Gesticulating, shouting and armed with a set of unoriginal rebuttals force-fed by the parties they slavishly represent; that is the modern-day Pakistani politician on your average news channel. No matter what position they seek to defend, be it callous indifference towards the possibility of electoral reform or stubborn insistence that they, not the United Nations Development Program, are wholly and unequivocally right, your national representative will almost always fall back on the argument that they seek to "preserve democracy" in Pakistan.

Recently, the mantra has become nauseatingly oft-repeated, particularly by those critical of Pakistan’s "revolutionaries", who it seems have no reply to the waves of discontent from opposition parties, besides an indignant appeal not to "derail democracy" and incredulity at their poor timing in expressing public criticism towards the government.

Yes, exactly because the people’s ability to exercise a democratic right in this democratic country depends on precisely what month of the year it is, such allegations are poorly founded.

Take the example of the United States during the Vietnam War. Then, protests were directed specifically at United States’ military for its involvement in the region. Yet, no serious, self-respecting politician would attack other candidates running for office on an anti-war platform after Johnson’s first term on the basis of their poor timing in choosing to voice their dissent. It is worth understanding, for such politicians particularly and people generally, that public demonstrations are a part and parcel of democracy that serve to strengthen the practice rather than weaken it.

Derailing democracy -- as counter-intuitive as it may sound to many of us indoctrinated with the belief that that the institution is sacred and untouchable -- is absolutely necessary when discontent has grown to the point where such a derailment is actually possible.

Has that point arrived yet?

To be fair, democracy isn’t a powder keg that is lit off by a match; to take down government requires process, large amounts of public disapproval and subsequent action on part of the populace, and judging from how the opposition has resorted to desperate rhetoric calling for violence and murder, that level of support has yet to arrive.

Rather than carrying out their political role in a civil and responsible manner, they chose instead to pick pointless rivalries with news networks over social media, tour the Punjab by calling rallies where nothing of substance is discussed and trivialise the issue of rigging in the 2013 elections by limiting it to four constituencies. They boldly call government officials ‘monarchs’, ‘bullies’ and ‘criminals’, but has this rhetoric ever translated to equally firm action on their part?

The reason behind such recalcitrance once again lies in democracy and its apparent divinity. The opposition cannot reasonably aim to both remove the government before the end of its five-year term and not derail democracy, and yet they do. They choose to appeal to public sentiment and hawkish TV anchors by spewing blatant oxymorons like "we accept the election results but not the rigging" simply because they would rather lie to us or choose to remain ignorant of the constitution’s clauses than accept the implications of the agenda they are pushing for.

They must either begin to acknowledge that what they hope to achieve goes beyond the scope of the constitution, or return to the civil and political discourse that they abandoned long ago.

Both seem unlikely, and so the country continues its downward spiral.