For decades in general, and the past couple of years in particular, most of the people of Pakistan have struggled in lawlessness, destitution and poverty, with all their calls and agonies unheeded by a government focused on self-preservation and prolonging itself by whatever means possible. The means employed for its sustenance only worsened the poverty, among other issues, so much that people were left with no voice or stake except invoking the divine. For none in the government cared. Nor was the public good within its capacity, mandate or legitimacy. Therefore, the government, in order to conceal the real public plight, arbitrarily reduced the poverty threshold to 8,000 a month. Until then, the government had desperately passed the buck for, or deliberately overlooked and downplayed, the issues of its own making. It turned a deaf ear to the vanishingly few voices for the voiceless poor amid silenced, sold or mortgaged souls.

Yet the specter of poverty began to bother the elite - not for the public good,........

© The Express Tribune