Democracy or no democracy…Ali Hassan Bangwar
Our founders rightly envisioned a democratic political system, intending Pakistan to be inclusively prosperous. However, the country’s democratic label has largely been used to mask an evil system – a blend of stratocracy, dynastic despotism, plutocracy, theocracy, oligarchy, totalitarianism and anarchy. Though the original democratic vision isn’t at fault, it has been exploited as a ploy to integrate characteristics, interests and people into the status quo, which has become stronger and systematically more oppressive and kleptocratic over time. This has transformed Pakistan’s democracy into a lasting gamble for power, prestige and resources disproportionately administered by the succeeding handful of stratocrats. This gamble is played among the dynastic despots, ruthless feudal and tribal warlords, voracious bureaucracy and judiciary, parasitic pirs, clergy, mainstream media and civil society.
For decades now, the handful of successive stratocrats tied their socio-political and commercial stakes with those of their subordinate stakeholders so that challenging or undoing the same could amount to undoing the system altogether – a Herculean task, if not a Sisyphean one. This has reduced democracy to a tool for legitimising this uglier hybrid system. Notwithstanding their “apparent” differences on their turns and their shares, they all harbour common intentions and embrace common strategies that utterly defy the principles of genuine democracy: amass as much pelf and power as possible.
In order to carry on with their plunder and delay potential retributions, they support each other’s kleptocracy under the guise of democracy. Resultantly, public aspirations that should reflect the functionality of the governance are instead overridden by the interests of the powerful.
Had Pakistan officially been anything but democracy, it would have been a true democracy today. Though this might seem oxymoronic, it’s turning into a bitter reality that rarely finds due space in the socio-political and academic discourse. The democratic false hope, or more aptly democratic cloak, has helped make dictatorship in all hues acceptable in the country. That is, the absence of a democratic faade would have opened the country to explicit dictatorship, theocracy, or the combination of the two. Either way, the public would have, much like today’s stratocracy cloaked as democracy, been the ultimate losers. Nevertheless, the two, unlike the democratic cloak of the status quo, wouldn’t have taken a quarter of a century to be identified and undone. The longest tenure of martial law in the country, imposed by Zia, lasted for roughly a decade.
The dynastic despots cloaked as democrats, however, continued to empower them for their power share. Over and over again, they banked on the unrepresentative forces rather than the public for reaching the helm. This helped ossify the deep state’s presence and interests across the board. Had it not been for dynastic despots cloaked as democrats, the country would most likely have rebuilt itself along genuine democratic lines with the public as chief power broker and beneficiaries.
Even after plundering the country to the extent of socio-economic collapse, they are reluctant to retreat or learn a lesson from. This is evident from their desperate attempts to questionably reform, omit and manipulate laws and the Constitution to redeploy their retiring “asset” in top judiciary. If these ‘extension’ practices of maintaining the status quo continue unchecked, only Articles One and Two of the Constitution would remain intact until they meet the fate of their own making.
However, manipulations and brute force underlying the status quo have outlived their scope and utility so much so that its collapse has become a matter of when rather than if. The wreckage of kleptocracy would offer a rare chance to rebuild the foundations of genuine democracy through a social contract created for the people, by the people, of the people.
Courtesy The Express Tribune