There are no two opinions about the PML-N government’s poor governance, their incapacity to take decisions, indulgence in nepotism, or their unconstitutional stubbornness. But this is no excuse to hold the Constitution in abeyance now, or to claim the right to be Prime Minister just because you have manoeuvred a demonstration in Islamabad.
We either have ‘Rule of Law’, or ‘Law of the Jungle’, where only the powerful survive and there is no such thing as freedom or equality. I am 65 years old, and for the past one decade we were following a foreign policy that ended up conceding the length and breadth of this unfortunate nation to the scourge of terrorism. There are no quick fixes, nor can there be selective accountability, and neither can we bridge the dangerously widening deficit between revenues and expenditure, unless everybody pays taxes. Otherwise economic strangulation and the unchecked flight of capital and human resources will be the undoing of Pakistan from within, without any physical attack across our borders. We must learn to live in peace with our neighbors and under no circumstances allow our territory to be used by non state actors for intervention in other countries if we want to survive as a sovereign state. No country can afford to outsource security responsibilities to non state actors, because if you do, you end up creating monsters that turn on their mentors.
MALIK TARIQ ALI,
Lahore, August 20.