oday is September 15. Many countries around the world will be marking the International Day of Democracy—an event that was instituted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2007 at the request of the 135-year-old Inter-Parliamentary Union. Generic expectation from the 180 members and 15 associate members of the union would be to reaffirm their resolve to make sure parliaments and parliamentarians across the world are empowered enough to deliver on promises made to their respective people—promises about “peace, democracy, human rights, gender equality, youth empowerment, climate change and sustainable development.”

A question sure to pinch every thinking mind would be about the delivery of these promises. Seminars and conferences will see weathered politicians, university professors, subject specialists and informed activists talk about what really needs to be done to make our beleaguered planet a better place. Dedicated audiences would be in attendance to listen to yearly sermons. A few events will be organised in Pakistan too. Depending on the organisers’ bent, speakers might prefer not to employ critical thinking and tread carefully. After all, self-censorship remains “the best revenge,” in a society that has by and large accepted ideas like manufactured consent and constructed history.

Our performance in terms of the promises listed above remains appalling. Sitting atop that list of failures is democracy. The officers’ class that Pakistan inherited from the British administration believed that the people were not “ready” for democracy. That mindset has fossilised over the decades. Its crumbs are now force-fed to public every time a “selected” civilian baby is thrown out with the bath water.

Pakistan was trying painfully to limp away from Gen Zia’s decade when Francis Fukuyama, the American political scientist, announced in an essay that the political journey of the humankind had come to an end. He predicted that liberal democracy would now last forever “as the final form of human government.” Soviet Union, one of the two post- World War II superpowers was on the cusp of fragmenting into fifteen states after losing a decade-long war in Afghanistan. The Americans had all the reasons to revel in their victory in a war that had lasted for over four decades.

Fukuyama’s self-righteous prognosis could be apt for some countries in Europe and North America that have gone through an autocratic melange of monarchical and ecclesiastical architecture for centuries before their post-industrial revolution bourgeoisie took control of the governance of the state and resources. Since Pakistan lacked an organically grown model of governance at the time of its birth, there was some confusion regarding the model of democracy it should follow. The American genre was defined by Abraham Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” The British model was epitomised by Winston Churchill when he described democracy as the “worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Recent conduct of the so-called champions of democracy has inflicted irreversible damage to the idea of democracy. Democracies like the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, India and Israel have shown beyond doubt that democracy can be an easy casualty when confronted by “national interest.” I remember asking Michael Howard, a former leader of the Conservative Party of Britain, during an interview after the US and its allies had launched their attack on Saddam’s Iraq in 2003 as to why the weaker states emulate democracy as a preferred model of governance when the international order was being run through brazen authoritarianism. He largely agreed with me that democracy could have various hues in different societies to succeed in the confines of a national state.

In Pakistan, the issue of democracy has been a major source of political conflict. The country has been described by some Western as well as local commentators as hybrid or praetorian set-up. Dr Mohammad Wasim has defined the nature of Pakistani polity as “establishmentarian democracy.” For him, the story of Pakistani democracy is a persistent, perilous and devastating conflict between two elite groups—the state elite and the political elite. “The former is generally identified with the establishment. The latter represents the political parties and parliament, which draw on the constitutional edifice as the supreme source of legitimacy.”

Many successful representatives of Pakistan’s middle class, as defined by Dr Wasim in his seminal work titled Political Conflict in Pakistan, have been educated in the Western institutions. They embraced Fukuyama’s prediction as gospel truth. If the “professionals, technocrats, lawyers, engineers, doctors, chartered accountants, professors, journalists, architects, artists, literary writers, computer analysts, corporate managers and the business community” are considered as Toynbee’s “creative minority,” then all of them “provide the catchment area for the state elite.” That makes Pakistan an interesting case study, for the “creative minority” was the main force behind the European struggle to create democratic societies.

When Gen Zia perished mid-air over Bahawalpur in 1988, his successors decided to hold elections and hand over the government to Benazir Bhutto. Bhutto thought she was entitled to her father’s prime ministerial legacy. She underestimated the selection and subsequent elevation of Nawaz Sharif by the establishment as a potent Punjabi politician to confront the challenge from ‘Sindhi’ politicians.

The nasty duels between Bhutto’s Pakistan Peoples Party and Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League in the 1990s emboldened the establishment. By the end of the last decade of the last millennium, it had planned, executed and lost an unnecessary military adventure in Kargil, but succeeded in toppling the popularly-elected prime minister for the second time. The establishment elite were at their games again during the PPP’s 2008-13 government led by Asif Zardari and Nawaz Sharif’s in 2013-16. Officers and politicians belonging to various parties were reported to have gathered in London in 1999 and 2013 to fine tune overthrow plots against elected governments. Instead of mounting another coup against Sharif the third time around, they sought to deploy Imran Khan as a Trojan horse.

The irony of Pakistani politics is manifest in the inability of popular politicians to build potent political parties. This makes them vulnerable against an establishment that has been enlarging its footprint in almost all spheres of national life and still harbours a desire to disrupt the parliamentary form of government in Pakistan.

Confronted with powerful non-representative political forces, politicians have found that democracy is the only game in town where they can utilise their resources to move inside the state, says Dr Wasim. “Not surprisingly, the state elite inside discounted this resource and shunned democracy. This led to a persistent tug of war between the two classes.”

A substantially large number of ordinary Pakistanis believe that massive rigging was carried out by the powers that be during the 2018 and 2024 elections to achieve results that favoured them. The perception has not only caused political chaos in the country, it has also weakened people’s trust in the very idea of democracy. The public distrust in the establishment will have long-term negative repercussions. With Nawaz Sharif denied a fourth term and Imran Khan pushed out through an unprecedented no-confidence vote and imprisoned on multiple charges, the political space gained between 2008 and 2018 already appears lost.

Only time will tell if Pakistani political elite and the state elite can look beyond their personal interests and deliver for the people. For now, a very large number of Pakistanis in Balochistan, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Punjab do not trust their governments and some of the country’s most powerful institutions. Feelings of distrust and disgust are rising, especially among the youth who feel short changed by the privileged.

Rigoberta Menchu Tum, a Guatemalan human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate defines an architecture for democracy as one wherein “peace cannot exist without justice, justice cannot exist without fairness, fairness cannot exist without development, development cannot exist without democracy, democracy cannot exist without respect for the identity and worth of cultures and people.” Pakistan, many contend, is still far away from becoming a truly democratic polity and society. Others fear that it is drifting further away.

The writer is the resident editor of The News at Islamabad. His X handle: @aamirghauri