Desperate situation

Random thoughts
by Dr A Q Khan

Faiz Ahmad Faiz was a great poet and a very sensitive one too. We can well imagine his feelings when he wrote:

Bedam hue beemar, dawa kyon nahin detey? / Tum kaisey masiha ho, shifa kyon nahin detey?

He was not a poet obsessed with sad stories about loved ones, but was sensitive to the pains of the common man. He must have seen, and felt, their agony, but was helpless to do anything about it. We all, in one way or another, suffer some kind of grief.

Dareen dunya kasey begham na bashad / Agar bashad, bani adam na bashad

(Nobody in this world is without grief; and if there is one, then he is not a human being.)

Our famous poet Ghalib expressed the difficulty of being human in the following words:

Bas ke dushwar hai har kaam ka aasaan hona / Aadmi ko bhi muyassar nahin insaan hona.

In Faiz’s time people were probably not subjected to the same problems faced by the public today. Those clever enough and dishonest enough don’t face such worries, as they prosper at the cost of the poor. They are the powerful ones who rule the nation. The only option left to the masses is to protest and demonstrate. Faiz did not limit himself to the lifeless and sick but demanded to know of the rulers why they were behaving like spectators rather than helping the masses to alleviate their sufferings.

At this time the poor are facing many problems–unemployment, spiralling prices, load-shedding and scarcity of items of daily necessity, to name but a few. Only the rich and corrupt can afford to live comfortably, while the poor struggle to make ends meet and find essential commodities. Load-shedding has forced factories, mills, shops, etc., to close for many hours, causing enormous losses to the national economy and high unemployment. The poor do not have generators and have no option but to sit out in the open to catch some fresh air (if there is a breeze) and to feed the mosquitoes with their meagre blood.

The prices of items of everyday use like gas, petrol, diesel, electricity, sugar, flour, are continuously being raised while those in power care naught about the agonies of the poor. How can they even imagine what it is like to be poor when the daily expenditures of the Presidency and Prime Minister’s House are almost Rs1.5 million and Rs1 billion has been reserved for foreign trips for the current fiscal year.

The only means by which the people can vent their anger is by blocking roads and burning tyres. Instead of initiating projects for producing electricity on a war footing, we are told to limit the use of electricity or not to use it at all. Non-essential projects like motorways, highways, flyovers and bridges are continued because these offer about 50 per cent of the budgeted cost as kickbacks. These kickbacks do not benefit the needy. When those who could afford to do so bought generators, the price of diesel was immediately raised; when they switched their cars to LNG, this immediately became scarce. While the poor run from pillar to post seeking relief, the elected representatives do nothing. Furthermore, the people are blamed for the woes of the nation.

Help is nowhere to be found.

The public should demand that the residences of the elected representatives should not be allowed to use electricity from normal lines or from generators until the people too get electricity. The public at large is least interested in lectures and discussions by so-called experts, analysts and intellectuals or in reports about “successful trips abroad” of the ruling elite. They want to see action to relieve their problems–i.e., reduction in prices of essential commodities and their easy availability. When they don’t get relief they may keep quiet, but the dissatisfaction festers like a sore.

Nature has its own rules and laws. There are those who support good and honest people and there are those who are opportunists and support the dishonest ones. The rich and well-to-do are not ignorant of the laws and religious injunctions, but they find it more attractive/profitable to follow the practice of Qarun who, though belonging to the tribe of Hazrat Musa (AS), was obsessed with accumulating wealth by any means. He did not pay any heed to Hazrat Musa’s advice and was eventually buried alive, together with all his wealth, by Almighty Allah. The laws of Allah never change. Even today we have examples of wealthy hoarders coming to an unexplained painful end. But people don’t learn from examples. They always assume nothing will happen to them.

The problem with wrongdoers is they have selective and short memories. They choose to forget what happened to the powerful and extremely rich Shah of Iran and Marcos of the Philippines in the relatively recent past. At the time of their deaths, neither of them could find even two metres of land for burial in their own homelands and all their billions could do nothing for them. Individuals die and their wealth is fought over and squandered by their heirs. Honest and pious (God-fearing) people spend their wealth on the poor during their lifetimes, which benefits the public for many generations.

As an example we have Queen Zubaida, wife of Khalifa Harun-al-Rashid, who had a freshwater canal built from Baghdad to Mecca. After more than a thousand years, people are still benefiting from it. Look at the various educational institutes and hospitals built by philanthropists on the subcontinent, which have been providing excellent services for the benefit of the people for decades. These are factual examples. The Holy Quran and the Hadiths are full of such relevant advice. However, the poor remain mere spectators. They know that it makes little difference to them who their rulers are–they are all of a kind.

About 30 years ago, the president of a famous German multinational visited us regularly and we had excellent business relations with them. They visited Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Peshawar, Murree and other places. One day he asked me why it was that so many Pakistan rulers and senior bureaucrats were always travelling to the West, saw the development and excellent management practices there, yet did not manage to make any difference in the backwardness and underdevelopment of the country. I told him his remark reminded me of a saying by the famous Persian saint Shaikh Saadi (RA) of Iran, which would aptly answer his query:

Khar-e-Isa agar ba Makka rawad
Chun bi aayad hunuz khar bashad

(Even if Hazrat Isa’s donkey went to Makka many times, on its return it would still be the same donkey.)

The situation in Pakistan is desperate and there is not much hope for improvement.

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