Daily Times

For those of us living in Lahore, this past week has been a bit more than peculiar. First we had a creeping, unannounced increase in load shedding. Gas ‘shedding’ was going on any way and the Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) stations were already closed but then occurred the absolutely bizarre petrol shortage. The world has a glut of petroleum products and we in Lahore were unable to get even a few litres of petrol for our cars, motorcycles or other forms of transportation. Eventually, almost all vehicular traffic in Punjab, except that belonging to the VVIP types, came to a standstill. To believe for a moment that the second most powerful and arguably the most well informed politician in Pakistan did not expect that such a shortage was going to hit his capital city and the basis of his party’s political power is hard to accept. Or is it?

And then the minister for petroleum and such stuff, after many days of deliberation, came up with the brilliant ‘analysis’ that all this shortage happened because people wanted too much petrol. Well, the government cut off supply of CNG and closed down all CNG stations in Punjab, so all the vehicular traffic that used CNG was of course forced to use petrol once again. Obviously, the demand for petrol was going to increase. What did all of these brilliant business minds expect? That people would start walking or perhaps they felt that people would start riding camels? Was it an attempt to corner the camel market?

I suppose if the petrol shortage is prolonged for another year then whoever imported enough camels could indeed make a killing in the camel market. If, by the next festival of the sacrifice, petrol supplies return to normal, then all these camels will become a major source of sacrificial animals. And, if the government and its allied mullahs decide that the camel is the only acceptable animal for religious sacrifice in the Islamic Republic, then all those who imported and will then own camels will, as they say, make it in the shade. A brilliant idea as far as business is concerned though perhaps almost as farfetched as the ‘water powered’ car; anybody remember that? So, perhaps this petrol shortage has nothing to do with any attempt to corner the camel import market.

Coming back to the petroleum shortage and the declaration of the minister of such things that it was all because people wanted too much petrol. That sums up the political and economic philosophy of the PML-N. For this government, all would be well if people just behaved. If people never wanted electricity, there would be no electricity shortage and no need to raise prices and if people did not want to have natural gas to cook food or heat their homes, there would be no shortage of gas. The same is true of all other commodities, especially food. If people just ate less, there would be no food shortages or food inflation.

All this seems pretty obvious but something else has been bothering me for the last few weeks. I have written in these pages that Mian Nawaz Sharif, the Prime Minister (PM), had already given up on the idea of running a lot of things himself, like foreign policy and the war on terror, but I have started wondering whether the PM has also given up on running much of domestic policy. Or worse, perhaps the Chief Minister (CM) of Punjab is tired of his role as the PM-in-waiting and has come to the conclusion that enough is enough. Of course, the CM cannot force any change at the Centre and so, having finally realised that he has no chance at the top spot for the foreseeable future, he has also perhaps just lost interest in running things in Punjab. Too many new languages to learn anyway.

And that perhaps is why things got so bad as far as petrol supply is concerned. Let us not forget that one of the most powerful ministers in the federal government, who is also accused of acting as the ‘acting’ PM, while denying any complicity in the petrol matter also alluded to a possible ‘conspiracy’. Since Punjab as well as the central government is run by the same party, any conspiracy must be coming from within the party. However, here again I do not believe that there is any real conspiracy but just that the PML-N has gone into the El Cid mode of government realising that they just do not have the ability to run the country as well as the war on terror. Just calling it a day is not how things are done in Pakistan. Unfortunately, the political opposition has refused to oppose them while the army has refused to oblige them by removing them forcibly. So, the PM and his party are stuck with the infamous mandate: they cannot swallow it and they cannot spit it out.

And this brings me to why I expect things to get a lot worse. There is an old story from the last time the PML-N was running the country on how the people of Lahore were demonstrating some disgruntlement with the PML-N government. To put the people in their place for not being pleased at the ‘good governance’ they were being offered, Mian sahib the younger decided to pay them back by uprooting half the city on the pretext of building new roads. This story sounds much better in the vernacular since it revolves around a Punjabi double entendre about pulling things out or off. That said, what we might be seeing on the electricity front, the natural gas front and now the petrol front is that the government of Punjab is perhaps a trifle displeased at the people of Punjab for being too nice to Imran Khan.

The author is a former editor of the Journal of Association of Pakistani descent Physicians
of North America (APPNA)