A satirical Open Letter to the Chief Minister of Gilgit-Baltistan for the acknowledgment of his services.

The ensuing letter is written with a solemn and firm conviction to explicate the sanctity of moral pedestal that you have attained and to apprise the general masses at large of the services you have dispensed and the sacrificial contributions you have made for the social welfare, societal betterment and institutional re-organization of our society. It is an onus upon those in loop of your endeavours to further disseminate the saga of your achievements to ensure their shelter from divine anathema for the crime of its concealment.

The dispensation of justice, the uplift of the downtrodden, and the alleviation of poverty have been the cornerstone of your political campaign. Soon after you assumed the helm of chief ministership, you reinforced your commitment on the floor of the house to avail yourself of every opportunity to act up to your vows. Those around you on their seats and the ones glued to their television sets felt a surge of excitement after having listened to your speech. You generated a spine-chilling wave of gusto in an auspiciously powerful oration. A strong sense of trustworthiness ran through the veins of your words.|

To this end, you strained every nerve from the onset and appointed hand-picked civil servants and endowed them with perks, privileges and unwarranted authority. They were provided with the license to liberally manipulate, slyly maneuver, and advertently hamstring the local civil administration at will and whim to peddle for a greater sway over the resources. Funds were criminally tapped into, resources were brutally abused, illegal inductions were carried out at industrial scale, and financial largesse was distributed amongst the cronies with impunity at your behest. By pressing into use your political go-ahead, these civil servants showcased their exceptional calibre in siphoning off money by bypassing all the auditory filters. Industrious, painstaking, and assiduous bureaucrats were either upstaged or were incapacitated of their legal right to undertake any meaningful enterprise. They were vilified, ridiculed, and disempowered only with an intent to further strengthen the organizational sinew of our civil administrative skeleton.

The spree of showering the financial blessings did not restrict itself to the civil servants, the political elite and the government contractors were also collaborating in unison in their pious effort to loot, plunder, and embezzle without scruples. An outstanding display of camaraderie, collusion, connivance was exhibited and an insurmountable bar of exceptionally brilliant record  for systemic mismanagement, malfunction, and malpractice was maintained by these contenders. You did not shrink away from ennobling yourself as the spearhead of this crusade for the aggrandizement of personal assets and the proliferation of personal belongings. Your commitment to remain unequivocal and unambiguous in your speeches is reflected in your admission of these achievements.

Under your direct supervision, the fragile infrastructure of Gilgit-Baltistan languishing in shambles and mired in dilapidation is transformed into a cutting-edge network of artistic sophistication. A wide web of transportation-facilitating metallic roads is spread across the length and breath of the region with colossal flyovers and titanic off-ground bridges straddling the skyline of skyscrapers. Each lap of metallic road is interspersed by a government administered tax-free advisory cell dedicated to cater traffic education and a horse-reliant postal service. This unique model was conceived and materialized into execution under your auspices.

The Korean Committee for quality transportation in the Republic of Korea and the Zimbabwean Committee for serviceable highway-mapping in the Republic of Zimbabwe in acknowledgment of this project dispatched theirs teams of experts to study, investigate, and adopt the formula at play in the formulation of this model.

In addition, innovative proposals reflective of intellectual ingenuity have already been conceived by your perspicacious coterie to generate electricity by grinding the boulders littered across the region, to purge the sea-water of adulteration by diverting its course of flow towards Russia, and to get connected with wider global community through telepathy by invoking shamanic powers in lieu of internet. A vast swath of land has been earmarked with a vision to establish a state-of-the-art workshop in pursuance of launching a home-manufactured satellite for the exploration of space. The project entails a multi-layered process ranging from the indigenous systemization of space technology to the consignment of a robot-carrying satellite across a multitude of galaxies. Of late, concerted efforts have been undertaken to store the light of stars for the generation of electricity in order to meet the industrial consumption.

In toto, the afore-mentioned series of achievements merely amounts to an infinitesimal mass of speck against your accolades, and a writer notorious for his lack of lexical acquaintance and a letter characterized by the brevity of its content, cannot stand up to enumerate the string of accomplishments carried off in your brief stint of benison-endowed incumbency.

Honestly Yours,

A Passionate Truth-Teller

The writer is a prospective candidate for the Ph.D. program at NYU.
Former COAS, Pakistan friendscolumn@hotmail.com