HAVING survived five years of a democratic dispensation and on the cusp of an election, most people are inclined to see a faint ray of hope through the dark clouds.

The past few months have agonisingly been characterised by murder and mayhem of the worst kind, including the massacre and pillaging of minority communities and the killing of prominent people, from Bashir Bilour in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to Parween Rahman in Sind.

Yet many observers also have a foreboding that the worst is not over; that the flicker of hope some detect may yet be extinguished by folly or by design, plunging us again into an era of darkness — as has happened before, to our great loss. Darkness is a metaphor that the country has learned to live with. Yet Pakistan has managed to stumble through — even if only to land in another quagmire.

Thankfully, people are beginning to realise that despondency or inaction is not an option at this moment and any hope for improvement in their collective predicament is premised on greater and more intensive participation in their own affairs at all levels of communitarian interaction.

The drift towards finding private solutions to public problems — which has been gaining currency as a result of the withdrawal of the besieged state — must be halted, without ignoring the role of individual and collective responsibility.

The recent resurgence in public interest for making the process of holding elections that are more transparent, fair and less susceptible to the financial and parochial influence of the elites testifies to the fact that the people at large are beginning to take the forthcoming polls seriously.

A higher turnout on polling day, along with some surprise results that inflict a blow on the traditional citadels of power, will provide real proof of whether the people who participated in the various meetings and marches were able to translate the emotion that fuelled them into voter turnouts.

Once the elections have been held in a reasonably fair manner and their results are perceived as reflecting the genuine aspirations of the electorate, public confidence in the political system will no doubt be greatly enhanced; the much-derided dysfunctional state will begin to mend its ways and the road to stable democracy will not be paved merely by intentions.

If, on the other hand, the elections are botched or fall short of public expectations, the cynics will have a field day; a fertile ground will have been prepared for political adventurism and chaos.

In case that unfortunate scenario transpires, democracy is unlikely to get a second chance for a long while and people may even settle for what they perceive as a benevolent dictator. It is futile to speculate beyond that.

Pakistan needs to break the vicious cycle of alternating civilian and military regimes, once and for all. Although the political arena is still dominated by two major political players in the two largest provinces in terms of population, the coming elections provide a much larger range of choices that are conducive to democratic functioning.

It seems to be everybody’s fervent hope, however, that the nation as a whole has learned some adroitness and maturity in traversing the learning curve of democracy and that it will not easily be taken for a ride this time.

Although the last five years have been a rollercoaster ride in the political arena, the lay public is now much more politically aware and conscious of its rights.

What is needed now is to develop mechanisms — both within the formal governance structure and with the help of civil society institutions — to ensure that the basic issues confronting the nation are duly addressed with diligence, responsibility and conscientiousness.

These basic issues have been well-articulated and debated in recent months and a fair degree of consensus exists — although the details, the devil’s usual abode — need to be thrashed out.

Without regurgitating in detail these basic issues, it would not be amiss to recount the more salient among them: education, equity, employment, energy, extremism and economy are the sectors that need the most urgent attention and broad-based consensus.

The wish-list can be elaborated upon and modified in any number of ways depending on one’s perspective, but nothing will be realised without radical institutional changes.

Reforms continue to be resisted by the protagonists of the status quo who will lose no opportunity to stymie them, directly or indirectly, through the power and influence accumulated over the decades.

When the new managers of the economy turn to the IMF for help, the latter will insist on the reforms that enhance the economy’s ability to pay back its loans, but not on those which would give citizens — particularly those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder — a decent living and a hope for the future.

It is about time the reins of the economy were in the hands of those who can steer it out of troubled waters.

Pakistan may have abundant natural and human resources, but it lacks the capacity to transform them in the service of its people. It has wasted six decades in the pursuit of flawed political agendas and has been left far behind in the race for economic and social betterment by nations whom it was deemed to be considerably ahead of half a century earlier.

The forthcoming elections — which many still entertain serious doubts about — provide another golden opportunity for redemption; if it is squandered, that will be yet another lost opportunity.

The nation awaits with bated breath the unfolding of this critical phase of our national catharsis and the political kaleidoscope that may emerge after the election.

The writer is a former professor of economics at Quaid-i-Azam University.

smnaseem@gmail.com