Avoiding the authoritarian spectre

For a long time democracy in Pakistan has been in the intensive care unit. Every time it collapses, army plays the role of a surgeon, and every time when it happens, people take a sigh of relief. But as the treatment prolongs, the sigh of relief turns first into groans and then into cries of anguish. Scared, the surgeon runs to his barracks.
For a while, the politicians stage a comeback. Democracy also comes out of the intensive care unit, though with an oxygen tank attached to its body. With a courageous smile on its face, it walks into the extended arms of the politicians. Their embrace makes people happy, but the politicians' embrace of democracy almost suffocates it to death. As usual, democracy goes back to the intensive care unit, with the old surgeon again attending to it. Would it happen this time again is perhaps too soon to say.
The whole process has been so often repeated that it has become difficult to know whether it is democracy, which is sick or it is the surgeon or the politician who is sick. Whatever its demerits, one cannot blame democracy. One can trade a horse for an automobile but whether it serves one's need is determined more by the operator than the medium.
Many a time in the history of Pakistan, the power operators, instead of being critical of their own intentions and abilities, absolved themselves of any wrongdoing. If at all someone was to be blamed, it was the people. Without giving any thought to improving the art of rule or statecraft, they indulged in new experiments. But since they were motivated by self-interests, the experiments failed. They ignore a simple principle, namely, that a system works only when it serves the good of the masses and not when it is made to serve an individual or a group. Second, it is not the system, no matter how well conceived, but the individual behind the system that can make it credible by managing it run successfully.
Break up of an alliance is not a simple case of split that one may dismiss as an aberration but a shift in political configuration that people feel difficult to swallow. The PPP-PML union was not a patch up between two individuals, it involved people, for it not only fulfilled a political need but also answered a psychological urge in them for unity - something coming from their sense of insecurity.
Ironically, politicians' desire to huddle together under a common umbrella is to save themselves from stroke by the heat caused by one-man rule that tries to expose their corruption, making them naked in the people's eyes. United political platforms are thus not necessarily for the nation - they are for self-preservation. In this sense, there is little difference between one-man rule that preserves itself and the politicians' desire to overthrow him.
One may say that the fall of dictatorship is the rise of the common person - the supremacy of the popular intelligence - who by its wise use of vote brings politics back into the national discourse. True it may be the so-called political dispensation does not often result in the empowerment of the people. In fact, the post-electoral scene is tarnished by distention between the people and the politicians, with different grids to hang on. People expect unity, good governance, and deliverance while politicians think, exception allowed, it is just another time for grab. Their success at the polls also convinces them that people are emotional buffoons, gullible, and ignorant for had it not been so, they would not have received their confidence.