IF beauty is skin deep, integrity in politics is equally superficial. Scratch the gilt surface of any Pakistani politician; exposed will be a lower layer of hypocrisy, smelted in guilt.

Take the founder of the PPP. He promised the people ‘Roti, kapra aur makan’. His lineal descendants enjoy all these, mainly abroad.

Take the founder of the PML-N. His elders began their ironmongery business in Lahore’s Landa Bazar. When the PPP government nationalised the family’s Ittefaq Foundries in January 1972, his wife’s jewellery was found in the factory safe, where it had been squirrelled away for safekeeping.

Today, the Sharif descendants flaunt their extravagant baubles at wedding functions held in London, Islamabad and Lahore. They do so with a brazen panache that even the Mukesh Ambanis might envy. Meanwhile, these hereditary politicos treat their poor followers as flies; they swat them for their sport.

What has become of Mr. Bhutto’s socialist dreams?

A diminishing generation will recall that fateful morning in January 1972, 50 years ago, when Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Nationa­li­sat­ion and Economic Reforms Order (its apt ac­­ro­nym was NERO) released a slew of act­i­ons, disguised as social reforms aimed at imp­ov­e­r­­­­­ishing the rich rather than enriching the poor.

At a stroke, private entrepreneurs who had built a range of basic industries and profitable businesses found themselves dispossessed overnight, without relief or compensation. This initial wave was followed by a tsunami which swamped banks, life insurance services, educational institutions, agricultural processors, etc.

Read: Economic and political legacy of Z.A. Bhutto

Over the past 50 years, many of these have been denationalised — most notably Ittefaq Foundries. It was returned by Gen Ziaul Haq to the Sharifs, the deal sealed with the anointing of the elder son Nawaz Sharif as the future political patriarch of Punjab.

What has become of those socialist dreams of Mr Bhutto’s? They have degenerated into economic nightmares. The most prominent failure amongst them is the Pakistan Steel Mills, a flagship of Pak-Russian collaboration, now a stricken Titanic that refuses to sink.

Over a hundred taken-over industries and businesses have been denuded by generations of government-appointed administrators, chosen from sticky-fingered bureaucrats, retired military officers given a shot at supplementing their meagre pensions, and politically peripheral upstarts. Appointed to run these enterprises, they ran them instead into the ground.

One has only to read the reports of the Public Accounts Committee and the Privati­s­a­tion Commission to gauge the condition of these failed experiments in ‘Islamic socialism’. The term ‘sick industries’ used to be ap­­plied to those businesses in the private sector that teetered on the edge of insolvency. To­­day, there are more ‘sick’ industries, companies, and corporations under the governm­ent’s management than in the private sector.

Unlike the private sector which cannot afford to be inefficient or unprofitable, units in the public sector refuse to die. They hobble like geriatric pensioners, dependent on dole milked from the national exchequer.

The PTI government’s election manifesto promised to exact the allegedly looted wealth taken abroad by the PML-N and PPP bigwigs. It was to be the quick fix to Pakistan’s economic stagnancy. That might have been the reason why the present prime minister, soon after taking oath in August 2018, gave the chairman NAB a ringing endorsement, intended to resound in the Sharif’s flats in London’s Belgravia and the Zardari château in Normandy, France.

Forty months on, that self-imposed Herculean task has made a Sisyphus of the PM. He continues to shoulder the boulder of recovery uphill. He sees it roll down again, then repeats the same exercise with myopic zeal. The original Sisyphus had eternity to accomplish his task. The PM’s failure to surmount that distant crest may well become the boulder that crushes its own Sisyphus.

A prime minister who learns on the job receives an expensive education, at state expense. Undergraduate Khan took three years to obtain his privately funded degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (gaining a weak Third) from Oxford University. He has spent as long already swotting politics and economics and expounding his philosophy in Islamabad. Will he be allowed to graduate (he hopes, with honours) in 2023?

Indian columnist Shobha Dé in her book Selective Memory (1998) contends that he doesn’t like women: “He certainly does not respect them.” She met the once debonair Khan over dinner, recalling: “He had bags under his eyes, and a huge chip on his shoulder. He carried on like there was a heavy burden he had to bear — Pakistan had to be saved at all costs.” She added: “This was the future prime-ministerial hopeful talking, a mixture of mullah-speak and politics”, addressing airily some “distant spot as if that helped him focus on his own pearls of wisdom”.

How soon, one wonders, will it be before those presently in love with him fall out with him? Or he, with them?

The writer is an author.

www.fsaijazuddin.pk

Published in Dawn, December 23rd, 2021