f you follow the news and listen to talking heads on the media and social media platforms, your foremost challenge is to make sense of where things actually stand. A week ago, the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf chairman, Barrister Gohar Ali Khan, announced that under instructions from the party founder, Imran Khan, the party would withdraw from negotiations with the government. The purported reason: the government, according to the PTI leadership, failed to constitute a judicial commission to probe the alleged violence against its workers. Investigating the last parliamentary elections and release of what the PTI describes as political prisoners are other notable demands made by the embattled party that the government has apparently refused to meet.

Days later, Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif claimed that the PTI team had walked out of the negotiations without allowing the ruling coalition sufficient time to respond to its demands, after consultation with its coalition partners. The government also hinted at the offer of a house committee to probe the February 2024 elections and the incidents of May 9 and November 26 of the same year. PTI’s position was that the government had missed the seven-day deadline for the establishment of a judicial commission. Meanwhile, PTI’s imprisoned founder addressed the chief of army staff in a letter, among other things, lamenting the growing distance between the military and the common man. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister revealed that proposals to relocate Imran Khan to Nathia Gali or CM House in Peshawar were under consideration. This last claim was repudiated by the federal minister for defence, Khwaja Asif. The multiple streams of disorganised negotiations with unclear aims continue without visible progress.

The earnest non-effort to seriously negotiate and reconcile, as demonstrated in the brief description of developments above, reveal two underlying beliefs. First, the two sides read their respective leverage quite differently. The PTI believes that the government is under considerable internal and external pressures due to questions surrounding the last elections, and therefore, the government’s legitimacy. The PTI also believes that it enjoys the support of a vast majority of the population. The governing coalition, on the other hand, is confident that the PTI has little fuel in the tank after the November demonstrations. Having fallen out of favour with the establishment, the PTI, in the government’s estimation, is unable to mount a serious challenge.

Second, the PTI leadership has shown more interest in reaching out to the military leadership than in negotiating or reconciling with the current administration. Imran Khan’s effort and Ali Amin Gandapur’s claim regarding the proposal to move Imran Khan to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, unbeknownst to the federal cabinet, are clearly indicative of the PTI’s belief that any meaningful settlement has to be concluded with the military leadership, rather than the ruling coalition of political parties.

These trends would be interesting to study from a purely academic political psychology perspective. We also need to understand how these contrasting beliefs about the potency of the challenge to the government’s ability to remain in power and the importance of mending fences with the establishment as opposed to a political dialogue among political parties bode for the future of our democracy. In other words, the more significant aspects of the discussion should be the strain on our democracy from the government’s attempt at the structural exclusion of the PTI while hoping for a lasting “same-page” relationship with the military leadership, and the PTI’s anti-system approach to politics.

From the outset, the PTI positioned itself as the outsider. It questioned the political architecture of the state. Unsurprisingly, any compromise with the existing political actors is an anathema to most PTI supporters. Naturally, the result is a permanent confrontation and rejection of the system rather than a more realistic approach to reform from within. Such black-and-white view of politics means that the only approach to oppositional politics by PTI will be radical. On many occasions, as evidenced by their recent efforts to reach out to the army chief, the PTI leadership has opted to be pragmatic, but such pragmatism is rarely acknowledged by the party’s public rhetoric. Reconciliation remains a dirty word in the party’s lexicon.

The government’s attempted exclusion of the PTI, on the other hand, is realpolitik at its worst, and quite petty. The government has employed undemocratic means to silence the PTI into obscurity—disqualifications, arrests, intimidation and media bans. Such short-termism will naturally alienate a large section of voters, especially the young, from democratic politics. The leaders in the current political dispensation are too well aware of the cycle of political victimisation to miss such obvious red flags. When you are in power, a false sense of perpetuity can blind you not only to what can happen in the future but also make you forget what preceded.

The easiest definition of democracy is that it is a political system with a competitive political sphere. A managed democracy is just another name for authoritarianism. Having said that, democracy is never ideal. Compromises across political divides and across principled positions are not only expected but should be welcomed and celebrated. In the absence of political compromises, one can think back to the 1970s and 1990s. You will find no political winners. The utmost loser, however, has always been our democracy.

The writer teaches political science at the University of Peshawar. He can be reached at aameraza@gmail.com