Democracy didn’t work either

So, there’s going to be no snap election. Imran Khan’s call for the second, decisive march on the capital never came, though he’s still threatening it, and soon enough “imported government” and “foreign conspiracy” will also become stale.

But what does that matter?

Look at it, for a moment, from the people’s point of view. Most of the two-hundred-many-million strong that give the Islamic Republic one of the highest population growth rates in the world and who couldn’t take their minds off of the price list if they wanted to.

This, then, just means that the PML-N (Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz) government will now take the country closer to bankruptcy, default, ruin, and all that, instead of the PTI (Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf) administration over the next year or so. For them (people), nothing changes at all because literally every administration opts for an IMF (International Monetary Fund) bailout programme, implements its excruciating structural adjustment for a while, and then abandons it just before the next election.

Now, though, the situation has reached a breaking point. If you kick the can any further down the road and try to delay implementation of the Fund’s harsh conditions, there’s going to be certain default – something Finance Minister Miftah Ismail finally coughed up at a press conference the other day. But things have come to such a pass only and only because no government ever took the trouble of devising policies to expand and add value to the export basket and give the trade balance a shot in the arm in all these years.

The fact that it is budget time ought to make this thing easier to understand.

Nobody did that, just like the previous government did not do it, because such things require a lot of short-term pain for lasting, long-term benefits. And the problem is that the next election arrives a lot sooner than there’s even a hint of good times down the road.

Plus, in a parliamentary democracy like the one we’re so proud to have at last, there’s always the opposition breathing down your neck. Give the people any pain at all, even if it’s for their own benefit eventually, and you’d have the other lot that’s dying to come to power nailing you on crosses all over the campaign trail next time.

That explains why Imran Khan took Nawaz Sharif to the cleaners for his high-visibility, high-cost projects that allegedly looked good on the resume but wasted more money than they earned and then did pretty much the same things when he came to power. It also explains why, if you observe enough surveys, you come to understand that just about the only difference that different governments or leaders make for most people is that they give them a different name to assign blame for all the problems of the time to; which are also more or less the same even at different times.

That’s why the governments the people vote in cannot take the difficult decisions that are needed to give the economy enough strength to turn around in a few years. That’s not all. The institution of democracy has not just not done us much good, despite all the sacrifices all the politicians claim to have made for it all the time, it has also done us much harm; especially lately.

The no-confidence motion against Imran Khan was, after all, perfectly constitutional and, technically at least, in keeping with the finest democratic traditions of the advanced world. Who’s to blame, then, if the former prime minister very cunningly laid what former interior minister Sheikh Rashid recently referred to as “economic landmines” by suddenly reducing and then freezing petrol and electricity prices?

In an instant, it derailed the IMF programme. And the press didn’t talk about it much at the time, but it also put the Saudi loan and oil facility in very serious danger; since it was contingent upon the bailout programme. And the former PM and his associates were the only people laughing when the new PM initially resisted raising prices, out of fear of severe public backlash which PTI was itching to exploit, even as it did very serious harm to the economy.

Long years of military rule might not have done the country much good. But equally long years of representative democracy haven’t done the people much good either. And since a nation is its people, these people ought to figure out newer, better systems for themselves because soon enough this debt and the interest on it will become unpayable and the country will have to default.

And since government of the people, for the people, etc., didn’t quite work out either, whatever could be next?

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022