Doctors on strike; lady health workers on strike; teachers on strike; PCS officers on strike.

The Frontier Post
Where are administrators?
Doctors on strike; lady health workers on strike; teachers on strike; PCS officers on strike. Nurses agitating; factory workers agitating; government employees agitating; transporters agitating. Flood-battered demonstrating; gas consumers demonstrating; power users demonstrating. Protestors blocking roads; protesters burning tyres on streets; protestors torching utilities’ offices; protestors gheraoing police stations; protestors stoning government buildings. Look around, and the whole of the country appears on strike or in agitation. But where are the administrators? So much of turmoil would indeed be a nightmare for administrators anywhere else in the world and drive them into sleepless nights. But not so troubled are ours. They are having a jolly good time, vacationing or hibernating or just playing political football. The painstaking labours to think out ways and means to grapple with such a mind-boggling multiplicity of adversities afflicting the nation injuriously they are not letting to hurt their health. They are leaving these afflictions to the divine powers to take care of while sparing their own selves to fatten their muscles and improve their facial complexions. The best they offer for the redress of the people’s vows is to choke the media with their pious vows, keeping the ground all empty. And this ground is screaming with stalking poverty, squalor, pestilence, joblessness, deprivation, denial, and the rampage of terrorist bomb and criminal gun. And as a harried citizenry is yelling to the administrators to secure them some relief, some respite, from the multiplying miseries making a hell of its life, they are telling it to feel gratified with their policy of reconciliation and consensus. This policy they hold out to this wretched citizenry as the panacea of all its woes. This they tell it would wipe out its afflictions and wants on its own. And if it has happened not so far, they sure would tell it that it is all for its own misfortune written in the scriptures, and not their fault. Such an insouciance of administrators to a people’s miseries is indeed hard to find even in a banana republic. The people are wailing on streets and homes. But the administrators are just sitting pretty, seemingly enjoying this tragic show. There indeed are two Pakistans: a Pakistan of the affluent, the privileged officialdom and bureaucracy, landed aristocracy, big business, big industry and a formidable corporate sector; and a Pakistan of the poor, deprived and denied. The Pakistan of the rich is the administrators loved baby and with their blessings it is flourishing even in these traumatic times. The Pakistan of the downtrodden is an orphan that receives a rich lip service from the administrators but gets only bones to feed on. All the gravy goes to the Pakistan of the rich to sup on and fatten on. And while the administrators go to every extra mile to pamper and indulge the Pakistan of the rich, they have only a short shrift for the Pakistan of the downtrodden. So protective are they of the Pakistan of the rich that they have evolved cunningly a sly contrivance of stakeholders. When it comes to taxing traders, businessmen, industrialists and land barons, they say they would take the stakeholders into confidence. And as these stakeholders refuse, which they often do, the administrators just stand down apologetically. But no such niceties they know of when it comes to overtaxing the Pakistan of the downtrodden, sinking under the unbearably heavy burden of indirect taxes of all hues and brands known to the administrators. So as the island of a Pakistan of the privileged is rejoicing, celebrating and partying all the time, the oceanic Pakistan of the downtrodden is in a perpetual state of mourning over its denizens’ irreversible doleful lot. And as some of us once thought this sorry state of affairs wouldn’t hold any longer and the downtrodden would rise up against this unjust order, we were scoffed at by the oracles of the Pakistan of the privileged. They said the downtrodden would not. And they indeed have not, proving us ignorant and the privileged Pakistan’s oracles knowledgeable. They knew, while we did not, that the privileged Pakistan had smitten the downtrodden into such an impotence that even the youth of the Pakistan of the poor had not the grit and stamina of Tunisian and Egyptian youths to rise up against an unjust state order. And we never knew and those oracles did that the administrators of ours could safely leave the downtrodden untended and unattended. Still, one knows not how the turmoil presently gripping the land would finally settle down.