Budget blame.

THE bickering started before the weekend was out. While economists, analysts and experts were poring over the budget documents to make sense of the implications of the government's proposals for the common citizen, our politicians seemed to have spent more time sharpening their tongues.

Not unexpectedly, the PTI and PML-N began sparring over the budget soon after its unveiling, and their attacks against each other will likely set the tone for the coming weeks, raising political tensions and adding to domestic instability.

Read more: Budget2022-23: Appeasing IMF while preserving political capital

Consider a recent debate on who took on more debt during their time in power. Responding to criticism over the size of Pakistan's public debt, former finance minister Shaukat Tarin on Saturday asserted that it grew by 'only' 76pc during the PTI's tenure, not the 80pc as claimed by the new government. This prompted scorn from the PML-N, with the information minister responding with the misleading claim that the PTI had 'confessed' to taking on 76pc as much debt as all other rulers of the country put together.

This, in turn, invited another riposte, this time from former information minister Fawad Chaudhry, who claimed that most of the debt taken on was only to retire old loans taken by past governments. In the back and forth, both parties pushed their own line on the matter, which seemed quite at odds with economic realities past and present.

Neither was willing to acknowledge that the other faced situations of considerable adversity - one, the Covid-19 pandemic and the other, the Russia-Ukraine conflict - and had to make...