Undertakers and liquidators vs Sadiq and Ameen.

Khawaja Asif and Asad Umar are the most articulate representatives of their respective parties. Before switching to fulltime politics, both of them had also spent long years in serving for sectors, directly dealing with vibrant aspects of economic activity.

One was thus fully justified to expect that while opening the general discussion on budgetary proposals Monday afternoon, they would help the economic illiterates like me to fathom the good or bad sides of these proposals. Both of them kept rubbing in the hackneyed narratives and remained brutally vicious in throwing mud at each other's leadership. In the zeal of scoring points, they recklessly failed to focus their attention on the deepening gloom COVID-19 had brought to this country since the advent of 2020.

The leader of the opposition normally opens the general discussion on budgetary proposals, as per the established parliamentary traditions. But Shehbaz Sharif, the PML-N leader, has been forced to self-quarantine himself after getting infected by the Corona virus. Being the senior most leader of his party, Khawaja Asif was asked to initiate the debate on his behalf. Instead of an assiduous dissection of the second budget of Imran government, point by point, Khawaja Sahib preferred to please the hawkish base of his party by vigorously living up to his reputation of an unforgiving orator.

The initial parts of his speech sounded as if studiously aiming at a comprehensive appraisal. COVID-19, for sure, remains an on going story. Apparently, we have to wait until the end of August this year to correctly assess the accumulated damages the pandemic is set to cause to our economy. Preparing a budget for a full year, without reaching 'there,' at this point in time, certainly looked like an audacious attempt. The PML-N leader was justified to insist that we must treat the proposals, tabled on June 12, 2020, as 'interim.' We also need to prepare ourselves for a series of mini-budgets in the days to come.

Khawaja Asif sounded justified for savagely taking on Dr. Hafeez Sheikh, a technocrat the IMF has loaned to us for presumably pushing Pakistan on the road to economic recovery. At least two previous governments of Pakistan since the start of this century had already attempted to seek guidance from his wisdom. Last time, he had served the PPP government for around two years. He miserably failed to deliver and left the country in early-2011.

Things don't look promising under his command, for...

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