'With A Heavy Heart'.

Shenanigans that the eleven-party government keeps displaying since replacing Imran Khan in April this year have stopped being laughable. They have now begun to deepen the feeling that Pakistan was rather being run by a team of recklessly incompetent persons.

You certainly need a very thick skin for not fathoming that our country needs to vigorously address a daunting number of challenges on multiple fronts. Far more alarming are the economic issues. Our Foreign Currency Reserves continue to deplete, ruthlessly pushing the value of Pak Rupee to the bottom. In spite of increasing the prices of electricity, gas and petroleum products to backbreaking limits, economic and fiscal managers of this government are yet not able to satisfy the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

In spite of being unable to create any hope in this season of absolute doom and gloom, the eleven-party government, led by Shehbaz Sharif, still wants to act as if ruling in 'normal' times. It also wants the world to take us as a 'functional democracy,' where a 'duly elected parliament' continues to work 'overtime' to find solutions to accumulated problems.

To act normal and brave, the government had also summoned another National Assembly session Wednesday. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif delivered a bombastic speech during its maiden sitting. But the tale he told with too much pomp and fury failed to induce any hope; he rather kept remorsefully suggesting that powerful quarters of the permanent institutions of our state were not helping him to focus on his job.

In the said context, he also was not too subtle in telegraphing the messages that the superior courts were crippling his powers to deliver. With the clear intent of demonstrating some 'push back,' thundering speeches were then delivered from the treasury benches. They vowed to 'reclaim' the territory, the elected parliament had relentlessly been conceding to extra-parliamentary institutions, since at least 2014. But exactly a day after, Thursday, the ruling alliance miserably failed to show the minimum number present in the house, required for establishing quorum; the sitting had to be adjourned for the lack of it!

While promising to reclaim the 'lost territory' during Wednesday's sitting, speaker after speaker from the ruling benches also looked astonishingly oblivious to the reality that 125 members of the largest party in the National Assembly, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) of Imran Khan, had posted collective...