MANY had warned of the return of inflation when the Nawaz Sharif government significantly raised indirect taxation in the budget, letting wealthy traders, growers and businesses get away without paying their share of taxes. A warning was again sounded when the State Bank of Pakistan didn’t intervene until it was too late to stop the rupee’s slide (the Pakistani currency has lost over 10pc against the dollar in the first five months of the present fiscal). Similarly, when domestic electricity prices were raised to ‘recover’ the full cost of supplying power to consumers, no one doubted that it would have serious implications for the fixed income group. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone if inflation in November rose by almost 11pc to a 15-month high.

The five-month average headline Consumer Price Index inflation has already outstripped the budgetary target of 8pc, which all except our experienced budget makers had described as unrealistic. Even the conservative central bank has forecast that prices will increase by an average 10.5-11.5pc during the present fiscal compared with less than 7.5pc last year, and the bank has raised interest rates by 1pc since September. Price inflation bites everyone; it feeds on the poor and the middle class. The PML-N, which, before the May general election, had promised to control prices and even substantially reduce them, has been unable to shield those affected by the quick rise in inflation. At the moment all that the PML-N politicians can tell the people is that they will see an improvement once this phase that demands some tough decisions is out of the way. Yet they have no plans to share with them at present. The country’s finance managers don’t seem to have any strategy to protect against the fast rising prices of essentials, particularly food and energy. All the government feels that it needs to do is to secure itself from the popular anger building up, and remedies to the people’s problems can come later.