ball on the wheat scandal was set rolling when the Shehbaz Sharif government—installed in power, courtesy of IK-baiting military ‘Establishment’—ignoring the experts’ advice toyed with the idea of importing wheat from abroad to avert a ‘presumed shortage’ in the country. But PDM-1, as Shehbaz government’s first foray into governance is known in Pakistan parlance—didn’t quite finish the process of hoodwinking the people of Pakistan and blatantly cheating the Pakistani farmers.

What was left undone by PDM-1 was quickly taken to the finish line by the caretakers succeeding it—again, of course, with the blessings of the omniscient ‘Establishment.’

The caretakers decided, on their own, that wheat needed to be imported from Ukraine, which country has loomed large in the drama staged to upend the IK government. It was IK’s neutrality in the Russian-Ukraine war that had angered the guardian power of Pakistani Bonapartes. They acted quickly to please their masters and orchestrated IK’s toppling from his pedestal of power.

So, promoting the pro-Ukraine agenda of their masters-in-uniform, the caretakers decided, in Cabinet, on October 15, 2023, to import 2.7 million tons of wheat from Ukraine, at a cost of 250 billion rupees.

But the whiff of scandal quickly leaked into the air when the ship laden with Ukrainian wheat landed at the Karachi port, on October 21—within a mere six days. Normally, a ship takes 3 to 4 weeks to cover the distance from Ukraine to Karachi. It didn’t take a genius to infer that the order for shipment was placed at least two weeks before the Cabinet formally started the charade.

PDM-2—the title of the Shehbaz government whose rise has been engineered, once again, by the Bonapartes who doctored the outcome of the February 8 Elections to rob the people of Pakistan’s vociferous mandate in favor of IK—added on to the misery of Pakistani farmers by authorizing a further shipment of 700,000 tons of Ukrainian wheat, with a price tag of 80 billion rupees.

So, in all, 3.3 million tons of Ukrainian wheat was imported at a cost of 330 billion rupees, which translated into 1.1 billion dollars, at a time when Pakistan was strapped of foreign exchange and was begging IMF for its last tranche of a 3 billion dollar package of loan. The mafia of mega-corrupt politicians lording over Pakistan and making a mockery of every democratic institution has inflicted a colossal loss of precious money on a Pakistan teetering on the verge of economic collapse.

It isn’t the vocal social media but the hamstrung mainstream media buzzing with comments from political pundits saying that someone in the ruling mafia made a cool 25 billion rupees, in kickbacks or commissions, on the Ukrainian wheat deal!

To add insult to injury, the wheat imported from Ukraine is unfit, according to agricultural experts, for human consumption. But that doesn’t bother the corrupt masters who have spawned this scandal. The welfare of the people of Pakistan is the least of their priorities. Of course, as well-known, categorically, to any pundit of Pakistani politics, the ruling elite of the country is into the game only for the purpose of making money.

The ruling mafia is not content only with adding insult to injury. It’s rubbing salt into the wounds of the farmers growing a bumper crop by its refusal to buy the home-grown wheat from those who toiled hard in their fields against an unfriendly climate of no-support from the government.

It’s a double-edged sword being used to harass the wheat farmers: not only the government is reluctant to buy their bumper crop but is also haggling over the price of the wheat. IK, on his watch, had been generous and munificent in mandating a purchase price that more than compensated the farmer. The mafia, complicit with the Bonapartes in his downfall, has no grain of sympathy for the toiling farmer.

Not to mention the hands-on Pakistani social media—which has been rightly critical of the ruling mafia’s foot-dragging in the scandal—but the military-harassed mainstream media of the country seems to be breaking its shackles by voicing its concern for the hard-pressed farmers. It’s the mainstream media that has blown the cover from the scandal, in the first place, and also disclosed the unsuitability of the imported wheat for consumption.

The farmers who came out on the streets of Lahore were beaten up, in a show of force, by the trigger-happy, baton-wielding Punjab Police. But the farmers have refused to be intimidated and their council has given a call for a country-wide farmers’ agitation, come May 10.

All bets are off as to how this unprecedented agitation of those thought to be at the backbone of Pakistan’s agriculture-dominated economy will play out.

But there’s another scandal in the making at the level of the apex court of Pakistan.

The incumbent Chief Justice, Faez Isa, is seen by most pundits as being overtly friendly to the ‘Establishment,’ with whom he shares an ambition to stay in power—and limelight—for as long as possible. The air in Pakistani chattering lobbies has been thick with gossip, and guesstimates, that Faez Isa has his heart set—as is the case with General Asim Munir—to somehow wangle an extension in his tenure from the power brokers.

However, in the course of presiding over a review of his own 2019 verdict in the infamous 2017 Faizabad Dharna or Sit-in—which had paralyzed the capital city of Islamabad for three long weeks under siege engineered by a raucous religious party—Faez Isa has unambiguously pointed the finger of blame on the military leadership. His turn-around must give sleepless nights to those-in-uniform presumed to be on the same page with him.

CJ Faez Isa, in the course of publicly-televised hearings and deliberations of the bench presided over by him, angrily lashed out at the Commission tasked with probing the bizarre drama staged for three weeks by the ultra-conservative and orthodox TLP (Tehreek Labbaik Pakistan) and accused it of whitewashing General Faiz Hameed’s involvement in the sit-in. Gen Faiz Hameed was, at that time, second-in-command of Pakistan’s shady intelligence outfit, the notorious ISI.

Faiz Hameed is suspected of playing a pivotal role in inducing and encouraging the aficionados of ultra-hawkish TLP to stage that raucous protest against the then-in-power government, led by Nawaz Sharif, who has since become a protégé of the establishment.

It’s too early to predict a black-and-white, categorical, outcome of the drama on this score being played out in the Supreme Court of Pakistan. But early straws in the air do hint at a dramatic change in the political ambiance of the country.

Watching all this unfolding scenario from his cell in the Adiala Jail of Rawalpindi is Pakistan’s most prominent political prisoner, IK. He must derive comfort from any parting of ways between his principal tormentors—the power-addicted establishment and its complicit judiciary. Tea- leaves readers may have a lot to ponder over and cogitate. All is most certainly not well in the Kingdom of Denmark. A lot is obviously rotten and stinking. - K_K_ghori@hotmail.com

(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)