HOPES of clarity after the Feb 8 elections have evaporated and a country, perennially in the midst of a crisis, now appears gripped by chaos and in a tailspin, with the wildest of speculation suddenly acquiring an eminently plausible status. That is where we are.

From the usually informed journalists and analysts to the wildly swinging vloggers, everyone is clueless. Truly so. Even more, columnists such as this one. Would you stop reading if I own up to not having any inside information? Perhaps you might, and that’s a risk I have to take in being honest.

What I do know, and you too, is that Pakistan has had endless experiments with military rule or, more accurately, has had endless experiments conducted by military rulers: from Ayub Khan’s martial law to Basic Democracies to Ziaul Haq’s outright military rule and then an attempted civilianisation of that via a partyless election which produced a party-run parliament.

And, more recently, the general-chief executive whose martial law was cloaked in civvies but he wielded absolute power from the centre of his empire in Rawalpindi. At some point or the other, each of these military rulers has suffered from a crisis of legitimacy and tried to hide behind a civilian façade. But, as a number of elections in different eras have demonstrated, the people have always had other ideas.

Endless political engineering experiments will always result in some undesirable........

© Dawn