Almost everyday, newspapers publish advertisements by banking courts asking defaulters to pay or face legal action (usually resulting in their properties being auctioned). Sometimes the loans are as low as half a million rupees. So can anyone explain why loans amounting to Rs. 60 billion were written off during the Musharraf era? One favoured politician (Senator Haroon Akhter of the PML-Q) got away with a hundred and ten million rupees. Why didn’t the banks follow the prescribed procedure for these big defaulters also? Perhaps there are different laws for bigger criminals.
After this loot and plunder by the bigwigs, on what grounds can banks take legal action against small defaulters? Justice demands that either all loans be written off or all defaulters be made to return the money borrowed by them. But one thing is evident: in Pakistan, it pays to be a big crook. You can lie, cheat and rob, and yet you can be elected to the assemblies, where you get more opportunities to loot the country and become even richer.
Should we not rename the country as “Crookistan�
Leave a Reply