Long on rights and short on duties

President Kennedy once posed a very thought- provoking question:every American says what has his country given to him but nobody asks himself as to what has he given to it? Formation of unions by various segments of society is not a bad thing. Unions protect the rights of individuals but whereas the safeguard of one’s rights is sacred , one’s duties to his organisation are also equally sacrosanct and one should always keep a balance between one’s rights and duties, otherwise, the system where he works for earning his livelihood can go haywire.
In this country, unfortunately, too much stress has always been made on the rights of individuals and little or no attention has been given to their duties. Since most of our rulers had been financially corrupt they, more often than not, failed to withstand unions’pressure even on those issues where their stand was correct and the unions were in the wrong. If Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan had called the bluff of the striking coal miners and air control tower operators during their tenure in office as British prime minister and American president respectively and successfully lanced their boil it was only because they were financially upright persons. Let us hope that Imran Khan would take a stand on the imposition of Essential Services Act in all the government hospitals of the KPK. Whether or not the prime minister too can show resilience and courage and hold his nerves in fighting off those within the national carrier who have been raising hullabaloo despite his promise that no body would be laid off in the PIA is open to question?
POSTSCRIPT:Sardar Mehtab Khan Abbasi, Governor KPK, has called it a day after serving in this gubernatorial office for about two years. Earlier, between 1997 and 1999, he had been chief minister of the same province also. He thus has the rare distinction of holding these two important offices one after the other. He is basically a political man and feels more comfortable by freely mixing with his electorate rather than remaining confined within the four walls of the Governor House. He has an eye on contesting polls in 2018 for which there is a pre-condition that the candidate contesting polls should not have served as a public servant for at least two years before the date of nomination of papers.