SIX years may have passed since the engineering experiments that spoiled the 2018 general election, but no lessons have been learned and little has changed. With another poll approaching, old turncoats are now being ushered to the ranks of a new ‘chosen one’.

The opportunists, too, seem to have sensed the mood and will soon start rushing to pay obeisance to the PML-N’s rising sun. With a new ‘selected’ being prepared to take Imran Khan’s place, one cannot help but feel sorry for the PPP and the others who had cast their lot with the Pakistan Democratic Movement. After all, wasn’t the entire raison d’etre of the movement to prevent undemocratic forces from planting deeper roots in the political landscape?

Instead, the same forces seem to have ended up taking an even more central role in national-level decision-making. As for the PDM’s component parties, they are now being co-opted into what looks like ‘hybrid 2.0’, or being turned against each other.

Considering how the 2018 election played out, it seems unlikely that 2024 will yield any different results. Whoever will take over will constantly be looking over their shoulder, wondering when the winds of favour will start blowing in a different direction.

Eventually, today’s beneficiaries may realise that they were played; that a ‘victory’ that came from a tainted contest is never meant to endure. At some point, historians will ask: what was the point of removing one malformed government if it was only going to be replaced with a similar system of governance?

It will be a difficult question for political actors like the PML-N to contend with, who have played and lost this game too many times before and should have known better. Such arrangements only suit those who wish to rule without accountability; to whom politicians are a front, to be used and discarded at will.

Pakistan’s democracy lies in tatters. Those who promised to be its saviours have dealt it a grievous blow. Is there hope for a better future? Once again, only principled politics can yield an answer.

Until legitimacy and power are derived from the vox populi, no civilian government can hope to deliver. At best, it can be a pliant tool in the hands of institutions whose ideas about good governance, foreign policy and economic management, etc, have repeatedly failed the test of time.

Politicians should, as one of them recently put it, rely on their own politics instead of looking to the country’s security establishment to keep lending them a hand.

They should also learn to work with each other instead of turning politics into a zero-sum game. Lastly, they must yield to the people’s will. Elections cannot be turned into a rubber stamp for backroom deals. All such efforts must be resisted.

Published in Dawn, November 16th, 2023