IN March 1981, Harvard Law School professor Robert Fisher proposed a unique idea for nuclear deterrence.

In the US, the launch codes required to fire a nuclear weapon are stored in a briefcase carried by a young officer who follows the president wherever he goes. Fisher suggested that instead, these codes be enclosed in a tiny capsule and surgically implanted near the heart of a volunteer.

That volunteer would then follow the president in a similar fashion as the gent with the briefcase. Only he or she would be carrying a heavy butcher knife. If the president ever decided to fire the nuke, the only way to do so would be to kill the volunteer and rip them apart with his bare hands.

The rationale here is simple: firing a modern-day nuclear weapon, regardless of circumstances, is guaranteed to kill countless innocent people. So, if Mr President would like to indulge this bloodlust, he should first look one person in the eye and realise what death looks like. Innocent death. Spill blood on the White House carpet and bring home the reality he’d like to inflict overseas.

Why do those in power need so many privileges?

Prof Fisher recalled responses from friends at the Pentagon; “My God, that’s terrible. He might never push the button.” That’s the point. I’d like to think human beings are not apathetic by nature; far too often, cruelty is a by-product of distance. From the consequences of one’s choices. From the reality of its victims.

Since moving to Islamabad earlier this year, I’ve thought of this story often. Partly because of distance (it’s often said that this city exists 10 miles outside of Pakistan), and partly because of its consequences (it’s a pretty-looking cesspool of inequality).

This isn’t a critique of the city, which is of course, quite lovely. It’s a critique of what it harbours; crooked-by-design systems of bureaucratic excess, leeches who profit off them, and a glaring truth you’d be blind to miss — Pakistan has a public expenditure problem.

Consider, for example, my hometown in Okara. Travel time from Lahore has almost doubled since my childhood, because governments fail to maintain old roads, let alone construct new ones. The stretch between Haveli Lakha and Depalpur feels like a post-apocalyptic Hollywood film, nature reclaiming the asphalt in an unending barrage of potholes and vegetation.

Most people drive bikes there. When an elderly labourer breaks his back each morning just to commute, the pain of every bump felt on that road is a sin by the state. An embodiment of its failures.

And I wonder, if the ruling elite of the twin cities had to look that labourer in the eye as they did so, would they still accept allotments of plots in their favour worth billions at the state’s expense? Would they drive around in government SUVs burning taxpayer-funded fuel to get from the sarkarihome to the golf club? Would the absence of distance make a dent on their apathy?

The plots regularly doled out for fractions of market price are massive, their size surpassed only by the sheer stupidity that goes into deciding who gets them. It seems to be a relic of colonialism; the idea that a sahib’s seniority means the state owes him financial reward for being so wonderful. This is antithetical to every progressive nation on the planet, which for some odd reason seem to prefer directing their resources to the folks with less of them to begin with.

The loss to the exchequer from a handful of these plot allotments would have been enough to build Okara’s roads several times over. Or develop an even more deserving locality, bringing countless rural Pakistanis closer to a dignified quality of life.

But failure on that front doesn’t negate success at others. After the invention of cricket, Pakistan has once again managed to defeat an old coloniser at its own game. According to the Ministry of Transport, the British government owns and allocates a grand total of 45 vehicles across all its departments. The province of Sindh alone uses 25,000. Take that, losers.

In an economy on the brink, nobody seems to address the elephant in the room — why do those in power need so many privileges? Leaders love shifting the burden onto taxpayers, because it’s awfully convenient. It’s always ‘just drink less tea’, or ‘just stop eating chocolate’, and never ‘maybe we can reconsider our self-destructive obsession with playing reverse Robin Hood’.

And one can’t fully blame them either. The people now used to government handouts, shiny new cars, and material shrines to their own importance also happen to be the most powerful in the country. Better to stay on their good side. And just like that, a cycle of rot perpetuates itself.

Politicians are temporary. Sahibs are forever. So, for now, one of the latter will gladly accept the cake, leaving a million villagers to split the crumbs. But that’s okay, we clearly don’t think about those people too much. After all, they’re such a great distance away from Islamabad.

The writer is a lawyer and columnist from Okara.

Twitter: @hkwattoo1

Published in Dawn, July 17th, 2022