KARACHI:
One of the curses which Quaid referred to in his 1947 address was the cancer of corruption which we inherited from the British Raj. The colonial occupation used allotment of lands and titles to persuade the natives in collaborating and serving the Raj.
This insatiable greed of paid civil and uniformed elites was further promoted, instead of being contained, and became so predominant that the abuse had assumed the status of a perk gone berserk. What started as welfare for paid government employees — getting one subsidised plot for construction of a house — has become an obsession, threatening to destroy Islamabad and all major cities with reckless expansion. Successive military and civil governments which they nurtured through political engineering have made matters worse. The abuse became so predominant that the Islamabad High Court had to intervene by declaring most of these allotments’ irregular. What is unfortunate is that while the political leadership at the helm of Jinnah’s Muslim League left behind vast land holdings in India and chose to live and devote their lives to make Pakistan a modern democratic welfare state for all citizens, a few beneficiaries of the Raj had their own ulterior ambitions and selfish motives. Following the migration of the Muslims from India, the allotment of evacuee property left behind by an affluent Hindu population through fake claims, in nexus with few corrupt bureaucrats, created a novae rich class devoid of morals and ethics. This could have been contained if the political process had continued through free and fair elections and national reforms and development pursued as per Quaid’s vision.
Unfortunately, after Quaid’s demise, the forces that had worked for the Raj strengthened their hold on power. Today we have achieved strategic defence through our nuclear capability, but chaos, injustices and lack of ethics has destroyed us from within.
Malik Tariq Ali
Lahore
Published in The Express Tribune, September 1st, 2021.
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