People could be seen queuing up in the in front on fair price shops and utility stores for a bag of flour are the reminiscent of the days before the French Revolution and eye opener for our society and particularly the rulers.
On Friday, I waited before a shop selling subsidized flour for nearly an hour to see what kind of agony these people are passing through for an essential food item and most of the people who were either labourers or low income people. They stood there oblivious of calls for the Friday prayers engrossed in their thoughts and it was visible from their faces that they were thinking that they would be able to took some flour to their houses or not.
While coming back I heard the sermons from the mosques’ loudspeakers and most of the prayer leaders were engaged discussing of importance of sacrifice in Islam.
The ironical situation forced me to laugh, like the proverbial Urdu, “maroon ko mary shah madar,” our Ulema were preaching sacrifice to those poor people who couldn’t meet two ends.
My mind took me back to the food riots which culminated in French Revolution and were also a result of such situation. When the ruling elites continued to press the poor masses to an extreme that they were not able to bear they revolted and destroyed the whole system which was bent on squeezing them beyond their circumstances allowed and in this process also destroyed themselves.
Our land of pure has witnessed several scams during the five years rule of the PMLQ including the sugar scam, stock market scam and the flour scam to name a few.
The flour crisis is hitting the masses twice this year, during the holy month of Ramzan the flour crisis hit the general public and now again this monster has hit back in its ugly shape. The most important aspect of this crisis is that the total disregards of the rulers for the poor people and this is dangerous indicator of the extremes the rulers are taking in this country.
At the one hand the rulers are constructing heavens on earth like the Crescent Bay, Water Front and Diamond Bar Island city projects in the midst of slums and at the same time are denying the opportunity to the people to fill their stomach twice a day.
The sprawling DHAs across the country, high rises residential complexes, shopping malls and a ruthless new bourgeoisie class are acting as a catalyst in the polarization between the haves and have nots in this country.
A crazy Machiavellian junta of bureaucrats, politicians, general and feudal is riding on the necks of the people of this land like the Sind Bad’s ‘pir tasma pa’ for the past sixty years and have encroached on their rights.
What would be our future direction, this question often puzzles me. South East Asian countries and many others in the world have made tremendous achievements both technologically and as well on the human development level while in our part of the world only improvement has been in discovering new ways of corruption and tightly squeezing the masses.
Posted in Common Sense, News, Pakistan, Random, Society, Thoughts, Wordly Affairs
