What a shameful insensitivity! For days, the rain flooding has been battering the people in Sindh, Balochistan and southern Punjab fatally and devastatingly. Yet the calamity is passing out without evoking even a whimper of concern or sympathy in any political quarters, be it the official clans or the opposition tribe. There is all dead silence over there. Mercifully, the political eminences are making a beeline to the Karachi factory that saw hundreds of trapped workers being roasted alive in a horrific fire that broke out there. Probably they found that politically beneficial. But appalling none has bothered about the catastrophe of the flood-battered. Maybe, they found it of no political use. The official grandees could be excused. Over these past few years, they have demonstrated that people's distresses and tribulations do not come any feelingly to them. Often they forget to shed a crocodile tear or two even for form's sake on the public woes. But not even the opposition eminences have cared to voice some grief over the tragic predicament of the flood-devastated. All the Imrans, Munawwars, Nawazs and Fazlurs are keeping their lips sealed tight as if talking of their gloomy plight is a cardinal sin. No affected areas have they visited. No relief camps have their parties set up. None of their workers are seen in the devastated areas helping out the ruined or the marooned.      Yet they too have the audacity to scream day in and day out that they are the people's true representatives, the people's actual voice, and the polity's real face. Could there be a funnier pretence than this? While the stormy rain flooding is laying to waste human lives calamitously and is destroying crops, homes and villages by droves, these eminence are all taken up with the issues of elections, interim governments and what not. Then aren't they for power, not for the people at all? Clearly, it is their hunger for power that drives them wholly. All their avowals of commitment to the people's cause are, bluntly, just sham and fake.Could indeed it be imagined that a people-loving and public-spirited would give such a short shrift to a people in distress as have these eminences to the flood-battered over these days? This flooding may not be as colossal as was the 2010's or the following year's. Yet it has not been some small flooding in a seasonal nullah or a hilly ravine. It has been quite a strong freak flooding that submerged vast areas in Sindh, Balochistan and southern Punjab. People in scores have died. Precious crops in quantities have been washed out. Animals in numbers have been swept away. Homes and villages have hit extinction. By every reckoning, this flooding has been a colossal calamity.Yet the political grandees across the spectrum have given a cold shoulder to this catastrophe. And, arguably, it is for their insensitivity that even the citizenry remains not sensitized at all to the horrors of this flooding. There is absolute public passivity. Nowhere have the volunteers pitched tents to collect the relief goods for the flood-ruined. No relief or medical teams are rushing for the succour of the flood-battered. No public appeals are being heard for their help. No civil society group is seen working in the affected areas. Not even the religious outfits. Inexplicably, they too are absent from the scene. The insensitivity, indeed, is total. The media channels and the press did report the flood story and continue reporting it, but only perfunctorily. No commentaries have appeared. No horrors have been articulated on the opinion pages. No talk shows have been held. Horror of horrors, as the floods were sweeping away human beings, animals, crops and villages, the anchors were quarrelling spiritedly with the panelists over the issue of local bodies in Sindh. They too, like the political elites and civil society moguls, were oblivious of the inherent irony in the issue. What really could be more ironic to ignore the very people, in distress, for whose benefit these local bodies are supposed to be, at least theoretically?All said and done, it is the political class that sets the tone and the pace in a case like this rain flooding. And with their act, the eminences strutting so vaingloriously on our political landscape have demonstrated conclusively that they are no leaders at all but mere charlatans, chicaners and imposters. And with their insensitivity, they have established once again, beyond a shred a doubt, that they are shameless, unconscientious and disgraceful characters. To hell with them all.