Ever since he started his political career, Imran Khan has been promising to turn Pakistan into “Riyasat-e-Medina”—a political utopia where everybody is happy. After promising heaven, Imran Khan has delivered hell to the people of Pakistan. The saving grace for him is that he is not solely responsible for this fiasco.
It is the cumulative effect of years of hypocrisy in the name of religious fundamentalism that the Pakistani establishment has been promoting. The political class has looked the other way while this was going on. Imran Khan himself played the religious card to gain popularity and acceptance among the wider electorate. Now, he is paying for his sins.
Imran Khan has failed to fulfill even a single promise that he made to the people of Pakistan when he was campaigning to become the Prime Minister. Corruption is as rampant as it was before, if not more. Lawlessness due to separatist movements still prevails in the tribal parts of Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa as well as Sindh. The economy is as fragile and as precarious as it was before.
Pakistan is on the brink of a precipice, just about to topple over and tumble down. The severity of the economic crisis can be gauged from a recent tweet by an official of Pakistan embassy in Serbia lamenting non-payment of salaries for the past three months as a result their children had to be removed from school due to inability to pay fees.
Unemployment is soaring because there has been no foreign investment in the country. The primary reason for this being the prevailing lawlessness caused by religious extremism. All in all, it is a hopeless situation.
To cut a long story short, Pakistan is running out of money. Prime Minister Imran Khan himself admitted this and confessed that the nation’s sustainability is at stake. He further reiterated that there was an immediate need to raise the tax revenue by widening the tax net and ensuring better tax compliance.
In order to meet its expenditure needs, the government has been raising the prices of petrol and electricity. As a result, prices of everyday goods has increased as the input costs have risen because of higher power tariffs. The rise in petrol prices have exacerbated this as the cost of transportation has increased.
As a result inflation has surged to more than 9% and is battering the economy. Along with this, the weakening of the Pakistani Rupee has killed the purchasing power of the country.
To deal with the crisis Pakistan went to the IMF for a bail out but all they got was a rude snub. The IMF says that the debt situation in Pakistan does not allow it to borrow any more money.
The government wanted loans equal to 2% of its GDP but it cannot get it now as it is already saddled with previous debts which have not been cleared. To add insult to injury, the IMF has also not allowed Pakistan to borrow from its own central bank.
According to reports, the central bank’s profit will not be transferred 100% to the government. The central bank will have to keep 20% of its profits with itself until Pakistan gets the desired cover for its borrowings.
Pakistan’s total debt has crossed 280 billion dollars. This data was released by the State Bank Of Pakistan after Imran Khan publicly called the increasing debt burden a national security issue, while squarely putting the blame for the situation on the previous governments and absolving his own government completely from any responsibility for the present situation.
Statistics show that the total debt and the current account as well as fiscal deficit deteriorated under the current government headed by Imran Khan.
To ameliorate the situation, Imran Khan has to go begging to Pakistan’s allies like Saudi Arabia for financial aid with the hope that Islamic countries would help them, but they seem to be ambivalent to their problems.
Instead of showing any leniency towards a fellow Islamic country, they behave like any other money lender, sometimes imposing exorbitant rates of interest for the loans they provide further worsening the situation. Pakistan’s last hope was China.
It is with this hope that Pakistan borrowed heavily from China and invested so much in the much-touted CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor). The signature project under this initiative was the Gwadar port that China is building in the Balochistan province of Pakistan.
This was supposed to be the new silk route linking Xinjiang province of China with Pakistan after traversing through Afghanistan. But because of security issues with Taliban in Afghanistan and other issues concerning rights of the native people of Balochistan, the projects under the CPEC have not been able to come up as expected.
Because of cost overruns, time delays and rampant corruption, the expected revenue was not generated and the Pakistanis are knee deep in debt to the Chinese. The Chinese are equally demanding when it comes to recovering their loan. In a way, Pakistan is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
The situation that Pakistan finds itself in is of its own making. It is a cumulative effect of so many maladies that afflict Pakistan as a state. The obsession with religion has colored their approach to life, and they have a jaundiced view of life. Everything is seen through the prism of religion. Religious seminaries are preferred to schools
. Instead of teaching children the basics of science which would bring about a scientific temper in them, they are taught the tenets of radical Islam which makes them religious fanatics. This religious indoctrination makes them prone to take up the gun for jihad ultimately making them terrorists.
The recent demonstrations in Pakistan by TLP and the emergence of TTP as a force to reckon with is a manifestation of this theocratic approach towards governance. This reinforces the patriarchal and mysogynistic tendencies in them. As a result, women have to suffer the most. They are deprived of education. This in turn promotes illiteracy in the community further reinforcing religious extremism.
The irony is that Imran Khan, though himself educated in Oxford University, supports this obscurantism and promotes it earning the sobriquet of “Taliban Khan” for himself.
All these have a bearing on the economy as the economy today is a knowledge-based economy and illiteracy is a big stumbling block in this regard. Moreover, lately Imran Khan’s equation with the Pakistan army has also got ruptured due to difference of opinion on the appointment of the new ISI chief.
Analysts fear all these might lead to a change of guard in Islamabad, and Imran Khan might have to step down quite unceremoniously. The cookie has crumbled for Imran Khan. Sometimes, it is too late to mend.
EDITED AND PROOFREAD NIKITA SHARMA
