The Price Made the Argument We Refused to Make

For six months the water rights-floor sat in a Karachi committee because principle, apparently, is negotiable and arithmetic is not. This week a spike in delivered cost accomplished in a fortnight what advocates could not accomplish in half a year: it gave a legislature the votes to guarantee families a baseline of water they could afford. We should be glad, and we should be uneasy about being glad. A guarantee that arrives only when the unenhanced majority's bills become politically intolerable is a guarantee built on a threshold of suffering, not a floor of dignity. The corridor's families — Rashida Bhatti and her notebook among 120 million registered migrants now moving through widening heat — did the math long before the members did. The lesson is not that markets clarify. It is that we let a market say what a parliament should have said first. The floor is worth passing. It is worth remembering, too, what it took to move us: not conscience, but a bill.