IT was a humid Sunday afternoon in Islamabad. The small pharmacy was empty with just one man behind the cash counter. A woman approached him, prescription and medicines in hand. She was simply but not shabbily dressed. But she still returned a quarter of the medication once the bill was generated. The man behind the counter explained the bill was around Rs4,000, and she returned about Rs1,000 worth of medication. This took place at a pharmacy in the heart of Islamabad, where real estate sells or rents at eye-watering prices. There was no doctor nearby or a hospital. The woman, chances are, lived close by.
It is not a dramatic story or one that really shocks. Tell it to a group of people and they will nod, and, in fact, recount similar stories. Of people’s difficulties. The loans they have taken. How someone got a utility bill higher than their salary. How a colleague had switched from his car to a motorbike. How another had begun shopping for lower-quality food.
Conversations such as these abound. And this is before the past week when petrol hikes — even those of a daily kind — had begun to hit the headlines. People are now taking bets on when the price of petrol will hit 400 — a far more probable prospect than the cricket team managing a respectable score.
That the government realises the impact of the petrol hikes is evident from its announcement to relaunch its subsidy scheme. There is little clarity on how effective the last one had been and how long it lasted, but it’s now back with some tweaks. Ask the government to reduce the petrol levy, and suddenly the big bad IMF enters the conversation; the same IMF which can’t get the government to impose a proper tax on traders or agriculture income or even stop it from giving relief to real estate. Apparently, the petrol levy is the red line.
There is little conversation about what inflationary impact this petrol hike will have.
And of course, there is little conversation about what inflationary impact this petrol hike will have on food, transport and more — what will happen to the electricity bills, and what this new cycle of inflation will do to already weakened purchasing power.
Before the reader rolls her eyes at my audacity to write a piece on the economy, let me clarify that I am about to do no such thing. This is simply going to be a clutch-my-pearls piece on the callousness of the ruling elite. It doesn’t get simpler than that.
Long before the Iran war and its impact on the global economy, Pakistan’s human story was already a matter of shame. Our infant mortality rate (46 to 58 deaths per 1,000 births) is higher than the rest of the region and comparable to Afghanistan and Yemen. Nearly 20 per cent of the population has an insufficient caloric intake, and around 40pc of children under five years are malnourished and suffer from stunting — in this, Pakistan is comparable to countries hit by conflict and civil war. The numbers are not recent so as to be linked to the economic mess of the past few years.
This is the real story, with facts and figures, along with our own experiences and the anecdotes we all hear of the suffering of the people. But for those ruling us, there is little empathy or awareness of the crisis. This may seem a bit harsh but what else does one say when governments are incapable of curbing even their own lavish personal lifestyles in the face of human misery?
The prime minister and his deputy, it seems, spend more time abroad than in the country. Newly born babies recently died in a hospital fire in the heart of the capital, petrol is going up faster than pollution, and we already know he is off to New York on the 20th to tell the world about Pakistan’s efforts in mediation. When one’s home is on fire, shouldn’t saving it be more important? A rhetorical question — for soon we will be subjected to a bunch of ministers and advisers walking on the tarmac and entering a plane.
The rest are not far behind. Just recently both the president and the chief minister of Punjab travelled to Europe on personal visits on private planes. And only widespread criticism forced them both to make public the information that the trips were paid for personally. As if anyone needed any more proof of such disconnect from the lives of ordinary Pakistanis.
The president was on a personal visit while the party and the government he heads was announcing war on proposals to divide Sindh. If the situation was that dire politically, shouldn’t he have been in Pakistan and in the province? And the Punjab CM — two-and-a-half years later — does not seem to realise that a display of wealth in these times is just poor judgement. Despite the widespread criticism of the aircraft purchased by the Punjab government, it was used for a personal trip.
However, this criticism is simply water off a duck’s back. The display of a lavish wedding followed all of this. This is not to say that politicians should not be allowed private lives; they have every right to it. However, extensive footage and images displaying the grandeur of an event is simply a poor decision.
No one expects Pakistan’s ruling elite to behave like their counterparts in the West where ministers carry their own baggage and fly economy. We are far too realistic to expect miracles here but a little discretion can do no harm. And for once, it is not enough to argue that there are powerful people in Pakistan who perhaps enjoy even more perks than politicians but are not spoken about.
Indeed, those who take part in electoral exercise and claim to be popular have different burdens than those who simply wield power. And the people in government need to understand this difference.
The writer is a journalist.
Published in Dawn, September 15th, 2026
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