Queues, official fleets, and the cost of calm! Don’t panic, we just bought new cars

2026-03-08 - 20:54

Urban Bystander Panic in Islamabad is rarely panic in the usual sense. It is closer to recognition. People hear the reassurance, check the gauge, and leave the house. By the time officials appear before cameras to say there is no shortage, the line has already formed. By the previous evening, the queues had begun. At Karal Chowk, empty tankers waited to reload after a day of panic buying in the twin cities. On March 6, officials appeared before cameras to reassure the nation. There was no shortage. Supplies were adequate. The DC Islamabad was on the case. The petroleum minister was on the case. The prime minister had chaired a high-level meeting and was, one gathered, on a larger and more upholstered version of the same case. At the Karachi Company pump, in a queue that had moved fourteen feet in forty-five minutes, Khalid Mehmood switched off the engine of his old Cultus. Khalid sahib was a retired Cabinet Division assistant, sixty-eight, pensioned, and inclined to believe that a matter reaching three ministers ought by now to have been handled. He had believed this for thirty-three years. He saw no reason to stop now. By iftar, citizens were breaking fast in petrol lines. Khalid opened a tissue in which his wife had packed two dates. He ate one with the engine off and kept the second in his lap, in case the queue moved him into a more hopeful category of citizen. A few cars behind, someone could not break fast at all, because he had left the house expecting petrol and not theology. Then, at midnight, the government resolved the shortage in the traditional manner. It raised petrol from Rs266.17 to Rs321.17 and diesel from Rs280.86 to Rs335.86, effective immediately. The explanation arrived in the usual language of necessity: global prices, regional instability, limited fiscal room. It may well have been true. But in this country truth has a timing problem. It usually arrives after the queue. By dawn, the shortage was over. It had always been there; the price had simply not yet been correct. The public was told not to panic after it had already panicked efficiently, at a premium, in the dark. Petrol carried a record levy; diesel was spared part of the blow. The man on the motorcycle paid extra so the state could call the result balanced. Khalid sahib did the arithmetic with an old government servant’s instinct for injury: one visit to PIMS, one family iftar in Rawalpindi, the weekly dignity of turning the ignition without consulting his budget. Dignity had become a variable cost. He wrote it down, underlined it, added a question mark. Thirty-three years in the Cabinet Division had taught him the final number is never the one they show you first. No ministry announced fewer vehicles. No convoy shrank. Ministers and senior officials, each drawing hundreds of litres of free government petrol every month, did not surrender a single drop, and no one, in any official room, appears to have thought to ask them to. Citizens were told not to hoard. The state, its tanks full, did not volunteer to walk. Then came the week’s clearest fact. The government had purchased new cars for bureaucrats. He read it twice, with the expression of a man discovering that the file on which he had retired was still moving without him. He spent forty minutes in a darkened car, contemplating the republic until the line moved and the briefing did not. The government fleets, innocent of sacrifice, would continue. Pain is never denied. It is merely allocated. The rider gets the levy. The commuter gets the lecture. The pump gets the inspection. The minister gets the camera. The bureaucracy gets the car. Do not panic. Do not hoard. Trust the system. Endure the rise. Behave responsibly. Somewhere in an air-conditioned room, this had already become a briefing. In Islamabad, scarcity is real. Shared sacrifice is the fiction. Ten litres for the citizen. Full tank for the sermon.—(The writer can be reached at bystanderinthecity@gmail.com)