Pakistan: Truth bitter and harsh

Why is all this hullabaloo? The figures of daily corruption in the country trotted out by the NAB chief may be right or may be wrong. It may be Rs.7 billion a day. It may not be Rs.13 billion a day. But isn't the open truth far more bitter and harsh? Isn't corruption so rampant in the polity that it has become part and parcel of the national life? Doesn't it cut across the polity, having enveloped its every segment and sparing not even its private sector? The holy ecclesiastical orders too have fallen to the seductions of the malfeasance. So ubiquitously has indeed the curse engulfed the polity that it has even proved the sages wrong. Evil, they contend, is like water that flows from top to bottom. But corruption, graft and sleaze flow here both ways, from top to bottom and from bottom to top. It is not just the high places that stink odiously with the scourge. The stench is very much there at the lower tiers. For having even a legitimate job done hassles-free, lowly palms have to be greased in government offices and state institutions. And that business is in the works every hour and every minute of the day. And driven by a crass greed of profiteering, petty shopkeepers feel no pricks of conscience whatsoever in fleecing the customers rapaciously. But if corruption and malfeasance have run wild in the polity, the goddess of wealth and money has blinded its segments after segments so starkly that they have lost every touch with the sense of shame. Tax evasion is in a binge. The landed aristocrats are wallowing in wealth that they heap up from the windfall earnings from their crops and hugely generous government support prices, apart from other multiple concessions and benefits. But chip they not even a penny in tax to the government treasury on their huge piles. The big business and industry fiddle with their books and in collusion with corrupt taxmen evade the due tax. The traders construe it as a big sin to pay tax and take to various devious devices not to pay it. In the famed taxmen's raid on the trendy Liberty supermarket of Lahore, the infuriated traders sent back the raiders with bleeding noses. That was the time when Mian Nawaz Sharif was in rule with a heavy mandate. So powerful is the trader lobby with so much of influence on Mian Sahib that no harm came to the traders who had obstructed with force and violence the state functionaries from doing their official duty. Instead, the head taxman, whom MNS had himself brought in from the private sector to do good to the health of the state revenues, had to lay down the baton. He was shown the door; the filthy rich traders were left off the hook not to pay the tax. In fact, we are a polity where the poor support the rich. Everywhere in the world it is the other way round. It is the rich and the affluent who raise the revenues for the state with their tax to launch into public welfare works. Here they do not. Here the rich live on the savings of the public and the tax money of the abysmally small populace of taxpayers. They live like little emperors on this public munificence. They wangle big loans from banks, which they pay back not and get away with the loot with a generous helping hand of duly palmed-off bank staffs. They drive on sleek chauffer-driven cars on the roads and lanes built from the money of taxpayers who themselves mostly travel by crowded public transport. So given are they to thriving and flourishing on the poor people's money that even the taunts of foreign donors have failed to shame them to loosen their purse strings to contribute even a little bit to the state revenues with their tax. Nowadays, the donors are in clamour all over the world that it could be nothing less than shameful that while their taxpayers are being pressed to help Pakistan out of its financial straits, its own rich should be sitting pretty and not shelling out the due tax money to generate more revenues for the state to cope with this difficult situation. But so thick-skinned are they that even these jeers are going without a slight effect on them. But then we as a polity are, verily, caught up in a big morality crisis. And the woe is there is no messiah out there to pull us out of this crisis. There are only preachers, no practitioners. There are only pretenders, no real leaders or guides. Only the divine powers can help us in the dire predicament that we are in, by every reckoning. This is the bitter, harsh truth.