Hunger Drives To Suicide!

Asem Mustafa Awan

They die each day and finally, when they are up to their very last limits, they snap and end their lives, including those of their loved ones, as they have reached the end of the road and there is no hope.

They have begged, borrowed and even tried stealing but the tyrannical system never supports the person in need, and all the departments in Pakistan made to look after the poor have corruption details that run into millions of rupees, if not billions.

The people who kill themselves are in poor localities and their neighbours are also faced with the same fate: ‘hunger’. Some take their lives now and the remaining will take it after.

Suicides are committed every day and the root cause is hunger. The families are committing suicide as they find the system oppressive and despotic, and with no respite in sight, ending one’s life is the only solution left.

The world witnesses these things time and again, but there are many other reasons for taking this extreme action. In Pakistan, it is only poverty and starvation, with the exception of a few who have other reasons, namely drugs and a guilty conscience.

The media has news appearing every day from different parts of Pakistan where a man commits suicide, a woman jumps into the canal with children, and a family member is served poison in sweets and dies as well, taking arsenic and rat poison—all these very painful deaths.

The religion ‘values life’ and Pakistan was envisioned to be a ‘welfare state’ by the great Quaid Muhammad Ali Jinnah– the father of the nation– but his dream never materialized and to date, the nation awaits its ‘coming true’.

What transpired after his demise is a long story with no end and the nightmare continues.

Agrarian Pakistan had an abundance of everything but it was systematically robbed of its features time after time, and now, at present, people die for a bag of subsidized flour that is not even fit for human consumption.

The ruling elite, with one of their political stalwarts who also happens to be a former prime minister, is on record stating that in the subsidized flour scheme, the scam would be in the billions and not the millions. The 100 bags shown will only have half and not more.

How he came to this conclusion needs to be probed by the authorities as poor Pakistanis die for the want of basic amenities of life that are now out of their reach.

The recent increase in electricity and gas tariffs will have many more people committing suicide as the cost of living in Pakistan has reached astronomical heights and millions are falling below the poverty line.

There have also been reports of people going into cardiac arrests after seeing the electricity or gas bill, as all that is done by the government is from backdates and there are so many taxes in the document that irk the masses.

A government is formed when the masses follow the rules and regulations, but in truth, it is hell-bent on turning the masses into an angry mob. The attacks on WAPDA offices where bills are generated are not a thing of the past and if this continues, one should welcome Pakistan back to the stone age with no money. It is high time the policymakers announced once and for all that living in the “land of the pure has its costs” and is not for the poor to live in.

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

Photo Credit: AFP/File/Google