On 26 November 1997, the then Prime Minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif inaugurated a new highway connecting the capital city of Islamabad to the historic city of Lahore. The six-lane, 333-kilometer-long M2 Motorway, which took five and a half years to complete and cost 987 million U.S. dollars, or 45 billion Pakistani rupees, was the first Americanstyle highway ever built in the Indian subcontinent.1 Nawaz Sharif claimed as much as he shouted “There is not one motorway in the entire Hindustan” from his Caravan of Progress bus, which traversed the road from Islamabad to Lahore during the Motorway’s inauguration.2 Camels bedecked in festive colors danced in step to the beat of drums and Punjabi folk songs, while foreign and local dignitaries and members of the press looked upon the start of something new. However, the inauguration carried premonitions of troubled times ahead as onlookers complained of falling victim to pickpockets, government officials took an unofficial holiday to attend the cavalcade, public cars were impounded to provide transportation to the Motorway, and the windscreens of cars shattered as people drove onto the hard shoulder of the road despite instructions to the contrary.3 The road appeared to be not yet free of the old habits of the corrupt state and the unruly crowd.
