Let Them Ride EVs: Punjab’s Modern Marie Antoinette and the Darkness of the Common Man

How the state’s “free” gifts are turning into a financial Trojan horse for Pakistan’s struggling fathers .

The ceiling fan hangs motionless in the stagnant, suffocating heat of a summer evening. Underneath it sits a father, his face illuminated only by the faint, cold glow of a phone screen. He is staring at a number he cannot comprehend—and simply cannot pay. His monthly electricity bill has arrived, and it reads like a financial execution order. It demands more than his entire monthly wage, a brutal penalty inflicted by the state for the simple crime of trying to keep his family alive in a nation with a collapsing grid.

Just then, the front door opens. His child walks in, face alight with excitement, wheeling a brand-new, government-subsidized electric bike, a glossy laptop bag slung over their shoulder. It is a prize from the state’s latest mega-scheme: 100,000 free vehicles and gadgets distributed amid a flurry of camera flashes, heavy security protocols, and self-congratulatory political speeches.

It is a scene of surreal, heartbreaking irony. The child has been given a machine to charge, but the father has no power. The state has gifted a laptop, but the home has no light.

This is the modern tragedy of Pakistan. It is a reality where the ruling elite buys political glorification with shiny, high-tech giveaways, while systematically breaking the backs of the everyday taxpayers who fund the illusion.

This disconnect is not unique to our time; it is a textbook symptom of an aristocracy living in an alternate reality. When the French queen Marie Antoinette was told that her starving subjects had no bread, her legendary’s response was, “Let them eat cake.” Today, in Punjab, we are witnessing the digitized resurrection of that exact hubris. As millions of citizens scream under the crushing weight of unpayable utility bills, fuel adjustments, and prolonged blackouts, the Chief Minister looks down from her air-conditioned podium and declares: “Let them ride electric bikes. Let them use laptops.”

*Here lies the hidden, structural cruelty of this gimmick: the “Protected Consumer” trap* .

To survive the crushing weight of inflation, the lower-middle-class father spends the entire month meticulously counting units, shutting off lights, and forcing his family to live in sweat just to stay under the 200-unit “protected” threshold. But what happens when the child plugs in that shiny new EV bike and the gifted laptop to charge?

The math is unforgiving. If that charging pushes the household meter over the limit by even a single unit, the trap snaps shut. The household is instantly cast out into the punitive “non-protected” category, where the cost of every single unit consumed that month retroactively doubles, and heavy fixed penal charges are slapped onto the bill.

Who is going to pay the penalty for that single, fatal unit? Not the Chief Minister. Not the politicians posing for the cameras. It is the father, whose reward for his child’s academic excellence is a sudden, unpayable debt. The state’s “free” gift is, in reality, a financial Trojan horse—a beautiful present brought through the front door that secretly destroys the family’s finances from within.

There is a devastating lack of basic logic at play here. Where, exactly, are these students supposed to charge these vehicles? How are they to utilize these laptops when the battery dies and the room plunges into a six-hour blackout? In a country where the power sector is suffocated by trillions in circular debt, gifting energy-dependent technology isn’t progress—it is a farce. It is like gifting a boat to someone stranded in a desert.

Worse still is the realization of who is actually paying for this theater. These “freebies” are not paid for by the rulers; they are extracted from the very fathers who are drowning in taxes. Every basic commodity, every unit of electricity, and every liter of fuel is heavily taxed to fund the elite’s vanity projects. The ruling class feasts on political entertainment, using state resources to build a legacy of photo-ops, completely blind to the fact that the foundation beneath them is burning.

We are living in an era that feels dangerously close to the prelude of the French Revolution. You cannot sustain a society on cosmetic charity while denying them the basic infrastructure of survival. The common man does not want elite benevolence; he wants structural justice. He does not want a subsidized gimmick; he wants an affordable life.

If the state cannot keep the present turned on, it has no business selling us a digital future. The rulers must realize that a population pushed to the brink cannot be pacified with shiny gadgets. No amount of free laptops can illuminate the darkness of a home broken by its own government—and the quiet fury building in ordinary households is a debt that no subsidy will ever be able to clear.