‘Asbahna wa asbaha-lmulku lillahi rabb-il’alameen’ (We awake and the country awakes to Allah the Lord of the Universe) — Hadith Sharif
PAKISTAN’S population is around 240 million, 90 per cent of whom are poor with little access to food security, shelter, health and education. Pakistan is also a constitutional democracy without essential democratic content.
Over the course of Pakistan’s history, its major national institutions have failed to serve the national interest which is the welfare, security, and protection of the basic human rights of its citizens. The superior judiciary has failed to protect the Constitution of Pakistan. The executive has failed to provide good governance for the people. The legislature has failed to represent the interests of the people. The military has failed to defend the territorial integrity of Pakistan or respect its own constitutional limits.
The relatively educated middle classes, especially the political intelligentsia, the bureaucracy, the commercial classes, and the media have by and large chosen opportunistic complicity rather than principled opposition whenever the national interest has been threatened by military intervention.
Each of these failures has contributed to corruption, inequality, inefficiency, cynicism, defeat, resignation, and loss of hope. This has inhibited the development of organised and sustained movements on behalf of a national transformation to overcome a whole range of challenges to the existence of the country. It has enabled the power structure to defeat the legal structure and precluded the political coherence of the........