The past few weeks have witnessed several tragic and horrifying incidents. A young man committed suicide in Islamabad because he did not have the means to repay his loan. A young mother jumped in front of a moving train in Lahore with her two children because of extreme poverty and starvation. A young man died in police custody again in Lahore because of alleged police torture and brutality. Similar stories of the people taking their lives in desperation because of grinding poverty or losing their lives due to state or non-state oppression are coming from all parts of Pakistan. These stories provide just a glimpse of the state of extreme poverty, misery, oppression and denial of justice in which the overwhelming majority of the people of Pakistan lives thanks to the exploitative and oppressive system that our elite has imposed on them. This is also the end result of the fantastic prosperity that the Musharraf-Shaukat Aziz clique has brought to Pakistan Thanks to the growing inequalities of wealth and income under the Musharraf-Shaukat Aziz dispensation, 16 million more people reportedly have been driven below the poverty line since 1999. According to a recent World Food Programme survey, the number of people deemed "food insecure" rose by 28 percent to 77 million people in March 2008 from 60 million a year earlier. The price of flour, the staple diet of most of the Pakistanis, has risen sharply during the past few months primarily because of the mismanagement of the wheat policy by the previous regime. The acute shortage of electricity due to the failure of the Musharraf regime to add to the country's power generation capacity during its eight-year rule has brought many self-employed small businessmen to ruin besides affecting adversely the productivity of the economy in general and causing hardships to domestic consumers. Little wonder that unemployment remains on the high side. The unemployment rate which was estimated to be 5.37 percent in 1996, increased to 8.27 percent in 2003 and thereafter declined to 6.20 percent in 2006. However, it was as high as 8.04 percent in the urban areas in 2006. More recent estimates are expected to show a jump in the rate of unemployment which combined with the steep jump in the prices of food items and other necessities of life has broken the back of the poor. The economic situation in Pakistan is the result of the exploitation of the poor by the rich. Our economic and taxation policies instead of providing relief to the down-trodden traditionally have aggravated their living conditions. The elite indulge in ostentatious living and waste of the national resources while the poor suffer due to hunger and lack of access to health, shelter, education, sanitation and safe drinking water. The roads in many small cities in the interior of Punjab like Jhang have simply ceased to exist showing the ineffectiveness of the departments concerned. The situation of the infrastructure in the interior of Sindh, Balochistan and NWFP is reportedly even worse. In the face of this grim situation, a luminary of the Musharraf-Shaukat Aziz economic team had the audacity to claim just a few months ago in a TV interview that the problem was not the shortage of food but the habit of over-eating of the Pakistanis The ignorance of this lady reminded me of the famous story of the French queen before the French Revolution who, when told that the people were rioting for bread, advised them to eat cakes instead. Or may be she lives among people who are given to over-eating and wasting food. What she needs is a reality check by getting out of the comfort of her office and undertaking a tour of the urban slums and the interior of the rural Sindh, Punjab, Balochistan and NWFP to acquaint herself with the poverty from which people are suffering. The economic exploitation of the poor in our country is matched by the oppression perpetrated by the powerful over the down-trodden. This is, of course, partly the result of the widespread and grinding poverty which places the poor at the mercy of the rich classes of the society. But the situation has been aggravated by the stranglehold of the feudal landlords, waderas and sardars over the people in their respective areas, the breakdown of the law and order machinery due to the ineffectiveness of the police, and the alleged corruption of the judiciary. The weakening of the district administration has aggravated the miseries of the poor and the weak. In the past, the district administration could provide protection to the weak against the excesses of the powerful classes of the society. Following the introduction of the devolution system, the rich and the powerful themselves have become the rulers at the local levels with the ability to violate the law with impunity. The weak now simply do not know whom to approach for redress and justice when they are subjected to cruelties by the powerful at the local level. In many case, the police instead of offering protection to the weak sections of the society becomes an accomplice in their exploitation by the local elite. The police thus has become an instrument of oppression instead of being a protection against it. At the national level, the state of oppression from which people at large suffer is the direct result of the strong inclination of our ruling classes including the politicians as well as the civil-military establishment to violate the law or to bend it for protecting their selfish political and economic interests. Pakistan's history is replete with examples of the violation of the law and even the constitution by our rulers. Musharraf may have crossed all limits in violating the constitution when he suspended it for the second time on November 3 last year in his capacity as the chief of the army staff but he was certainly not the first one to do so in our chequered history. The rot set in with Ayub's martial law and continued with his military successors who violated the constitution with impunity. Unfortunately, even our civilian rulers have left a dismal record as far as the respect for the law and the constitution is concerned. When the rulers themselves are guilty of violation of the law, they set a bad example which is followed down the line by those manning the government machinery at various levels whether in the police, the judiciary or other government departments. The net result is the breakdown of the law and order machinery leading to pervasive lawlessness which leads to denial of justice and erosion of the protection against oppression by the powerful. Pakistan right now is faced with this grim reality. The common man in Pakistan currently suffers from a lethal combination of oppression and economic exploitation by the powerful and the rich. A society based on injustice and exploitation cannot prosper or even survive for long. The change of the governments at the federal and provincial levels following the February elections offers a valuable opportunity to the political leadership to reverse course and adopt effective policies for the promotion of respect for law, justice and welfare of the common man. History will not forgive the new political leaders if they fail in their duty to dismantle the system of oppression and exploitation from which the people have suffered for so long. Nor will the people of Pakistan who showed unambiguously at the last elections that they were capable of booting out their rulers if they failed to establish the rule of law and provide good governance. The writer is a former ambassador E-mail: javid_husain@yahoo.com