The mill of death

The mill of poverty grinds its subjects so finely that no attempt to exploit and oppress them goes unaccomplished

Though the cereal humans grind and consume sustains lives through energy supplies, its access grinds human lives and, in the worst cases, consumes them too. This turns out to be an ugly reality in societies where the cost of staple foodstuff exceeds that of life. Our country is one such example where life is turning out to be a white elephant for the systematically deprived population. To this end, the carefully crafted mill of poverty grinds its subjects so finely that no attempt of their exploitation and oppression goes unaccomplished.

Therefore, life in our country might be a paradisiacal undertaking for some; the same is an insufferable experience for others. The less fortunate wrestle and overcome one tragedy, only to be welcomed by another waiting in the wings. They experience a living hell. This partition between the earthly hell and heaven is hardly a ‘divine tragedy’. Instead, this stratification is a systematic construction led by the powerful enigmatically encroaching on the country’s stakes and resources for seven and half decades now.

The chronically seated glutinous elite has reduced the poor people to worthless entities through their extractive and exploitative policies. After successfully depriving the poor of the necessities, the status quo is bent on depriving the masses of the flour — the only staple they dedicate their long struggle for. The backbreaking inflation has been making the lives, the only possession of the poor, unsustainable.

The queue Harsingh Kolhi stood in was his lifeline because it was through that this he could have afforded a bag of flour for his seven hunger-stricken children. However, what he didn’t know was that this line would also lead him to the same fate that he might meet if he didn’t stand in it — death. He reluctantly breathed his last because of a stampede in a subsidised wheat flour setting in Mirpukhas, Sindh. His death-dealing struggle nevertheless earned his children a bag of flour that could be seen lying beside his corpse in heart-wrenching pictures making rounds on various social media platforms.

Harsingh isn’t the only soul to be consumed by the circumstances generated by poverty; millions of people grind in the mill of death operated by the country’s hybrid greedy magpies. For the destitute, life has been so much expensive in these inflationary times that they risk their lives for even one time meal as a win-win bargain or extinguish lives altogether. Would any policymaker or economic tsar please help understand how a poor earning 500 bucks a day can make his living in this hyper-inflationary time where a kg of staple wheat flour costs over 150 rupees?

Where’s the media? Where are the so-called social workers and human rights organisations? Where are the very factions and personalities who had taken inflation as a ploy to ascend to power by ousting the last government? Where are religious parties who boast being the champions of Islamic teachings and fundamental human rights? Where are the so-called defenders of rights and the dispensers of justice? Isn’t killing the people from hunger an injustice? Aren’t the poor the humans and Pakistanis? Shouldn’t they have the only right to life, let alone the luxuries? But who cares? Whosesoever, voice counts have retired to silence for their shares in the callous status quo. For what they care about is the ‘share’ they claim and own. Since they are the beneficiaries of status quo, they are unlikely to challenge it regardless of morality, legality, constitutionality and assigned ethical considerations.

Unless challenged through people’s enlightenment, the destitute public plight would keep on serving the stakes of the aristocracy through notorious notions fabricated around democracy, falsified mandates, constitutionalism, religiosity and jingoism in place for over seven and half decades now.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 15^th, 2023.

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