Of the government, against a government
The power outages seem to have turned into a federalist issue, with Punjab MPAs leading a strike against the electricity loadshedding. Now the provincial government happens to be headed by the principal opposition party at the federal level, so the strikes, the League would say, should not be construed in that manner. But to the other federating units, the province, which consumes the bulk of the electricity on the grid, yet doesn’t really contribute all that much, would be chuckled at.
Compare, for instance, with KP, which has only just started receiving the hydel profits that were its constitutional dues. Compare with Balochistan, whose natural gas contributes to our thermal profile.
It would also do the League well to realise the crisis in its context. The second BB government ushered in the era of the IPPs, much maligned a little later, that too at rates which seem like a song in retrospect. This left Pakistan in a position to export power to India; a famous reversal of those roles was seen the other day in Seoul. This electric surplus continued well into the Nawaz Sharif government and lasted all the way through the later part of the Musharraf government, at the end of which there just wasn’t enough juice for everyone. Both the regimes did scant for addition of capacity to the profile. If there is any space for smug indignation, it belongs, counter-intuitively, to the incumbents.
But let us not tread on that ground. Let us assume what perhaps is the truth: that the present government has been far from ideal in its response to the electric crisis. In this framework, what should be considered is the acceptable modes of protest for what is, in fact, a sitting government. If a march is to be led by a chief minister – he promises this often – what good would it do to an already fractured polity?
The PML(N) thinks itself as a government in waiting. And, given the performance of the current PPP government, it might have a sporting chance. Under that assumption, it should avoid playing a game it would find hard to keep up with itself later on. The energy crisis is a global phenomenon. It should be above even international politics, what to speak of the national variety.