WHY do people take pride in jumping the queue in Pakistan? Why do they want to distinguish themselves by showing others they can jump the queue? People could be in line to pay bills, cars could be in line to get a parking spot, or people might be waiting for the delivery of their car from the auto manufacturer. We love to say we did it faster than others, that we had connections or we knew someone.

A lot of people talk of making the narrative on Pakistan better, especially to address the international image of Pakistan and to remove ‘misperceptions’ about the country in the eyes of outsiders.

Obviously Pakistan is not only about terrorism and the ‘war on terror’. How can 200 million people be only about that? But terror is what makes the news. So, the quest for a better narrative, though a difficult battle, is understandable.

But what will that narrative be? The only realistic alternative is a narrative based on power. Think of power as the ability either to make another person do what you want them to do or to thwart them from doing what they wanted to do. And power is not a zero-one variable. Power is comparative: in a relevant situation, is one party more powerful than the other? That is all that matters, or seems to, in Pakistan. Most things in Pakistan, currently at least, can be explained through narratives about power.

We are bending over backwards to negotiate with the Taliban. Some of the ministers have said that the majority of them are ‘patriots’. All this despite the fact that they have killed 50,000 odd Pakistanis. The families of the Baloch missing persons walked from Quetta to Islamabad and no minister came to see them, no opposition leader went to their camp, the prime minister did not go. Instead, security agencies tried their best to block access to their camp and tried convincing anchors of television channels to air programmes against them. If the disenfranchised Baloch behave like the Taliban, will the state negotiate with them? Are we not telling people that only the powerful will be heard?

The Supreme Court has made the life of many, in government or outside, uncomfortable. Some of the time rightly so. But whenever it has come up against a more powerful institution or organisation, they have been powerless.

The same is true of the various other state organs. The same applies to individuals in Pakistan.

Power is not the same thing as wealth. There are many who might be wealthy, but who are not powerful. There are some people from the Ahmadi community, Christian community or other minorities who have wealth, but hardly anyone would consider them to have power.

There are people who are not wealthy but do have a lot of power. This is true of the policeman who stands on the road or even an army major or captain: they have power by virtue of the institution they represent. In the patronage system, the ‘enforcers’ of the patron have little wealth but a lot of power. Many of our institutions, even our political parties, have developed on those lines.

There has been some debate on why the discourse on the right to education, granted through the 18th Amendment, has not been more successful. Why, despite the promise of free and compulsory education for all children from five to 16 years and the efforts of civil society groups, are we still far from the goal, and why do millions of children, 20 million-plus by some estimates, remain out of school?

People have talked about the lack of money, the number of schools, the number of teachers, lack of ‘political will’, etc as the main reasons for this. But the real issue is power. Those who have the power (or wealth) are able to access decent quality education through the private sector or select well-known public-funded institutions. Those who do not have power send their children to low-quality private or public institutions or do not send them at all.

The correlation between money and access to good education is high, but since power is not the same thing as wealth, the correlation is not perfect. The army has made schools for its own (cadet colleges and public schools) that are relatively cheap, but allow a lot of army parents access to decent education for their children.

A tragic but pertinent example of power dynamics comes from the study of compensation payments for civilian victims of bomb blasts and other mass terror incidents. Powerful groups and lobbies, able to put pressure on the state, get more money per person and get it far more quickly than the others. The variations in the amount of money and the time taken for disbursements are large and depend on the discretion of the chief minister. Clearly humans are not equal even in death.

The discourse on democracy, rule of law, basic rights and accountability will not gain traction till the direct connection between power and the state is not broken. If the state cannot mediate between citizens or even between citizens and other organs of the state on the basis of the rule of law, the dominant narrative will remain about power and all other narratives will remain subservient to it.

The writer is senior adviser, Pakistan, at Open Society Foundations, associate professor of economics, LUMS, and a visiting fellow at IDEAS, Lahore.