THE democratic-minded people of Pakistan were again let down by both the treasury and the opposition benches in the National Assembly last Monday.

The prime minister decided to underplay the significance of the session, where he was expected to defend himself, by coming to the chamber one hour after the session had begun. He chose to spend more than 30 minutes on what he wanted to say instead of what the people wanted to hear. Finally, the opposition deemed it appropriate to say outside parliament what they should have said inside. Neither side showed the country’s only sovereign authority the respect it deserves.

For the second time, Mian Nawaz Sharif has missed the chance of becoming a statesman and a potential winner of the next election by simply announcing his decision to step down for so long as it took to resolve the Panama leaks affair. The earlier chance he missed was on April 22 when he sought to win sympathy with a narrative of his family’s travails. Perhaps he was not aware of the gravity of the situation at that time. But what has been happening over the past many weeks should have made him wiser.

Stepping aside for the time being would not have meant acceptance of guilt. The question of holding the prime minister guilty on the basis of the Panama leaks does not arise. But in politics, public perception of a politician’s moral duty is more important than his actual guilt or innocence. Politicians who respect the public’s perception of a situation more than the word of their copy writers last longer and enjoy greater esteem than those who do otherwise.

The government has also played unfair by raising the bogey of the system’s derailment. The majority party in parliament is a legitimate repository of state power. A change in its leadership, on any account whatsoever, will not derail the system, but resistance to a morally dictated duty surely will.

For the second time, Mian Nawaz Sharif has missed the chance of becoming a statesman.

Perhaps the prime minister has been strengthened in his posture by the lack of public outrage of the kind that forced changes in other lands. True, the people have been drained of their capacity to react to the call of democratic duty and the threshold of acceptance of political waywardness is quite high in Pakistan. But this public will be equally apathetic in the event the democratic process is disrupted again.

The gladiators involved in demonising each other do not seem to realise that they are condemning the entire political elite as a batch of self-servers. Nawaz Sharif’s failure to correctly appraise his predicament has enabled his rivals to push aside their own records of financial and ideological corruption and call him to account.

All this cannot but encourage the extra-democratic forces to give a call to save the people from the clutches of the bumbling politicians. If the democratic experiment is again disrupted the country’s political elite will be held responsible to a greater extent than in earlier instances.

Incidentally, the military establishment has taken care to distance itself from the government on the Panama leaks issue and has secured a tactical gain by advocating across-the-board accountability. This is the first occasion in Nawaz Sharif’s current reign that his propagandists are not claiming that the government and the military are on the same page.

If the government finds this situation unwelcome it has to blame itself for sanctifying the illogical ‘same page’ mantra. No democratic government raises services to the rank of equality with the popularly elected authority. Those who derived strength from flawed compromises over their democratic rights must be prepared to face the consequences of being left in the lurch.

Regardless of the damage done to the cause of Pakis­tan’s democracy by the Panama leaks, much greater harm has been done by the poor quality of the ongoing debate. At one stage, the official spokespersons denounced all those asking for the prime minister’s accountability as terrorists.

One does not know who advised them against hauling up the entire opposition under the Protection of Pakistan Act.

Quite a few in the official debating team were bold enough to declare that the prime minister was not bound to answer the opposition’s questions. One of his loyalists went to the extent of defending his ‘right’ to ignore parliament by declaring that he was too busy to attend its sessions. And a gallant knight admits to tax evasion without the batting of an eye. The common refrain in the exchanges between the ruling caucus and the opposition is ‘they are more corrupt than us’. No serious politician anywhere solicits public support by presenting himself as the lesser evil.

Further, little thought is being given to the huge losses the state and the people are suffering because the entire administration has been paralysed for weeks on end. While the government leaders and the challengers are busy in their sickening war of invectives, the people’s tribulations are getting more and more unbearable.

The political authority continues to be exploited by anti-people and anti-reason mandarins in the bureaucracy by pushing measures such as the Cyber Crime Bill and the Orange Line Train project. The rulers have no time to prevent human rights defenders from getting killed or stop the jirgas from punishing girls and women, or to address the plight of small farmers and the large workforce in the informal sector. The Christians in a Punjab town are told to abandon their faith if they wish to stay in their traditional homes and no one in authority has the time to go for the criminals.

The political elite has little to show in support of its claim to be guardians of the people’s democratic rights. That now a general election cannot be avoided and that it has been possible to transfer power from an elected government to another popularly elected authority accounts for a small political capital, much too little to guarantee democratic consolidation.

Whatever the sins of the people of Pakistan, they deserve better guardians of their destiny than the present lot.

Published in Dawn, May 19th, 2016