Tahir Maqsood Chheena
There is a particular kind of arrogance that does not bother hiding itself. It parks on a tarmac, gleaming and unbothered, and dares you to say something. The Gulfstream G500 now sitting in Lahore is that arrogance made metal. Nineteen seats. Rs11.7 billion of public money. A country where people are rationing meals, skipping medications, and pulling children out of school because fees have become impossible. And the Punjab government’s response to the outrage this purchase has generated is not embarrassment. It is explanation. That, in itself, tells you everything.
Let us begin with what this aircraft actually is. The Gulfstream G500 is not a workhorse transport plane. It is not a functional government vessel built for efficiency. It is a luxury business jet of the kind that petroleum billionaires and tech oligarchs use to cross continents in leather-seated comfort. Its acquisition at Rs11.7 billion, in a province that cannot consistently supply clean water to its rural districts, that runs public hospitals without basic medicines, that sends children to schools without roofs, is not a policy decision. It is a statement. And the statement is this: the comfort of those at the top matters more than the survival of those at the bottom.
What has made the whole episode worse is the quality of the justifications offered. When the story broke, the first instinct of the government was containment, to minimize and deflect and hope the news cycle moved on. When that failed, the explanations arrived. The most remarkable of these was the claim that this luxury jet is a commercial asset for the upcoming Air Punjab airline. Air Punjab, at the time of this writing, does not exist in any operational sense. It has no routes, no fleet, no regulatory clearances, and no credible launch date. Purchasing a Rs11.7 billion aircraft for an airline that lives entirely in the future is not investment. It is fiction dressed in the language of business planning.
Then came Information Minister Azma Bukhari with the defence that has since become notorious. If Sindh can operate a plane for Bilawal Bhutto, why cannot Punjab operate one for its own leadership. This argument deserves to be examined honestly, because it reveals something important about how the political class understands accountability. The minister is not defending the purchase on its own merits. She is defending it by pointing at someone else doing something equally indefensible. This is not governance. This is the logic of shared guilt, the political equivalent of a child caught stealing sweets and immediately reporting that his sibling stole them first. The correct answer to both situations is the same: stop stealing sweets.
And the minister is right about one thing, though not in the way she intended. Neither Sindh nor Punjab should be operating private aircraft when their people cannot access basic services. The fact that this argument was offered as a defence rather than as a concession of the broader problem tells you how detached this political class has become from the daily reality of ordinary Pakistani life.
The criticism from the opposition, meanwhile, deserves the same scrutiny. Imran Khan and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf have been among the loudest voices condemning this purchase. They are not wrong to condemn it. But the memory of helicopter trips from Bani Gala to the Prime Minister’s House, taken at public expense while the same leadership lectured the nation about austerity and sacrifice, has not faded. The problem being described here is not a problem of one party or one province. It is a problem of the Pakistani political class as a whole, a class that has constructed for itself a parallel existence: separate hospitals, separate schools, separate roads, separate aircraft, and a separate understanding of what sacrifice means. For them it means asking others to bear it.
There is a practical dimension to this that the government seems not to have considered seriously. The specific example offered, that the Chief Minister requires an aircraft because a drive from Lahore to Sialkot takes two hours while a flight takes twenty minutes, is a justification that undermines itself. Virtual meetings exist. Secure video conferencing is available to every government in the world. The administrative demands that supposedly make a Rs11.7 billion aircraft necessary can be met, in the overwhelming majority of cases, without leaving a chair. If the argument for this jet rests on the value of the Chief Minister’s time, the response is simple: use that time more efficiently, not more expensively.
There is also a comparison worth making, not the self-serving comparison the minister offered, but an honest one. The leaders of Singapore fly commercial. The Prime Ministers of Norway and Sweden, countries that Pakistan regularly approaches for aid and investment and whose governance models Pakistani officials praise in speeches, fly commercial. They do so not because their governments cannot afford alternatives, but because their political cultures have established that the distance between a leader and the people she serves should not be measured in luxury fittings and cabin altitude. Pakistan is not Singapore or Norway, and the comparison is not offered to embarrass but to ask a serious question: what kind of country do we intend to become, and what habits of leadership will take us there.
The people of Pakistan are not naive about their political class. Decades of experience have produced a detailed and accurate understanding of how power works here, who it protects, and who it costs. What has changed is the depth of the exhaustion. Inflation has ground household budgets to dust. Unemployment has removed the floor from beneath families that once considered themselves stable. In that context, a gleaming jet on a Lahore tarmac is not merely a bad use of public money. It is a visible declaration that the priorities of the state and the needs of its citizens have parted company entirely.
Ground the jet. Sell it. Return the money to a public hospital that needs an MRI machine, or a school district that needs desks, or a water treatment project that has been pending for a decade. And then, if our leaders must travel, let them travel the way Pakistanis travel: on the roads they build, through the delays they create, past the conditions they have failed to fix.
That journey might teach them something no Gulfstream ever could.
