Dignity on sale for a bag of flour

                                                                                  Editorial Pictorial

Asem Mustafa Awan: They are poor. They are hungry. They have very little money even to buy a bag of flour. They suffer indignity of standing in queue for hours to receive a bag of flour at a government rate.

They live on or below the poverty line hoping that their circumstances will change for the better but they never do.

We are told that Pakistan is a land of agriculture. 70 percent of the population is connected with the agriculture. Hence, If one thing Pakistan should not be short of is its staple food product. But the fact remains that year after year shortage happens, queues get longer and prices get pushed up and up.

The veiled woman in the picture might not ever have stepped outside of the house but is now having to stand in the line along with men to get hold of a bag of flour that is ‘thrown’ at people at the government price rate. Does anyone real care about what she may be feeling in these shuffles and scuffles to hold her position in the queue. How much more indignant can it be for a sister or a mother or daughter or a wife in the land of pure.

The scuffles over bag of flour in Sindh and Balochistan bring to fore weaknesses in the government distribution mechanism. Some may also say that the government wants people to fight over a bag of flour in order to give the publicity that so muc is being done to provide food to the poor.

People are shocked by these pictures. They are pushed to ask, ‘ what is happening to  a country for which millions sacrificed in 1947?’;

‘What has gone wrong in the land of five rivers and four seasons?’

The donor conference for Pakistan was an unheard development as in the past it was always for Afghanistan. The citizens of Pakistan can’t help asking, ‘ where millions and billions have disappeared because their plight has not changed, in fact, it has become even more worse.

The citizens constantly ask these questions of the left, right and the centre but are always given evasive answers or cover-up stories.

Connecting the dots leads us to only one conclusion that down the line Pakistan has been consistently robbed of its purpose, its wealth and is now in dark abyss.

Those in the corridors of power seem to have forgotten the purpose of Pakistan and what it took to achieve it. They perhaps need to take history lessons or go to their elders who survived the massacre and the displacement of partition to realise that Pakistan was created for a purpose which they unfortunately are not serving.

The writer is a journalist based in Islamabad and writes on a wide range of issues.

Photo Credit: Nadeem Khawar