The reality of Pakistan

Our neighbor is in serious trouble. Debt ridden, with little foreign exchange reserve to pay for essential imports, staring at major social and political instability, the country is on the verge of breaking up and even end up with major civil strife and rebellion from the poor who form the majority in that country. Th disaster was waiting to happen. The ruling class had a simple agenda. Kashmir and religion. Heady mixture and like opium. Generations were addicted to this at the cost of socio economic development.

Should we rejoice at the country's plight? Far from it we should be deeply worried. Like there, here too we have a large population of poor and deprived. We too have been feeding them with false promises of redemption since independence by successive governments. Here too there is a ruling elite which is increasingly becoming more and more wealthy at the cost of the poor. Corruption too is rampant here and we are no better than Paki elite in ignoring the plight of masses.

 The saving grace is that we are a large country with a large middle class and have managed our finances reasonably well in the last twenty years despite the gains not percolating to the poorer sections as much as it should. But what is happening in Pakistan should be an eye opener to us.

We cannot take our poor for granted