One can easily pin a major party to each of the above consequences as Pakistan enters its most crucial electoral exercise in the next week. It is satisfying enough that elections will be held recognising their criticality in resolving the muddle that Pakistan has been in for the last two years. It remains a fledgling and distorted democracy struggling to find roots in common and institutional thinking and how it must evolve and deliver. Those who claim democracy as their chosen preference of seeking and dispensing power are also in the process of knowing and understanding what democracy entails and what will strengthen it as the preferred choice of governance.

For a governance model as raw as that any shock or disruption reverts the entire process back to zero from where yet another effort at reinstitution begins. April 2022 was one such shock. Power elites, political and non-political, must carry the responsibility for an entirely uncalled for disruption; a few months more and the process of public remedy in democratic systems would have repaired the malady. True, there were other determinants, perhaps equally perilous, which if resorted to would have been equally disruptive. And those may have triggered the rot faster, but it remains opportunistic and less than committed and uncompromised intent in power which gives cause to apprehensions and uncertainty forcing resort to extreme measures.

April 2022 was one such consequence. Rather than quickly restore the system back on rails, patent self-interest and myopic aggrandisement ruled the roost thrusting the 240 million others to the fate which became their destiny for the next two years. The country has slid back at least twenty years in these twenty months. In a democracy if the ruling system........

© The Express Tribune