KARACHI:
The insatiable greed of the powerful elite has brought Pakistan to the brink of economic collapse. Blaming external enemies is a futile exercise. It is just a lazy excuse and offers no remedy. We alone are to be blamed. Economic structural changes can save Pakistan with direct taxation on all sources of income with no exceptions or subsidies to commercial cartels irrespective of who owns them.
Undoubtedly, the main culprits are those who derailed Pakistan from Jinnah’s vision in the mid-50s. Due to their actions, today we are bearing the consequences in the form of a shattered economy and a worsening security situation. As a nation, we need to understand that either Quaid was right that Pakistan should be a modern democratic welfare state with no political role for paid bureaucracy or the narrative given by the political pygmies created through political engineering. Even the humiliation of defeat and surrender in 1971 does not seem enough.
Pakistan was created for the welfare of the Muslim majority and citizens of other faiths to live in peace and harmony as equal citizens free from economic exploitation and bias of the Hindutva ideology, which has manifested its brutality in Modi’s India. Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the pioneers of the All-India Muslim League struggled to free us from the yoke of the British Raj and Hindu supremacist and not to replace it with elite capture by a few. The Raj established cantonments on the periphery of every city to quell any uprising for independence. Pakistan should not be a cantonment state nor a haven for the real estate mafia with rapid uncontrolled urbanisation converting green agriculture pastures to concrete jungles.
Malik Tariq Ali
Lahore
Published in The Express Tribune, February 10th, 2023.
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