THE helicopter drops over a narrow embankment, showering the skinny men and boys perched on it with flotsam and brown floodwater. They rush forwards, waving and yelling soundlessly against the roar of rotary blades. Six weeks after torrential rains caused the Indus river to break its banks, inundating their mud-walled villages in Rajanpur, a district of southern Punjab, their anguish is not feigned. They are hungry, destitute and still marooned by a floodwater sea.
Through the chopper’s open door, Shahbaz Sharif, chief minister of Punjab, pitches a sack of food, then looks down and heaves out another. The younger brother of Pakistan’s opposition leader and twice prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, whose Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) rules Punjab, Mr Sharif has spent almost every day since the floods hit marshalling dykes and dispensing relief. His rivals accuse him of taking political advantage from the deluge, which at its height submerged a fifth of Pakistan’s area and affected over 20m people. But the country would be in less calamitous shape if more officials worked as hard as he.
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