When the legislature does not accurately represent the will of the people, when laws benefit only the powerful, and when brute force replaces public debate, no law—regardless of its substance—will be seen as legitimate. Lifetimes will be spent defending every sentence.

Parliamentary democracy is about more than simply erecting polling booths every few years. It’s a system premised on the role of public participation in government affairs. And elected representatives have a moral duty to do everything to enable this ideal. The 26th amendment’s crisis of legitimacy exists because it was conceived by discarding the principles of freedom of speech, information, transparency, and due process.

Consider the current composition of Pakistan’s Parliament. The 2024 general elections delivered a government whose representatives scatter the moment anyone utters the word “Form 45.” The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), forced to contest the election stripped of a unified electoral symbol, continues to be denied its share of reserved seats despite a Supreme Court ruling in its favour. To top it all off, the Senate elections for one province, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, have yet to be held. 

This is the Parliament that sought to tinker with the Constitution. Legitimacy never really stood a chance. 

The legitimacy problem is compounded by the process that was adopted to pass the 26th amendment. Barring a small round of stump speeches by Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari on the virtues of a constitutional court, no public draft of the amendment was ever shared, and no public deliberations were held. Clothed in secrecy, the people were deemed superfluous.

When it was finally presented in Parliament, no one could say for certain what its contents were. The public saw no draft, but saw visuals of politicians who until recently had been “missing” suddenly appear to cast their vote for an amendment that nobody had yet seen. 

“These are my senators,” wrote an exasperated Sardar Akhtar Mengal on social media. “Where are they coming from? Look at their condition.” Shortly following these scenes, members of the ruling coalition gave grand speeches on the sanctity of Parliament. Akhtar Mengal subsequently had a terrorism case filed against him.  

In the end, the 26th amendment was passed in the early hours of the morning after a marathon legislative session. According to Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency (PILDAT), the National Assembly approved it in five hours. The Senate passed it in three. Everything, it seems, had to be done as soon as possible, lest the weight of conscience, or the retirement date for the Chief Justice of Pakistan, prove too much to bear. 

What is tragic is that those who brute forced this amendment knew exactly what they were doing. In a previous era, the same ruling parties had passed the 18th amendment. According to PILDAT, it was passed after a Parliamentary Committee on constitutional reform held 77 meetings over 10 months and spent 385 hours in deliberations. 982 public proposals were reviewed. 

The 26th amendment holds little democratic legitimacy because it is marred by allegations of coercion and a lack of transparency. A precedent has been set in which Parliament functions as a rubber stamp rather than a forum for democratic norms. For all the claims about its sovereignty, the institution of Parliament has been severely undermined. 

This brings us to the substance of the amendment. A substance that cannot escape the cost and circumstances through which it came about. 

There is no debate that Pakistan’s judiciary requires serious reform. Successive periods of judicial activism have left Pakistan’s democracy and the separation of powers in shreds. A massive backlog of cases has made the pursuit of justice elusive. But the solution to these problems is not to create a compromised judiciary unable to perform one of its core constitutional duties: accountability of the government. 

“The 26th amendment holds little democratic legitimacy because it is marred by allegations of coercion and a lack of transparency. It was conceived by discarding the principles of freedom of speech, transparency, and due process.”

The government’s first target was to restructure the Judicial Commission of Pakistan (JCP), the body responsible for appointing judges. It did so by reducing the “judicial” part of the commission to a minority. The incumbent government now enjoys a comfortable majority in appointing judges to the Supreme Court. The intent behind this change became clear when the government passed a recent law to increase the number of judges in the top court.  

There have been genuine calls to reform the JCP to allow for more stakeholders outside the judiciary to have a say in the appointment process. These proposals have called for greater transparency, objective criteria, and enhanced diversity in an effort to create balance between judicial independence and public accountability. Yet, the 26th amendment’s solution, devoid of objective criteria and balanced membership, simply gives today’s ruling government an uninhibited say over who gets to be a judge. 

Any law or constitutional scheme operates within a context and is developed according to that context. This is why references to how judicial appointments work in other jurisdictions can sometimes be unhelpful. While it may be true that there are certain jurisdictions where politicians have a say in judicial appointments, it is also true that many of these jurisdictions do not have a history of executive meddling in judicial affairs. In a state with a deep civil-military imbalance, giving the executive leverage over judicial appointments compromises the legitimacy of the judicial institution. 

Another innovation the 26th amendment introduced is to empower this compromised JCP to appoint constitutional benches within the Supreme Court. This court within a court would hear all constitutional matters. This was done in the name of reducing the backlog of cases before the Supreme Court. But it is a red herring. The number of constitutional cases before the Supreme Court is actually miniscule. The vast majority of cases clogging up the judicial system are before the trial courts and High Courts. Even otherwise, transferring cases from one department of the Supreme Court to another is no substitute for the deep structural reform that is necessary throughout the court system if pendency of cases is to be improved.

Perhaps if the government had left the composition and workings of this new bench to the Supreme Court, there would have been little objection. But the majority in the JCP will decide who sits on these benches, reserving for itself the power to exclude judges who it deems may go against its interest.

Constitutional cases, by definition, are cases against the government. A party to a case should not be allowed to choose its own judges. Especially if those judges owe their new appointments to them. In these circumstances, how much legitimacy would these constitutional benches have in the eyes of ordinary people?

Finally, a special parliamentary committee that proportionately represents all parties in parliament decides who becomes the Chief Justice of Pakistan from a panel of the three most senior judges of the Supreme Court. On the face of it, this seems like a fair proposal. But the process can only be fair if there is a clear criteria for selection based on merit rather than politics. In the absence of this, it is a mechanism to ensure the triumph of subservience over competence. Every few years, judicial politics will peak as judges audition to demonstrate that they will keep the government’s interest at the forefront in their decisions. 

In an effort to make judges less political, politicians have granted themselves the ability to appoint judges, select who hears constitutional cases, and pick the Chief Justice. 

This amendment was never about creating a more responsive and accountable judiciary, but one that could be more easily managed by a hybrid regime that is insecure about its own future. Divested of pretence, it must be called for what it truly is: an instrument of guarantee. In order to guarantee that a government with a shaky mandate continues to rule, both Parliament and the judiciary have been weakened. 

It is important to note that all this isn’t being done during an era of unchecked judicial activism. Instead, the catalyst was a decision where the judiciary pushed back against an unlawful attempt to deprive a political party of its share of reserved seats. The author of that verdict was prevented from becoming Chief Justice and excluded from constitutional cases. And the dissenting judge, who argued that compliance with Supreme Court verdicts was optional, ending up becoming the head of the constitutional bench.

Hassan A Niazi

The writer is a lawyer and former member of the visiting faculty at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He did his LL.M. from New York University where he was a Hauser Global Scholar. He is currently based in Singapore.

The post Here’s Why The 26th Amendment to Pakistan’s Constitution Is Undemocratic appeared first on Dissent Today.

Further, the Committee notes that “the trial of civilians in military or special courts may raise serious problems as far as the equitable, impartial and independent administration of justice is concerned.” Accordingly, “trials of civilians by military or special courts should be exceptional, i.e. limited to cases where the State party can show that resorting to such trials is necessary and justified by objective and serious reasons, and where with regard to the specific class of individuals and offences at issue the regular civilian courts are unable to undertake the trials.” 

In Pakistan, court martial trials of civilians are opaque, biased and heavily dependent on the whims and wishes of military high command. There is no meaningful right of appeal; no free and unimpeded access of accused to counsel; no provision of record/documentation to counsel for the accused; and perhaps most concerning of all, military officers take on the role of judges, when they do not possess the requisite training or capacity to do so. Imagine the converse if your mind cannot process the nature or magnitude of the problem: judges being sent to defend our borders with a copy of the Constitution. If that is laughable, so is the idea that those tasked with defending Pakistan against external aggression, have the training or capacity to dispense justice. Different organs of the State/Government have differing responsibilities — for good reason.

Following the horrific cold-blooded murder of Pakistan’s children in the Army Public School (APS) terrorist attack, the nation was traumatized and that trauma resulted in poor decision-making (there were only a handful of people who chose principle over panic – the late Asma Jahangir included of course). If anything was Pakistan’s “9/11”, it was that absolutely tragic mass murder of this country’s children. Anyone who recalls the waves of terrorism that engulfed Pakistan, and the indiscriminate military operations ostensibly aimed at countering that terrorism, will remember that despite us ceding our civil liberties by allowing the 21^st Constitutional Amendment, we were not safe then and we are not safe now. In fact, even after our 9/11, we refused to course correct. Ehsanullah Ehsan – the man we were told made it necessary for us to surrender our civil liberties – roams free while a young man who stole a peacock from the Corps Commander House Lahore is languishing in prison. So in the eyes of the state, the value of the Corps Commander’s peacock far outweighs the value of human life – in fact a Pakistani child’s life.

In a June 2016 briefing paper by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), titled “Military Injustice in Pakistan,” it was observed that “Pakistani military courts are not independent and the proceedings before them fall far short of national and international fair trial standards.” It would appear that Law Minister Adam Namer Tarar was in a deep slumber from 2015 till date because there seems to be no other reasonable explanation for why he is actively misleading the public today with entirely false statements claiming that Pakistan’s military courts comply with international minimum protections for fair trial and due process. This is not only disingenuous but also in breach of the Minister’s oath, which places on him the obligation to “do right to all manner of people, according to Law, without fear or favour, affection or ill-will.” That “all manner of people” includes all of Pakistan’s citizens, irrespective of whether they are Baloch students, activists of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) or even political workers of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI).

In Pakistan, court martial trials of civilians are biased and heavily dependent on the whims of military high command. There is no meaningful right of appeal, and most concerning of all, military officers take on the role of judges.

Such barefaced defense of the unjustifiable isn’t limited to the Law Minister. The Government machinery has gone into overdrive to defend military court trials of civilians, which they themselves will likely be the victims of a few years from now. One must remember to ask the Prime Minister’s Special Assistant Mr. Atta Tarar how he feels about the “three rights of appeal” in that eventuality. After all, in Pakistan, we only seem to care if and when we become victims of an injustice.

In a country where even the mildest of criticism of the military high command can result in trial by court martial, it is alarming that the entire civilian set up (that holds power as a trust for the people of Pakistan) is performing mental gymnastics to deal a final blow to any prospect of civilian supremacy or control. 

Action against May 9 rioters 

The acts that took place on 9 and 10 May are nothing more than offences triable under the Pakistan Penal Code – they neither require trials by anti-terrorism courts nor court martial trials. To suggest that acts of arson or attacks on public property – criminal offenses under the Penal Code – require civilians to be subjected to trials by military officers, who do not even have basic understanding of the law, is beyond absurd and dangerous.

One need only recall the enforced disappearance and secret trial of human rights defender, Idrees Khattak, resulting in his continued incarceration. In November 2019, Idrees Khattak was forcibly disappeared and there was no information available on his fate or whereabouts up until several months later. In June 2020, it was discovered that Idrees Khattak was in the custody of the agencies working under the Ministry of Defence, in connection with a case under the Official Secrets Act. What followed exactly, no one knows (due to the inherent non-transparency and secrecy that surrounds military courts which is not denied but in fact justified on grounds of “confidentiality” and “national security”). However, Idrees Khattak was tried and sentenced to fourteen years rigorous imprisonment. He is not the only civilian who has been subjected to biased and opaque court martial proceedings. In Pakistan, where all power rests with Rawalpindi (with zero accountability for exercise of that power), there can never be even the remotest possibility of fair trial of civilians by court martial.

Have civilian courts failed to serve justice?

There is no weight in the argument being deployed by the civilian face of the present martial law to justify court martial of civilians. However, so that the uninterrupted flow of disinformation can be countered, the same is addressed below. The main (and rather audacious) line of argument adopted by those who lectured us on giving “respect to the vote”, is that the ordinary courts have failed to dispense justice and so there is a need for military courts. 

First, this flawed argument presumes (incorrectly) that military courts ensure fair dispensation of justice. This is contrary to the facts, research, judicial record and our history. Second, these courts which are being looked down upon by the civilian leadership are the same ordinary courts that are flooded each time it rains, where lawyers, judges and litigants alike sit for hours on end, covered in dirt and sweat in a tiny court room, functioning within a system that is heavily overburdened as a result of both frivolous/fake cases by the State against its own citizens and a refusal by the very same State to allocate sufficient funds/resources for functioning of the judiciary. Further, these are the same courts that rely on effective and timely investigations to proceed. How effective will those investigations be when investigating officers carry out the same on their own personal expense (with no proper reimbursement) because each successive government refuses to treat them as public functionaries, deserving of dignity in their work? Where for several decades the bulk of this country’s resources have been misallocated towards defense and defense-related expenditures, and luxuries for the ruling elite, what court system can deliver justice in these circumstances? More importantly, is it even reasonable to have this expectation when the civil-military imbalance has resulted in complete disintegration of all civilian institutions? And finally, with constant interference in the judiciary, brazen flouting of court orders, and intimidation of judges, by the military establishment, are we really to expect that those who dismantled our civilian structure will adhere to fair trial and due process guarantees in a system run entirely on their whims and wishes?

When the ordinary criminal law punishes arson, rioting and attacks on public property, there is no cogent reason why these offenses should be tried in anti-terror courts or by court martial.

There is no dispute over the poor functioning of our ordinary courts, however, military courts are not – and can never be – a solution to the problem because they are in fact an illustration of the State’s skewed priorities that have caused the problem in the first place. It is truly baffling why the civilian government is insistent on defending what is glaringly unconstitutional. Is the desire to completely dismantle and punish the PTI really greater than the desire for civilian supremacy? And is that desire to dismantle still greater than the desire for self-preservation of civilians/politicians in the long run?

Amidst all the propaganda and miscalculated defense of military court trials of civilians, it is pertinent to remember that when the ordinary criminal law protects against, and punishes, arson, rioting and attacks on public property, there is no cogent reason why these offenses should be tried in anti-terror courts or by court martial. To do so is also contrary to law settled by the Supreme Court of Pakistan, and in contravention of Article 4 of the Constitution, as held in the Waris Ali Case (2017 SCMR 1572): “The phrase ‘to be treated in accordance with law’ includes that every citizen must be dealt with according to law applicable to him, subject of course to the facts and circumstances of the case. If any citizen is triable under the ordinary penal law of the land, then treating him harshly under special law, not clearly applicable to him, would be a violation of the command of the Constitution.” 

Unfortunately however, the theater of the absurd continues in Pakistan as the climate of fear is at an all-time high. Politicians scramble to snatch the polish out of each other’s hands while the boots reward such servility by momentarily lifting their weight off the polisher’s neck. Tomorrow, each one of the politicians knows that the might of the boot will once again endanger their very own existence, but the choice is pettiness and vengefulness over reason. The delight of watching their opponents suffer (like they suffered in the past) is too good an opportunity to miss. And so it goes on and on, but real power (and exercise of that power with impunity) remains with the military establishment. 

Imaan Zainab Mazari-Hazir

The writer is an Islamabad-based lawyer and human rights activist.

The post Trial By Firing Squad: Prosecuting Civilians in Military Courts is Unconstitutional appeared first on Dissent Today.

Is a script that is all too familiar in Pakistan: an elected Prime Minister is ousted under dubious circumstances and is replaced by a rival who ‘wins’ a rigged election. It is clear that this sequence of events has been orchestrated by the military establishment, just as it is when, a few years later, the cycle repeats itself as yet another civilian leader is removed from power through questionable means. The constitutionality of the mechanisms employed to achieve these outcomes remains the subject of vociferous partisan debate. And as has been the case since the late 1940s, these developments are accompanied by vicious recriminations, accusations of corruption, and vows of ‘accountability’ and vengeance hurled by antagonistic political parties.

Amidst all the rallies and speechifying, the courts make repeated interventions in the political arena, tilting the balance in favour of one faction or another using judicial logic seemingly based more on expedience and ideological bias than any consistent set of principles. As these shenanigans unfold, becoming yet another chapter in the unending ‘crisis’ that confronts Pakistan, the specter of economic meltdown looms ever larger; despite, or perhaps because of, a record number of IMF-bailouts, numerous five-year plans, grandiose claims about ‘geo-economics’ and trade, countless campaign promises, and the oft-repeated mantra that things will be different this time, Pakistan’s economic prospects remain perennially bleak.

Watching the chaos in Pakistan, it is often easy to get swept up in the roiling currents of everyday events. The contemporary media landscape, with its polarized online discourse and unending competition for attention through ‘breaking’ news and breathless, endless punditry and ‘analysis’, distorts and magnifies the importance of even the smallest political pronouncements and acts; rallies are always unprecedented in size, persecution always unique in its savagery, and legal cases always unmatched in their implications.

Yet, the apparent ferocity of all this political conflict, and the seemingly apocalyptic stakes involved in its resolution, ultimately serves to do little more than mask the truly ephemeral nature of these events. The more things change, the more they stay the same and if the aim is to try and make sense of Pakistan, it is important to look beyond the banal gladiatorial theatrics that dominate the airwaves and instead look to the structural causes of perpetual crisis.

The first step in this direction should be, perhaps, to identify exactly what it is that does not change in Pakistan. First, while it has been a decade and a half since a dictator formally ruled Pakistan, the fact remains that the powerful military establishment remains firmly entrenched as the locus of power in the country, presiding over a vast economic empire, claiming a substantial share of public revenues both directly and indirectly, exercising influence over ‘civilian’ politics, and directing vast swathes of domestic and foreign policy. Second, the civilian political elite remains relatively small and privileged; research suggests that just 400 ‘dynastic’ families have dominated electoral politics in Punjab since the 1970s, and the Pakistani ruling class continues to be comprised of land and capital owning elites who, for all their factional disputes and differences, remain united in their common commitment to perpetuating and strengthening an economic status quo within which they are able to protect and pursue their interests at the expense of the country’s working classes. Third, state power in Pakistan remains centralized with Islam being used to legitimize a parochial official narrative of nationhood and citizenship while also being employed to crush dissent articulated in ethno-national, leftist, or other terms seen as threatening to the continued exercise of power by those holding public office in both its elected and unelected forms.

These three features – praetorianism, ruling class domination, and religious legitimation – are embedded within the institutional framework of Pakistan’s politics and are arguably interlinked. In my own research, for example, I have explored the colonial roots of elite domination in Pakistan, examining how the exercise of power by the British necessarily rested on the creation and continuous reproduction of a bargain between an authoritarian state elite and influential local landholders whereby the former traded patronage for the political support of the latter.

Driven by the imperatives of economic accumulation and the maintenance of order, yet perennially confronted with the possibility of resistance, the colonial state saw traditional landed elites – wielding economic and social power based on their ownership of property and their position within networks of caste and kinship – as powerful bulwarks against the growth of anti-colonial and possibly nationalist sentiment. In the years following the Revolt of 1857, all the way up to 1947, colonial policy in much of modern-day Pakistan was explicitly geared towards empowering these traditional elites, granting them property, political position, electoral legitimacy, and even legislative authority in exchange for their continued support for British rule. The net effect of these measures was to further strengthen and entrench these elites, leaving them well placed to capture state power in any post-colonial dispensation.

Following independence, many of the same pressures that shaped British policy were faced by an ‘overdeveloped’ military and bureaucratic apparatus that seized control of the state but which found itself searching for political allies as it struggled to assert its authority. The same traditional elites who underpinned colonial power struck a similar bargain with Pakistan’s new military authoritarians and while the nature of these allegiances would shift as different factions of this elite jockeyed for influence, the fundamental contours of the arrangement remained unchanged as the decades went by; in its quest to secure its own interests, the military establishment dispensed patronage to propertied civilian elites who, in turn, used their position to mobilize support for the state and, not coincidentally, further entrench themselves within the framework of politics. As and when challenges to this monopolization of power by the ruling class emerged, the brutal use of state coercion was supplemented by the strategic deployment of Islam, which proved to be a potent ideological mechanism through which resistance could be delegitimized and discredited.

A lot has changed over the past eight decades, but this pattern of politics has proven to be incredibly resilient. The landlords who dominated civilian politics in the years following independence gradually diversified into industry, constituting the core of a new capitalist elite. The expansion of the ‘democratic’ and electoral area, through for example the introduction of local governments, was designed to reinforce centralized state authority and served as a pathway for the creation and cultivation of new propertied elites. The diversification of the economy, accelerated by ‘liberalization’ since the 1980s, created new opportunities for the military and civilian elite to extract rents, and the ‘new’ middle classes emerging in Pakistan’s rapidly growing cities were either co opted by the state through the strategic provision of patronage, or limited by the barriers erected by the entrenched propertied classes. While popular movements – fighting against military authoritarianism and elite power, and for the dignity and rights of Pakistan’s women, ethnic and religious minorities, and working classes – sometimes offered glimmers of hope that a different world was possible, their radical potential was rapidly extinguished, replaced by state-sponsored religious nationalism and empty populism.

It is in this context that Pakistan now faces the crises that it does. When the structure of the state was designed, from its very inception, to pursue the interests of the military establishment and its civilian allies, it should be unsurprising that the economy is thoroughly cartelized and oriented towards continued accumulation by propertied elites motivated by a desire to do nothing more than protect their own positions. When political competition and outcomes have always been engineered, it is no wonder that elected and unelected holders of public office feel no obligation to serve voters who are not, in any case, beholden to the acquisition of power. When there is little accountability through democratic mechanisms like voting, and when the state has historically been able to rely on geo-political rents in the form of aid to sustain its existence, what could possibly compel those in power to look beyond their own interests when charting a path forward for Pakistan?

Democratizing Pakistan must involve a direct confrontation with Pakistan’s traditional economic elite, the landholders, industrialists, and financiers who command the heights of the country’s political economy.

This necessarily generalized and perhaps stylized view of Pakistan’s politics may lack some nuance, but it does capture that fundamental issue at the heart of the country’s governance and it is here that It becomes possible to imagine what it might take to change things for the better. In one word, what Pakistan needs is democracy. Yet this oft-maligned word requires clarification and elaboration. For Pakistan to prosper, it must be democratic yet this democratic future must be fundamentally different from the country’s ‘democratic’ past. Democracy, in this context, must mean something much more substantive than simply holding election. It must involve a fundamental restructuring of the entire political order and crucially, the extension of democratic principles to the governance of the economy.

What would this mean in practice? First, and perhaps most importantly of all, any meaningful effort to democratize Pakistan must begin with a principled and uncompromising commitment to challenging the power of the military establishment. The military’s involvement in politics – from its coups to the engineering involved in rigging elections, crafting backroom deals, and pitting different factions/parties against each other – has arguably been the main impediment to the development of democratic institutions and practice in Pakistan. By banning and persecuting political parties and leaders, empowering so-called ‘electables’ drawn from the traditional elite, exerting influence over the judiciary, and playing a lead role in suppressing dissent in all its manifestations, the military has effectively severed the connection between democracy and accountability in Pakistan. And this is in addition to the corrosive effect of its economic interests, foreign policy priorities, and parochial, self-serving approach to ‘national security’.

Second, democratizing Pakistan must involve a direct confrontation with Pakistan’s traditional economic elite, the landholders, industrialists, and financiers who command the heights of the country’s political economy. As discussed above, this class has historically been aligned with the military, and even those fractions that have remained avowedly ‘apolitical’ have nonetheless benefitted from their proximity to power, influencing policy and extracting rents. These elites have also dominated Pakistan’s political parties and the hollowness of their commitment to democratic principles is perhaps best exposed by their relentless competition to strike deals with the very same military establishment they often claim to oppose. The alternative to these elites, and the parties that control, would be any movement that explicitly commits itself to mobilizing the country’s working classes, building coalitions from below based on the inclusion of, and extension of dignity to, the poor, women, ethnic and religious minorities – and all those brutalized and exploited by the civilian and military elites who have ruled Pakistan.

By banning and persecuting political parties and leaders, empowering so-called ‘electables’ drawn from the traditional elite, and playing a lead role in suppressing dissent, the military has effectively severed the connection between democracy and accountability in Pakistan.

Third, building on the first two principles, democratizing Pakistan necessarily means exercising democratic control over the economy. The structural problems underpinning Pakistan’s dismal economic performance are numerous, and opinions on how to deal with them may differ, but it seems clear that elite domination and the logic of the market have both combined to create a situation in which ‘growth’, such as it is, benefits the few even as the many struggle to make ends meet.

For an economy to be governed through democratic principles, it would not be sufficient for it to be subject to formal control through parliament; instead, it would be characterized by a fundamental commitment to the pursuit of welfare over profit, and equity over growth. The institutional and organizational form taken by such an economy would, in the final analysis, be determined by the strength and ideology of any popular movement that might seek to bring it into existence – would it have collective ownership, competing cooperatives, or simply high levels of regulation and redistribution etc. – but it would nonetheless be an economy that put people – the toiling majority – first.

The word utopia means ‘no place’, and has often been used to describe political outcomes that, while desirable, are ultimately unachievable. The demands and realities of practicality often provide the justification for compromise and while many may agree on what needs to be done, far fewer will commit to actually achieving such goals.
Pakistan’s history shows that the power of the military and civilian elite – and all that flows from it – is deeply entrenched and difficult to dislodge.

Genuine attempts to change the status quo in the past have foundered, and there is little reason to believe things will be different in the near future. Yet, recognizing the difficulty of bringing about change should not lead to a willful limiting of our political imaginaries. Indeed the utility of utopian thinking may lay in precisely how it serves to help us uncover precisely what it is we oppose and hope to achieve, setting benchmarks that we aspire to through political struggle. As Gramsci famously said, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

Hassan Javid

The writer was previously an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Lahore University of Management Sciences and is currently based at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, Canada.

The post Democratizing Pakistan: It’s Not Just About Holding Elections appeared first on Dissent Today.