Punjab's Sharif clan : Time running out

The ruling Sharif clan may not know that the time is running out, and running out very fast. The public discontent with it is skyrocketing with not just the day but by every hour of the day. Of course, incumbency is a very deadly monster that ruins and ransacks even promising ruling hierarchies. But then the Sharif coterie does not even figure on that scale any where remarkably. Its spin doctors may be weaving yarns after yarns to show it up as a performer par excellence. But a screaming public tells that all that is a big, big lie. In fact, ever nook and cranny of the land is crying out shrilly that the people never had had as worst of time as are they having on its watch.

But once in the saddle, the hierarchy started gradually to backtrack on what it had promised the electorate. As the shortages stay now as persistent and unrelenting as in the past, some of its grandees have now even taken sheepishly to apologising to the people for betraying them with false, deceptive and misleading promises of obviating power load shedding immediately after ascending the Islamabad throne. So obviously, it had been using the ploy of inaugurating of power plants and foundation-stone-laying of new projects by the prime minister to impress the public with its efforts to deliver on its poll promise of shooing off power scarcity from the land. But the trick has not worked. Rather, the people are livid that the Sharif ruling clan is taking them for a ride with such contrivances.

But the people's discontent with the Sharif ruling clique is not due to the power scarcity alone. It runs far deeper and far inflammably on many an other account. Indeed, the utter collapse of this coterie in alleviating the people's biting travails on account of increasingly unaffordable food prices and a galloping unemployment has taken away all the people's trust and confidence in it. Even those who once were its fond supporters have now turned against it. And on the street, it is all anger that is dancing giddily against this Sharif coterie.

It really is so astonishing that the incumbency has flung in so early to gore this ruling clan. It had stridden into office, bragging deafeningly that it had had the experience of governance as well as an experienced team to tackle the adversities tormenting the people so woefully. But just in a year's time, it has become just dust on the street. And quite perilously. One knows not how the people would respond to the calls of Imran Khan for a people tsunami and Tahirul Qadri's people revolution. But a storm is brewing up on the street.

And if the Sharif ruling clique doesn't act at once and wisely to mitigate what really is making the people's miserable lives a living hell, a real people's tsunami is sure to break out from some obscure niche of the street to flare up and engulf the whole land with unforeseen consequences. The Sharif clan as also its peers in various political comps must know that the so-called democracy which in effect is a patent plutocracy may be their darling baby. But on the street it has no takers left. The people's patience with this sham system has run out.

None out there in the street would stick his neck out to be chopped off for this spurious system that serves the needs of a privileged oligarchy of landed aristocrats, waderas, landed pirs, sardars, chieftains, robber barons and the moneyed upstarts. Not the people's. They have no love lost for it; not at all.