The year 2020 was an eventful year for the people in Pakistan and around the world in several ways. The biggest crisis of 2020 was the Covid-19 pandemic. Health systems in many countries of the world were bogged down or were on the verge of collapse. An economic meltdown readily followed in many countries.

When the pandemic hit Pakistan, its economy, already teetering on the edge, nosedived. The foreign policy suffered a series of setbacks that included souring of relations with key allies including Saudi Arabia. Pakistan was seen as part of a new bloc of Islamic countries. A series of ill-timed and ill-thought-out diplomatic turns and U-turns by Pakistan exposed it to the danger of expulsion of millions of Pakistani workers in the Middle East.

At home, Pakistan continued to see heightened tensions among political opponents and state institutions. So, is there still some reason for hope? The answer is a definite yes.

Even though Covid-19 wreaked havoc in most countries, Pakistan’s situation was less precarious. Policymakers routinely make cross-country comparisons to track their progress. So far, there have been 0.5 million confirmed cases and around 10,000 Covid-19 related deaths in Pakistan.

The case-fatality rate in Pakistan is 2.1 percent, and the death rate 4.7 per 100,000 population. The number are significantly less than neighbouring India and Iran where the situation is much worse with death rates of 10.9 and 66.9 per 100,000, respectively. The smart-lockdown policy and sustained dissemination of Covid-19 related information appears to have contained the spread of the disease. The fatality rates might have been considerably lower had the SOPs been followed more rigorously.

The biggest hope is that two Covid-19 vaccines, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, have already been rolled out, and millions of the people are being vaccinated around the world. At least three vaccines in the USA are in their Phase 3 clinical trials. China is also about to roll out its vaccines by Sinovac and Sinopharm. Russia has already shipped its Sputnik V vaccine to Argentina.

Some other countries are also in the race for developing their vaccines. So it is a matter of time before Pakistan starts vaccinating the first batch of its people. The emergence of new a strain of coronavirus in the UK, that has also reached Pakistan, is alarming. According to the British medical experts, there is no evidence that the new variant causes more serious infections or will neutralise the vaccines.

Though Pakistan has faced unprecedented economic meltdown because of coronavirus and because of a series of developments preceding the pandemic, the dreaded scenarios of mass suicides and food riots have mercifully not materialised. A lot of factors might have contributed to this. Pakistan is among the top countries in terms of charitable giving. Extended family system and the cultural norm of supporting large families (negatively dubbed as high dependency ratio in economic literature) may have gone a long way in mitigating the conditions.

An unprecedented handout by the government under the Ehsaas programme, under which Rs 12,000 each was given to ten million individuals, may also have eased the burden of lost livelihoods.

However, the most significant factor working against complete economic meltdown, counterintuitively, may have been the realistic expectations of the people. The people understood that given the resource-constraints and a large population it would not be possible for the government to provide the safety nets of the type available in some of the developed countries. Therefore, they took the risk of venturing out, which largely explains why the economy did not come to a grinding halt.

In a convoluted sense, the very constraints became the biggest defence against a complete economic meltdown. But the public choice was not without some seriously troubling tradeoffs between health and livelihoods. Once life becomes normal in some key trading partners of Pakistan, the economy is expected to stage a comeback in relatively short time.

In 2020, two features primarily characterised Pakistan’s political landscape: the government’s apparent lack of direction, only recently acknowledged by the prime minister himself, and political uncertainty throughout the year arising from institutional conflicts. According to many observers, opposition lawmakers remained the main target of the government‘s lopsided accountability drive.

Criticism of the establishment’s role in politics which had previously been muted and outside the purview of mainstream media became overt in quite unprecedented ways. Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif openly, publicly and repeatedly highlighted the alleged role of the establishment in driving him out of power and installing the incumbent government.

The path taken by the JUI was even more radical. The JUI leadership has become, of late, more pointed in accusing the establishment of using the National Accountability Bureau as a coercive tool against the JUI and the PDM leadership. Despite all the grimness that defined Pakistan’s political waters last year, there is no clear indication that the establishment is preparing to install another military leader at the head of the government.

Despite grim realities of life in Pakistan, the biggest hope lies in the fact that Pakistanis have not agreed to cede their right to free speech and their allegiance to democracy. Among the lessons deeply etched on the national psyche, there is a fundamental belief that exclusive decision-making invariably results in national disasters. Trampling on the constitution, disrupting the political process, and gagging public opinion are understood to be significant factors in national disintegration in 1971. Pakistanis still believe that institutional encroachment on other domains unleashes disarray and mayhem. There is reason for hope for a better tomorrow because the struggle for the rule of law and respect for the public opinion goes on.

Democracy and the rule of law are no discrete events: they are, in fact, a continuous process. A lot of events in the contemporary world hold out crucial insights for Pakistani people. No one can take for granted the recent developments in the United States. Even though the incumbent president breathes fire against alleged election fraud, he has to leave the White House. The American people, and many other developed nations for that matter, have made great sacrifices to develop a system, which makes the transfer of power without bloodshed possible. This feature of the developed world points to unmistakable progress in human consciousness.

Will Pakistan ever have vibrant institutions that override individual whims and shenanigans, no matter how powerful the individual is? The answer is a guarded yes.

If we focus on the change in people’s minds, a lot of things have changed imperceptibly. Despite all the divisiveness in the national discourse a change in the historical narrative is apparent. Terms like “traitor” have assumed an entirely new meaning and connotation in the public understanding. People have distanced themselves from seeing everything in terms of black and white and have started appreciating the possibility of many shades of grey. The pariah status assigned to some individuals and parties of yore has become the subject of more critical scrutiny.

The stock concepts about patriotism and traitors passed on to the successive generations through state-mandated educational policy are being challenged. People have started doubting the policy of continuous hostility towards India and overtures towards Israel. It appears self-evident to many that there is no alternative to peaceful coexistence with one’s neighbours. There are few takers any longer for grandiose geostrategic policies for the region, such as finding the strategic depth in Afghanistan. Political victimisation behind the thin veneer of accountability stands exposed. More Pakistanis are now questioning the role of the judicial institutions in the dispensation of the matters related to national integrity.

Even if the odds are formidable, Pakistanis have refused to stop dreaming about a brilliant tomorrow. If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

The writer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus