A tragedy much bigger than the sunken Greek Ship

The devilish power grabs, the insatiable desire for monopoly over state resources;... have all combined to produce an environment that can only induce what we saw on the Greek coastline.

News is soul-searing all around. Take the Greek boat tragedy that went down and caused the deaths of over 750 smuggled passengers, including, possibly many dozens, if not hundreds, of Pakistanis from Azad Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere. Move to the venue of the traffic accident, Islamabad-Lahore Motorway which killed 13 when the bus driver lost control of the vehicle. Videos of the accident are heartbreaking as these show bodies flying around like straws in the wind at the point of impact. The same spot had a similar accident earlier this year with roughly the same number of casualties. These Pakistanis traveling on the Motorway were not on a risky, life-threatening, and fraught journey in Southern Greece. They were sitting pretty in their seats when the appalling accident reduced many of them to an unrecognizable heap of flesh.

Pakistan has the highest number of road accident fatalities in Asia. Nearly 100,000 people die each year in road crashes and five times as many suffer crippling injuries. But these tragedies seldom make big headlines; these are tucked away on the inner pages of newspapers except for the pictures and videos because these get eyeballs for TV and boost sales for print.

But the Greek Boat disaster is particularly appalling because it has brought to the fore an undocumented tragedy that is even bigger than the terrible event itself----people preferring to put themselves in acute harm’s way than bet on building a future at home. That is the real national crisis that has been brewing for years but whose full-blown version is now on display everywhere.

It is a pity that heartless politics does not leave even mass deaths. The PTI is using this event to shame the federal government for not expressing its grief and sympathies; a more virulent version of this political attack talks about the “imported government” has brought the country to a point where the public is forced to simply leave home and hearth and embrace ventures that take them to deadly alien waters.

This political encashment of human suffering is not surprising. Nor is it confined to one party only. We can’t seem to fall low enough in the realm of political conflict. Everything goes, all the time.

The fact that should really matter is that declining national trust in the system that governs people’s lives is not specific to these two events nor it is an individual failure. It is the outcome of years and years of heartless and pointless battles that the ruling elite have fought among themselves driving government and governance farther and farther away from the people’s struggling lives, leaving them to a hell-like existence.

The devilish power grabs, the insatiable desire for monopoly over state resources; the maniacal clashes of diseased egos; the mortal combats for promotions, positions and perks have all combined to produce an environment that can only induce what we saw on the Greek coastline and the Kalar Kahar road turn. When those in control of power don’t give a rat’s tale about people’s lives, what difference does it make to anything whether these lives are lost or retained? Whether someone sinks in the seas or perishes on the roads?

To top it all, years of mind-messing rhetoric have killed all critical thinking among the teeming masses. They are treated as zombies and some act like them as well, stomping around at command, dancing to the tunes of mad pied pipers. Consider the fact that many still believe that Imran Khan is a saviour.

And yet, and yet, there is no introspection, no soul searching, no true reflection of what endless power experiments and personal agendas have done to this country and how it has been reduced to an ash-heap of hope. Look at this chart of GDP growth ups and dips.

It contains a scary reality. The first dip (2018-20) was when the Imran Project was installed. The cost was paid by the nation. The second plunge (2022-23) came when the Imran Project was/is being dismantled. The cost is being paid by the nation. We don’t know what the next experiment would be like and what it would cost us.

I am not saying that there would have been no Pakistanis on board the hapless ship or that road accident would have ceased if the system was not derailed in 2017-18, but the probability is that there would have been fewer of these tragedies if governance was operational and the economy wasn’t teetering on the brink. If we had a national purpose, if we had the welfare of the people at the center of political struggles, some lives may have been saved, and some hope may have been around to invite people to trust the system.

Will hope be born again? Will trust return? We don’t know. At present the whole system is too busy dismantling the lunacy it introduced in the land in the name of the Imran Project to care. But generally, hope doesn’t descend from the heavens. You have to plow deep and hard to plant its seeds, water them with the sweat of the brow, feed them the blood of tireless hands, and protect the seedlings from being uprooted by stormy winds. That’s when a “hope crop” gets ready. It doesn’t come up through silly “image building” songs and hollow hypes of “us being a great nation”. When GDP growth falls to 0.29 percent when agriculture shrinks to 1.55 percent when the services sector collapses to around 0.80 percent when per capita incomes dwindle to a pitiable $1508, when foreign investment, remittances fall to historic lows and overseas employment registration goes up by a whopping 189 percent, you can tell that hope has fled the land for a long time.

Since the 2013 elections, the nation has seen nothing but chaos promoted and marketed as a revolution, but, in reality, a ploy to bring one man, Imran, to power. Now the nation is witnessing more morbid chaos in order to wind up that one man and his lunatic fringe. It goes on and on and on and on. Those who died in the Ionian Sea like those who perished in the Kalar Kahar crash would not know this, but their fates were sealed by the country-shattering, nation-dividing, and hope-sapping politics of Pakistan witnessed since the last decade. This politics is not over. There is no possibility that national tragedies would end too. And this is the real tragedy.