Elitism, cultist autocratic populism and threats to democracy

We always, more often than not, fall into the inevitable trap of confusing the forest for the trees; the peremptory for the permanent, the superficial for the real, the apparent for reality.

The here and now is viewed ahistorically. The apparent absence of democracy is viewed from the jaundiced eyes of one or the other elite predispositions whose own role in its deliberate diminution is often discounted.

Such a situation is reflected in the currently held partisan conviction that the present political crises originated from an imagined foreign led regime change rather than a legal VONC, followed by protracted political protests and turmoil initiated thereafter, accentuated by the unconstitutional Article 63-A Supreme Court judgment.

A crisis was created on dubious facts and evidence and riling up of popular passions on a cyber document after abject economic, diplomatic and governance failure, to force an earlier than fiated election. A crisis of agitation, provocation and attack on the state persists for the last two and a half years.

The Supreme Court endorsed the ECP decision of withholding an election symbol from a political party that ruled from 2018-2022 despite ample opportunities since 2019 when no intraparty elections were held evincing an air of entitlement to disregard the law, whose signs were lamentably apparent in the attempted May 2022 mutiny in a state institution.

The present political, economic, judicial and security situation in the country has certain unmistakable underlying features. They are present in one way or another in many organised societies, polities and economies, both developed as well as developing, but evince a severely deteriorated form in our present context.

Pakistan has experienced many a fixation since birth: of nation making (a devolved, inclusive federalism vs a centrist, strong armed government ); a security state preoccupation (even nuclear parity has not fully allayed apprehensions which brought relative peace to many other old rivals in the rest of the world); doubts about a shared, liveable ideology (Islamic vs Liberal/Secular); a regionally and culturally accommodative national narrative (regional languages vs one language); economic accommodation based upon political entente and the failure thus in devising a progressive constitution (Islamic vs Modernistic, Regional vs Authoritarian).

Seen from the perspective of a Pakistan depictive of extreme elite domination, the present is unique to the extent that unlike elites, old and new, the new situation shows a sharp severance of organic alliance between the most powerful and influential of groups, the military and the judiciary, which hitherto together took all vital national decisions.

What the present shows is a discord between the old guards, factions and groups. How and why has this occurred? How is it to be explained? There must be plausible reasons, if not explainable in science yet amenable to rationality and logic. Is it because of the induction of a hitherto unexperienced factor of media led and fed cultist populism that is based upon appeal to emotions and instincts of a vast group of those who are fed on the rather tenuous belief that nirvana shall be possible if the stolen wealth by a coterie, mostly political opponents, is brought back home.

We witness a hitherto novel political paradigm of a new populist cultism bred upon sloganeering and media, cast in a new political vocabulary and ideology, that contends with and fails to find accommodation in the mould of old politics, thus creating a period of grave uncertainty, polarisation and instability. How we evolve a new political synthesis encompassing order and change out of the old thesis of ordered constitutionalism confronting an antithesis of a challenge to the old order of law over emotionalism is a question that will determine the answer to many of our predicaments.

This hyperbole doesn't take into account the fact that in the end all elite based governments are old wine in new bottles.

No great change is possible with mere tinkerings, without a commitment to stand outside of the existing order to bring about a fundamental change in the way the system operates. Any effort at trying to work within this debilitating system has no chance. The musical chairs rotate endlessly mortgaged to temporary gain.

A new recent variant of 'entitlement' of 'no-law, no-rules' culture, which the old observant mind frame accepted as a given, has emerged.

There was a time when political leaders submitted to the writ of the state. We witness a situation quite opposite to how ZAB and his party submitted to a questionable trial but never attempted at overthrow of the system as a whole; why Gillani suppliantly went home on a contempt order; and how Nawaz came back from safe foreign residence, leaving behind his wife on an imminent death bed, to surrender to orders of arrest issued by a court of first recourse.

The new populist autocraticism has ushered in a new, unconventional narrative and attitudes challenging a rule based political game.

Vaclav Havel, Czech writer, architect of the Prague Spring of 1968 and two times President, writing about the modern day pseudo democrats, who actually are autocratic, self-centred, power hungry and dictatorial and give out the pretence of being concerned about the rights and welfare of the people, playing with the minds and emotions of the simple, gullible masses, wrote: "In some ways the Soviets simplified who the enemy was.

Today, autocrats are far more sophisticated. They stand for elections, freedom of press and rule of law, while undermining the institutions that make democracy possible. They rile against corruption while tolerating and often engaging in the same corruption, cronyism and rabid hatred for dissent or opposition as existed in the past."

Today the world is turning away from social democracy and witnesses increasing number of such populist autocrats.

One doesn't need to look far, if only one can unravel the false from the truth and decipher and understand the forces that enabled such bonaparts to derail democracy and upon their failure to deliver, falling out of line and attacking the state, is now whittling down its own creation. The python eating its own creation is not a contest between dictatorship and democracy. Rather what one witnesses is one form of autocrats versus another who challenged it but is not averse to joining hands if it is taken back into the fold.