Some Western analysts have declared Pakistan a failing state. The ignorance of the analysts is pitiable. They should have known that Pakistan was never a full-blooded genuine state. It has always been an estate, not a state. How can a state fail which never existed? The analysts ought to apologise.
Sometimes the estate was grabbed by one particular class of Pakistanis and sometimes by another class. The grabbings continued non-stop. Unfortunately, all the grabbings had one common mission. It was to squeeze as much wealth out of the estate as possible. Almost every squeezing was a fabulously successful squeezing. The masses kept miserably watching. Virtually, nothing was left for them.
Some Pakistanis keep regularly killing themselves because of extreme poverty. They use different techniques for the purpose. Some of them lie on the railway lines to be crushed by the trains. The trains do not disappoint them. Some of them fling themselves into rivers. The rivers eat them thankfully. Some kill themselves by swallowing various kinds of poisons. The self-killing by poison creates a mind-boggling problem. The self-killer who uses railway lines for his extinction gets his death free of charge. Likewise, the self-killer who uses a river for his extinction also gets his death free of charge. But he who poisons himself to death where from does he get poison? Poison is not freely available like railway lines and rivers. He who cannot afford to buy a piece of bread, how does he manage to buy poison? One can’t help suspecting that there must be a secret humanitarian organisation which freely supplies poison to the needy.
Our masses are miserable. The reason is that the rulers consume bulk of the national resources for living like princes. There is a very simple formula for solving our poverty problem. The formula says: “Live within your means.” But, unfortunately, the rulers reject the formula as pure nonsense. They assert: “Only animals live within their means. We are not animals. We are rulers. We must live beyond the country’s means to distinguish ourselves from the animals.”
Slavery is flourishing as rigorously in Pakistan as it ever did in pre-scientific ages. The rulers are the masters. The masses are the slaves. Once the Twenty-First Century visited Pakistan. It ordered its plane to keep flying over the country for a few minutes. It observed that the mud houses of the masses were wistfully looking at the palaces of the rulers. It flew back murmuring: “How many more centuries will be required to drive human slavery out of the world? I am ashamed of myself. I wish I was never born.”
