Voluntary spin-doctors of the Imran government.

The PTI has a huge brigade of spin-doctors. All of them fervently compete with each other to promote the feel-good stories about the Imran government. Most of them fully realize that the prime minister is not a regular reader of the print media. He rather considers this genre, old and dying. It does not help a politician with cultivating and deepening the populist base either.

Little wonder, Imran Khan proved himself to be the first politician in Pakistan who brilliantly focused on the electronic media for developing a diehard constituency of admirers and loyalists.

Of late, though, the prime minister seems to have discovered the limits of this medium as well. He rather keeps checking various APPs on his cell phone, almost addictively, to find out what has gone viral on social media. Most of his regular spokespersons don't look living up to his expectations on this front.

We can't blame him, therefore, if he has now begun to patronize a select group of dedicated youth. With obsessive zeal, the activists of this group sweat around the clock to establish themselves as perception-building 'YouTube Influencers.' Thanks to the diligence of such 'volunteers', the PTI narrative dominates the media discourse these days.

The economic and many other forms of constraints are not letting the regular media to breathe anyway and things continue to look rosy and hunky-dory for the Imran government, if you rely on media only.

'Virtual' can't replace 'the real', though. And some speeches, delivered from the treasury benches during the ongoing discussion on budgetary proposals have certainly conveyed that 'ground realities' are not as pleasing as the truckload of spin-doctors would want us to imagine.

Dr. Ramesh Kumar, a prominent representative of the Hindu community, is a very experienced parliamentarian. Since 2002, he has always been finding himself sitting on the treasury benches. With a friends-to-all-sincere-to-none mindset, he instinctively knows what not to say when delivering a speech in the national assembly, while speaking from the treasury benches. Tuesday he could not stop himself from cautiously expressing some unpleasant truths.

Doctor Kumar was also hit by Corona some weeks ago. Enduring the fear-inducing times of an ongoing pandemic, his experience of fighting with the virus surely deserved attentive listening. He shocked most of us by humbly revealing that as atrained doctor, he could not motivate himself to get admitted in 'any hospital...