By Faisal Shakeel

You can easily spot the passenger vans engaged in headlong races on the busy roads of Lahore. The passengers, who aren’t strapped into their seats, swing at every twist and turn of these raucous roller-coaster rides, and must fight continuously to retain their balance and their seats.

Driven solely by the race to pick up more passengers, the drivers pause only at the next bus-stop. The winner takes more commuters than the van’s capacity and makes them bend – not sit – like a quarterback on the narrow strip between the two rows of already-occupied seats. And the cutthroat run begins afresh.

The conductor, who keeps his head sticking out of the van’s window, signals the driver to slow down on spotting a passenger anywhere along the route. Before the van has even come to a halt, the conductor grabs the passenger by his arm and helps him jump in.

You don’t have to be a stuntman to board a moving van, but an ordinary Pakistani living below the poverty line. Why do people opt for such risky rides? The answer lies in the dearth of public transport and successive governments’ lack of focus on improving this vital sector. Private bus-stops have cropped up at every nook and cranny of the city in the absence of official ones.

The official bus-stops, which existed years back, now appear to be huge garbage bins and a shelter for junkies. There is little hope the situation will change anytime soon as the government is focused on fighting the war on terror. The terror war is the latest justification for all Pakistan’s perennial problems.
But it doesn’t seem that the war on terror has had any impact on the government. Despite announcing austerity measures, it continues to spend lavishly on official functions. The recent ceremony at Gwadar Port was a complete negation of the claimed austerity.

In Islamabad, officials and ministers have beefed up security for themselves. That means more personnel and vehicles guarding the servants of the people of Pakistan. While citizens are left at the mercy of a crumbling transport sector, ministers have added siren-wailing vehicles and gun-toting personnel to their convoys. Nobody dares come near such a convoy as policemen and rangers, assigned to protect these officials, wave their guns to warn drivers of other vehicles to keep their distance.

When a journalist at a press conference asked a minister to justify all this, he said that in such situations people would have to make sacrifices.
The minister compared himself with an army general, who sits back and directs his troops to fight on the frontline.