IT is not possible to think of the 18th Amend- ment without thinking of the precedents and traditions it follows. They form the backdrop against which a line of perspective, well, gains perspective.

Five amendments earlier when the 13th Amendment was passed Benazir and Nawaz Sharif themselves led the opposition and the house. Parliamentary consensus on the bill was entirely sincere and un-contrived between those bitterest of adversaries. The targeted president and presidential power had already taken their beating in the court of public opinion — that least formal yet mightiest of democratic forums. The distorting presidential power acquired under the Eighth Amendment to dissolve and thereby control parliament was amended out.

Many would argue that was the prime reason why we had Musharraf's bizarre 'countercoup' some years later. Nawaz Sharif's oncoming 15th Amendment was popularly untenable. But his infamously heavy mandate in the National Assembly would push it through there (it was blocked by the Senate) and Tarar could not nullify prime minister and parliament as Leghari and Ishaq had done.

The apologist justification is misguided Democracy has to learn by its mistakes; it is its own teacher. And the leading students of a democratic course are the party leaders themselves, whether in office or opposition. The PPP's leadership has changed hands since Amendment 13. The PML-N's has not. Does that mean extra allowances are due to the novice at party-chairing? Public opinion is even now telling us how it assesses the prowess and learning skills of the present democratic leadership.

If politicians continue failing to learn despite a process of wearisome repetition, amendments will come, for the democratic thrust is relentless, and failure and betrayal and incompetence are somehow dealt with. The overbearing Bhutto was pushed aside during the mass protest focused on election- rigging.

Zia perished while still checkmated by his own move against Junejo. Benazir and Nawaz Sharif failed twice. Which also means they were both given second chances. Musharraf, despite his powerful external and internal lobbies and a degree of popularity, had to leave.

This is because the governed judge governance on performance, not on the basis of labels such as true-'essence' democracy versus sham democracy; Majlis Shura model versus Westminster model; presidential system versus parliamentary system. Be it the general with his corps or the politicians with their masses, political failures get short shrift under judicially sanctifying doctrines of necessity and ensuing PCOs that become footnotes — or amendments that are made (Eighth), unmade (13th), and then remade (17th). The curtain has risen on the passage of number 18.

The connecting thread in this narrative of constitutional amendments is the withdrawal and conferral of the mischievous power given originally to referendum-derived and subsequently duly but indirectly elected presidents, to dissolve parliament and dismiss the prime minister at will.

When this power is removed the problem is the reluctance of the public representative in an appropriately sovereign parliament to recognise the democratic reality that his constituency is his auditor. Electoral vengeance is inescapable. One way or the other our would-be democratic Pakistan's false representatives and false redeemers are made accountable and set aside as deviant — and the democratic quest resumes.

There was no need for the renunciation of undue presidential power over parliament to take the gestation period, given the devising of the 18th Amendment. There was no need for the several accompanying but thematically separate clauses and articles in the bill to be lumped together with the burial of Article 58-2(b). The debate about that was concluded long ago. But the 18th Amendment has simultaneously ruled on many other sensitive issues without admitting any parliamentary discussion, adequate time and opportunity to attune itself to public opinion at its many different levels outside the house.

This is not to minimise the crucial urgency of actualising provincial autonomy and plugging lacunae in checks and balances between the executive, legislature and judiciary. But it is to ask whether common citizens endorse as blithely as their elected parliament does the fusion of party interests with the highest ceremonial office in the land.

They are definitely more questioning than their parliamentary reps of subtler amending provisos that could well facilitate playing with justice and draining the exchequer. Would ordinary Pakistanis protect Amendment 18 at a future date any more than they did Amendment 17? Yet they stayed out in hordes for an Asghar Khan and an Iftikhar Chaudhry.

Politicians know why, though they would rather fudge the answer.