You are an up and coming 35 year old lawyer from Bahawalpur. You belong to humble lower middle class background. You are a self made person who paid for his higher education by giving tuition and doing part time jobs. You have been practicing law for 8 years now and you have made a reputation for being a hardworking and competent lawyer. With your reputation slowly growing, you have started to make on average Rs 100,000 per month.
You have 4 school going children studying at a decent but not exorbitantly expensive private school which charges Rs 5,000 per child bring their total fee to Rs 20,000 per month. The suzuki driver that takes them to school and back charges Rs 1,500 per child (a total of Rs 6,000 per month). The incidental expenses for your children are about Rs 10,000 per month.
You live in a rented house in a middle class neighborhood and pay Rs 20,000 per month as rent. Utility bills add Rs 10,000 to your monthly budget. Groceries and other household expenses total Rs 20,000. You drive a second hand Mehran car and spend Rs 10,000 each month on its fuel and maintenance. Your total monthly expenses are Rs 96,000.
So at the end of the month, you hardly save anything but you are thankful to Allah that you are better than millions and are leading a decent life with hopes of even better days ahead.
You are a passionate politically aware person and want to make a change in the society. When the time for elections comes you are offered a ticket from PTI. You accept and the party workers do the campaigning for you. You do not have to spend anything on the campaign but you did not have much to spend anyway. You win the elections and become an MNA.
Now a new phase of your life has started. Your legal practice is as good as finished now because you'll have to spend at least half of your time in Islamabad to attend the sessions of the National Assembly. An advocate who is absent half teh time can hardly hope to get any clients. You'll have to travel to Islamabad for each NA session. The return air ticket from Bahawalpur to Islamabad costs Rs 22,000. Even if you go on Daewoo bus, it will still cost you about Rs 5,000 each time. Once in Islamabad, you'll be provided lodging in parliamentary lodges but still you'll have to pay for utility expenses. You'll be provided Rs 1,000 per day meal allowance during the NA session for your dinner as breakfast and lunch will be provided in NA cafetaria. Rs 1,000 is barely enough to pay for a single meal in any decent restaurant in Islamabad. But to make matters worse, there are always 5 or 6 of your constituents visiting you in Islamabad to seek your help on different issues. You'll have to take them to lunch as well and in Rs 1,000 you can only get a plate of 'daal' for all of you at a roadside khokha.
When the session ends and you are back home in Bahawalpur, each day you are visited by dozens of your voters who come and narrate the work they did in your campaign and want you to help their kid get admission at local college or get their niece transferred from the school in a remote village or get their son in law promoted or get a job for their brother or any other similar task. Even if you cannot do any thing for them as you believe that everything should be done only on merit without any 'sifarish' from anyone, still you'll have to listen to them and at least offer them tea as they are your guests.
At the end of the month you realize that your expenses have risen significantly but your income has gone drastically down. You are worried to death regarding how you can make ends meet. Suddenly, you realize that as an MNA you will get a salary of Rs 80,000 per month. Though it is less than what you had been earning before becoming an MNA but you think you can still manage if you transfer your children to a govt school, sell your car and start traveling on a bike. You are ready to give this sacrifice for the nation.
But then a blackmailer journalist starts writing stories about the million of rupees that are spent on MNAs. You start receiving hate mail and trolls on the internet trash you for sucking the blood of people by drawing the "huge salary" of Rs 80,000 per month. There is demand for stopping all payments to MNAs as their job is to do "awam ki khidmat". they should do it for free and should not expect any monetary compensation.
Now you are cursing yourself for joining politics and becoming an MNA as this has brought nothing but financial hardship for you and your family. If your salary as MNA is stopped, you have two choices; either to resign and go home trying to resuscitate your badly suffered legal practice or start demanding money from corrupt govt officials in return for your support. You do not want to think about second option as you are an honest person so you resign and go home saying that this nation has ensured that only rich and upper class people can sit in the assembly and politics is no place for a middle class person.
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This is a true and not uncommon situation in our assemblies and I know it personally. Is this the outcome you support?
