'Resign And Start Preparing For Fresh Elections'.

'Get me if you can,' was the one-line message of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif's unnecessarily lengthy speech that he delivered during the first sitting of another National Assembly session Wednesday evening. He delivered the said speech exactly a day after losing the most populous province of Pakistan, i.e., Punjab, to his opponents due to a Supreme Court decision. Thanks to this decision, he would increasingly begin to look more like the 'mayor of Islamabad' rather than a hands-on Chief Executive of the country of more than 220 million. Yet he tried hard not to look defeated or overwhelmed.

While acting brave he could, however, not stop himself from building on the narrative that his one and only rival, former Prime Minister Imran Khan, was still being treated as the most favourite 'darling' of some permanent institutions of our state. And the superior courts don't hesitate to travel extra miles, allegedly to 'please' him.

To prove his point, he kept recalling incident after incident that to him relentlessly established 'preferred treatment' of Imran Khan by multiple institutions of our state, since at least 2014. Many stories that he told to drum his narrative were indeed worth considering. But he failed to convince most of us that how could he live up to his reputation of being a 'doer and deliverer', if Imran Khan was still being pampered by the most powerful quarters of our state.

Shehbaz Sharif also behaved almost oblivious to the reality that after his taking over as the Prime Minister in the late night of April this year, he and his government were constantly being perceived as harbingers of 'bad news' for the mass of our people. After a gap of many years, long hours of power cuts had returned as if with vengeance. As if those were not enough the eleven-party government replacing Imran Khan had also been pushed to opt for relentless increase of petroleum and electricity prices.

You surely need to be blinded with incurable bias for exclusively holding Shehbaz Sharif and the government led by him for turning things gloomy for an overwhelming number of our people. Yes, for many decades, the state of Pakistan remained dependent on foreign aid and loans, doled out by various powerful and rich countries of the world to keep us in their 'camp.' We failed to develop the culture of austerity and self-sufficiency and kept ignoring the task of appropriately taxing the super rich of this country and Imran Khan's government didn't prove an...