…or lack thereof
A vacuous media will only try to connect the dots where they needn’t be and point news of the Indian railways minister resigning to the local railways minister. See, across the border (no love lost for our neighbours otherwise) they resign when something goes wrong; what about you?
Well, it isn’t an apple-to-apple comparison. “Something” didn’t go wrong in the Indian railways; the minister, who belongs to an ally party of the ruling Congress, was urged to resign by his party after he refused to roll-back the fare hike in the railways. Torn between the demands of his own party and his professional opinion as the concerned minister, he decided to opt out and quit. Guilty of loyalty to his own party. There are many nasty things one can say about his counterpart in Pakistan but disloyalty to his party isn’t one of them.
But this particular gripe of the local press on other occasions – Indian railways minister have resigned in instances of gruesome accidents, something no railways minister here, incumbent included has done – is well founded.
But it is not just the railways that seems to have the green pasture problem. It’s almost all our institutions, even the ones that the media are not too fond of criticising. Consider the presence of Osama Bin Laden, the world’s most wanted man, only a grenade’s throw away from Pakistan’s premier military academy. The military’s spymaster did not resign but was let to complete the full-term of his extension. The same case could have been made for all three military services during a month-long period in 2011. The naval chief for PNS Mehran, the other two for Abbottabad.
Amongst the politicians, resigning over an issue shouldn’t mean to imply an admission of incompetence, one that would ruin future prospects. Politics is politics; future electoral arrangements will mean other cabinet opportunities. But the humble – and (why not?) dramatic – resignation will serve to bolster the electorate’s confidence in the efficacy of the system.
