ONE should make allowances for the PPP leadership. Not only was the more operative co-chairman long cut off from the wider environment while in jail, even after emerging from prison he was not a ranking party leader — and the other rather emblematic co-chairman was fresh into Oxford when ensconced.

Admittedly, both were Benazir Bhutto's nearest and dearest, but she is no longer there as a buffer between the heirs assumptive and the public. And explicability cannot keep the realisation from being disturbing that the PPP leadership, for all the votes it got in February 2008, is out of touch with the present-day Pakistani mindset. The whole NRO saga and accompanying spin(s) show discrepancies between common public aspiration, the official government and the party.

Few, other than the jiyalas, think that democracy and the PPP government are conjoined Siamese twins the ISI's disestablished surgeons are after with an injudicious knife. The democratic bona fides of the PPP's substantial critics are sound enough and carping criticism of any elected government usually comes from a disappointed electorate. Of course rival political parties try to use that mood and present themselves as political alternatives. That is due part of any democratic political process. Stonewalling a parliamentary opposition and pooh-poohing a boisterously free press are not.

As things have developed post-Musharraf, the ceremonial state, the executive intent of government and the party executive have melded and are located in the persona of Pakistan's president. Inevitably, the bent of that leadership is more than a party matter and enters the domain of national federal concern. And the president's larger than life role on the national stage should enable even his simplest partisans to grasp why critical focus on their icon and his party is so intense.

It derives at least as much from a healthy desire to nurture democratic progress and avert swindle as from any junta's conspiring to get the custody of vested interests back from present custodians. Pakistan's case-hardened public well know that vested interests are variable depending on the political dispensation and have forms apart from the military and bureaucratic or even corporate.

Under criticism the PPP bloc is falling back on the vocabulary of the Bhutto-Zia divergence and is taking its perspective against the backdrop of Jam Sadiq's rule in Sindh. For the rest of Pakistan the timeline of the democratic narrative has reached 2010 and in getting there the country and its citizens have suffered other traumas. Benazir's assassination is one but so is the repugnant deal which birthed the NRO.

Its defenders avow she thereby enabled Nawaz Sharif to follow her back to the scene after she broke the ice so altruistically. But rather more people consider the preceding protest movement against his deposition of the chief justice as something that chiefly pressured Musharraf towards political compromise. Pakistanis came out on the streets for the rule of law to which the return of the PML-N or the PPP exiles was correlated. Fair governance in the democratic constitutional system is what the clamour was for. And will continue to be.

Whatever follows, deeming the NRO null and void ab initio can only be confused with prologues to anti-democratic agendas wilfully by those with guilty consciences.

Reopening past cases is a can of worms. The accountability processes variously initiated and retracted by successive governments of whatever hue — PML-N, PPP, caretakers, coup-makers — were hardly deemed disinterested or equitable. Equally, sundry big fish (and smaller fry in shoals) netted and subsequently returned to waters were scarcely deemed innocent despite years of inconclusive legal agonising and evident political victimisation.

The 2008 elections showed people extensively forgiving the PPP, PML-N, MQM and others. But did anyone say there was nothing to forgive? And forgiveness relates to the past for the future is beyond its remit.

Does the PPP today really want to argue that unwillingness to condone corruption, assuring public record and allowing space for investigative journalism is synonymous with or inseparable from a crippling assault on the party and its chosen?

Should one deem a particular PPP front-ranker fatuous or ingenuous for saying that the government did not use any of its machinery in the NRO context? One can at least commend parliament for realising that public opinion was so outraged at the prospect of the freely elected legislature legitimising the NRO (as the president implicitly desired) that it ducked.

Observing the increasing relation between public aspiration and the superior judiciary, Asma Jahangir presciently warns of other kinds of political trespass and usurpation than those we have already known. It would be contentious to inquire if there are other doctrines of necessity. She cannot have meant that a supreme democratic interest be guarded by letting the NRO be, or that public watchdogs stop barking unnecessarily and lose their bite lest media-malice be aforethought.

Do we meet the necessities of corrupt elected politicians who don't want to change? Or do we meet the necessities of striving for a healthy lawfully evolving democracy? If the choice is simple, the way through is a labyrinthine challenge. Thus I.A. Rehman too has expressed reservations to the effect that in quest of political ethicality the polity may (unwittingly) reanimate Gen Zia's democratically noxious and mala fide theocratic thrust. As post-NRO legalities and legislative direction unfold, varied and multi-dimensional fears are bound to arise and they will need to be allayed.

The minutiae of the constitutional package by which parliament eventually scraps the 17th Amendment must be scrutinised with keen intelligence. People depend on the platform the media can provide — experts and eminent public figures like Dr Mubashar Hasan and Hafeez Pirzada, to name but two — for considered critiques on the legislative import and political colouring in any proposed 18th Amendment or other bills and acts of parliament. These should not be hustled through the house.

Pragmatically speaking, in isolation the president's power to dissolve this parliament may only be an in-house concern. It was his electoral college and he is its guarantor. 'You scratch my back I scratch yours'. That working attitude is what parliamentary democracy in Pakistan needs to set right both in letter and spirit. The empowered talk of 2008's electoral mandate. Public esteem for the legislature and executive also relate to respecting that mandate.

As for the mandate and a full five years of tenure, elections are indeed constitutionally mandatory after five years. But there is no constitutional proscription of mid-term elections.