KARACHI:
The emergence of a scandalous video, showing MPAs from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province receiving bundles of currency notes, allegedly for March 2018 Senate elections, just a month before the elections to the upper house raises many questions about the timings of this leakage. While it casts aspersions about the morality of those receiving and giving the money, it also exposes the total lack of ethics of those who have for years been involved in manipulating elections in Pakistan and their role in bringing into disrepute the political process. That our election process has lost credibility goes without saying. We are, in fact, reaping the harvest for betraying the vision of our beloved Quaid, Muhammad Ali Jinnahh.
For a country, created through a democratic political struggle, led by politicians of integrity and character, it was a stab in the back of the Founding Fathers and their vision of a modern democratic welfare state to witness the remnants of colonial occupation who put in place a concocted and perverted authoritarian system in the guise of basic democracy. Such people have, since independence, embarked on a mission to reverse all that Jinnah had planned. We have lost half the country and our economy is in a shambles because of such crude individuals.
Thousands of our valiant soldiers have embraced martyrdom in order to rid this country of Zia’s legacy of terrorism and extremism. Even after decades, the seeds of extremism sown by the terrorists given refuge on our soil haunt this country.
Malik Tariq Ali
Lahore
Published in The Express Tribune, February 12th, 2021.
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