Legitimized Corruption

One should not grow up to have ideological differences with power brokers. This kind of mindset has consequences on the human personality. For one thing, you can end up developing a mentality that easily finds negativity in others, especially in people holding positions of power. You end up becoming a cribber. And if you are a sensitive person who likes to look good, you will face a certain feeling of awkwardness about yourself that at a time or place where you should have been dressed up all so good with a smiling countenance, why did you have to look grotesque by talking ill of someone. For the other thing, this can naturally lead you to trouble. Even if you don’t like to hate yourself and you have a happy personality, criticizing personnel behind the corridors of power can mean that the days of your happiness are numbered.

However, sometimes you should definitely speak up against powerful folks even if you are so apolitical. A certain degree of political activism is incumbent upon all of us.

The recent allotment of a landmass to General Raheel Sharif reminds me of a conversation with two of my colleagues in a car on our way to Lahore a few years back. We were serving together in Namal college Mianwali together as faculty members at that time and we were headed to attend the annual convocation.

One of the friends complained about the extravagant amount of luxuries army officers enjoy. To this, I argued that this was their right according to law. To this, the other friend explained how this was a way to conduct legitimized corruption. By the way, the other friend is the son of a retired army officer himself. By virtue of being affiliated with academia willfully for a long time, he tends to be a quite seasoned philosopher who cannot be denied quite easily when it comes to reason.

This is an extremely unjust, unfair and depriving way of distributing wealth and resources in our society. If this is not stopped now, this will lead to a lot of rifts in our society. The aggrieved society will surely turn against our army and it will lead to a lot of social instability. Animosity towards the army is already on its way and it has been burgeoning well over the last couple of decades in our society. But tell such things to an army officer and his mustache will catch fire.
 
I too have a background in the army and I feel proud of our army. But for me, this is totally unacceptable and this kind of bestowing of wealth should stop at all costs. It is time that we realize that our army is not so sacrosanct at the cost of the ordinary civilian. There are a lot of civilians (more so nowadays) that are contributing to our society that a whole army cannot do.

Photo by sassy mom

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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Legitimized Corruption by Psyops Prime is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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