The floods and discourse.

'Catastrophic floods in Pakistan' was one of the many headlines of 2022. However, unlike those many headings, highlights of the flood could not succeed to stay longer neither in discourse nor in the state policies. Despite producing heart-shattered visuals of victims, the flood was, though surprisingly, not enough for the media's ratings. As this headline disappeared in a flash, it was consequently declared unpopular and axiomatically imprinted in the collective consciousness as unimportant. Numbers are insignificant if not punctuated by monetary status. This is not unpredictable in a system constructed by and for the 1% elite. Neoliberalism, however, is the mainstream but camouflaged discourse. This dichotomy inherits through class stratification which is now exacerbated by the catalyst of floods. Given the food crisis, the ripple effects of floods have not only unravelled the bad governance but as a by-product reveal the neoliberal mantras infused in the society. The death of a helpless father in Mirpurkhas amid the flour crisis and concurrently the luxurious Karachi Eat food festival only 231 km away are the contrasting realities of the same community. This paradox is evidence of such neoliberal mantras-globalisation and food omperialism.

In order to dismantle the labyrinth of neoliberalism, it is crucial to investigate its unidentified nexus in society which provides the arena for the execution of its tactics and thus aggravates crises like floods. Its ubiquitous and simultaneously invisible nature cultivates the myth of an innocuous system wrongly accused of amplifying climate change. The floods in Pakistan are the repercussions of the abnormal torrential rainfall in Sindh and Balochistan which to a larger extent instigated by climate change. Neoliberalism, however, rejects this very narrative only when attributed to the elite. The carbon emissions of this 1% elite are double that of the poor, yet, the system lectures the individuals to delimit their carbon emissions while ignoring the bigger contributors. This neoliberal approach is the strategy as well as the rhetoric of so-called international organisations working in vain for environmental crises.

As neoliberalism cherishes markets and instinctively facilitates capitalists, it moulds each institution into a commodity. The intensity of this reconstruction can be measured by the fact that the fundamental institutions like food which had played its role in communal as well as...