By Uzma Ehtasham
Pakistan’s rulers have discovered a cheap new language of sacrifice. It comes dressed in somber declarations of “austerity” and “national duty”, but melts away the moment it is asked to bear any real weight. This year’s Pakistan Day is the latest stage for this performance. The traditional 23 March parade, with its carefully choreographed displays of military power and pageantry, has been scrapped. In its place, the government offers simple flag-hoisting ceremonies and a litany of symbolic cutbacks, all advertised as proof of fiscal prudence in an era of oil shocks and empty coffers. The message from Islamabad is clear: the state is tightening its belt. The question from the street is equally clear: whose belt, exactly?
In a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, officials laid out a plan that reads like a carefully curated theatre of restraint. There will be fuel conservation measures, we are told, and assurances that petroleum stocks are being vigilantly monitored. Cabinet members will forgo their salaries; government departments will cut back on fuel consumption in an ostensible bid to ease the public’s burden. On paper, it is the kind of language multilateral lenders like to hear. In practice, it falls apart under the lightest scrutiny. A waived ministerial salary is not a sacrifice when the minister is already insulated by layers of wealth, perks and undeclared income streams. It is closer to a rounding error than a reckoning.
The central conceit here is that the state can signal seriousness simply by shrinking the optics of celebration. The Pakistan Day parade is an easy target: expensive, visible and politically defensible to cut in the name of crisis management. But cancelling a parade does little to repair the structural rot that has left the economy hostage to every tremor in global oil markets. It does even less to address the daily indignities faced by citizens who have spent years absorbing the real costs of austerity: higher electricity tariffs, indirect taxes on essentials, collapsing public services and a labor market that offers insecurity instead of opportunity. Against that backdrop, the decision to sacrifice spectacle masquerades as strategy.
If austerity is to mean anything beyond slogan, it must begin at the apex of power, not at its periphery. Who among the prime minister, chief ministers, cabinet, advisers and special assistants will actually feel the sting of these measures? The country is not governed by the precariously employed. It is governed by individuals whose declared incomes already place them in the economic stratosphere, and whose undeclared fortunes—whether accumulated through business, patronage or proximity to power—are the real story. For such figures, the official state salary is an afterthought, a token stipend that lends a veneer of public service to otherwise lucrative careers. To forgo it is to part with the smallest coin in one’s pocket while keeping the vault firmly shut.
It is here that the government’s narrative collapses into something bordering on insult. When the elite glide through cities in convoys of imported SUVs, their fuel and maintenance paid for by the taxpayer, the claim that cancelling a national parade represents meaningful thrift sounds like a particularly cruel joke. Official residences, club memberships, foreign medical trips and security details are not on the chopping block. Nor are the entrenched networks of patronage that funnel public resources towards private estates. Instead, the public is asked to clap politely as those at the top trim, metaphorically, the corpse’s hair in the hope of convincing us that the body has grown lighter.
The parade itself is not above criticism. The money spent on military displays can fairly be questioned in a country where schools crumble and hospitals lack basic equipment. Yet it is disingenuous to pretend that its cancellation in this particular moment springs from a sudden attack of egalitarian conscience. For better or worse, national days and their rituals do something intangible that balance sheets cannot measure. They create a shared emotional vocabulary; they allow nations—especially anxious, divided ones like Pakistan—to rehearse a story about themselves that is larger than individual grievance. When the state hollows out that symbolic space and calls it saving, it risks signaling not maturity but exhaustion.
Pakistan Day was conceived as a commemoration of a political imagination bold enough to demand a separate homeland. It is a day built on the premise that collective futures can be reshaped by collective will. To shrink that day into a perfunctory flag-hoisting while leaving the old hierarchies intact is to misunderstand that legacy. The choice before the government is not between parade and prudence. It is between hollow gestures and honest reform. Sharif still has the opportunity to treat this controversy as more than a footnote in a difficult year. He can either persist with the illusion that austerity is a matter of cancelled fly-pasts and forgone stipends, or he can recognize what people already know: that legitimacy in hard times is earned not by preaching sacrifice from a distance, but by practising it in ways that genuinely alter who bears the weight.
(The writer is a public health professional, journalist, and possesses expertise in health communication, having keen interest in national and international affairs, can be reached at uzma@metro-morning.com)
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