Reality & equilibrium.

IT would be an understatement to say that Pakistan finds itself between a rock and a hard place. It makes more sense to suggest that reality has at last caught up with us and that we are struggling to come to terms with it.

Never before in recent history - more so even than when Modi annexed occupied Kashmir - has the national morale been so low. Even so, we are not, it seems, ready to accept the fact that we are collectively responsible for our present economic plight.

The government may, in its own eyes, have scored brownie points by, in the larger cause, repairing the breach with the IMF. But - in view of the extortionate rise in fuel prices - its victory has, if anything, been pyrrhic, making a dent in its own credibility.

The PTI has inevitably made political capital out of the ruling coalition's constraints, with the latter claiming that it was a case of force majeure and trying to pass the buck.

A time does come when one simply has to pay the piper.

Mutual recrimination is, however, not warranted where what we see today is clearly the end result of a cumulative process. Debt servicing has, for a variety of reasons, never been a top priority with us. But a time does come when one simply has to pay the piper. It is eminently possible that this is such a time.

Among the most pressing concerns of the government today, besides that of providing essential services to its citizens, is supposedly that of giving succour to those who, according to a glib federal cabinet minister, had 'been left behind'. The initiative of the proposed handouts of Rs2,000 a month to about one-third of the people of the country - the paucity of funds notwithstanding - may, in the government's own eyes, be commendable. But there are those who would hold that it is derisory.

If looked at more searchingly, however, the government's tightrope walking speaks - the sage input of economic experts notwithstanding - of something more fundamental such as the grim wages of a free-market economy run amok.

The issues of food and energy security aside, the sheer human cost, across the lower social strata, of the benefits accruing to the advantaged few cannot be counted in terms of the cold calculus of economics. We are speaking of a vast segment of society that has all but been abandoned and is there as if on sufferance as it waits for a modicum of state support.

The picture is bleak. An overall widening of the tax net together with a withdrawal, as demanded by the IMF, of...