Editorial
A plane for the Chief Minister of Punjab has triggered a storm of public criticism. Television anchors are outraged. Opposition politicians are furious. Social media is ablaze with indignation. The criticism is loud, coordinated, and relentless.
But where was this outrage when it actually mattered?
During the Naqvi era, over 1,600 vehicles were procured for the bureaucracy. Sixteen hundred. The figure is staggering by any standard of public accountability. These were not emergency purchases or operational necessities. They were institutional privileges extended to a civil service that already enjoys protections, perks, and entitlements unavailable to ordinary citizens. Nobody held a press conference. No anchor ran a primetime special. The political opposition stayed conspicuously silent.
Then came the DHA colony, an entire residential scheme carved out for bureaucrats. Public land, public resources, and institutional leverage all deployed to house the very people who already command some of the most secure employment in the country. Again, silence. The same voices now screaming about a single aircraft had nothing to say when an entire colony was being constructed for an unelected administrative class.
And today, hundreds of electric vehicles are being procured for the bureaucracy. The initiative is framed as environmental progress. Perhaps it is. But the pattern deserves scrutiny. Every fleet expansion, every housing scheme, every budgetary allocation flowing toward the civil service passes without the outrage reserved exclusively for elected governments.
This is not a defence of unnecessary executive expenditure. Accountability must be universal or it means nothing. The real question is why bureaucratic privilege consistently escapes the moral scrutiny that political figures routinely face. When outrage is selective, it stops being accountability. It becomes something far more dishonest — a political weapon dressed in the language of public interest.
