FEW people use the term ‘crisis’ any longer when speaking of the situation in the country. It would seem that, like so much else, our political thinking and vocabulary have undergone a radical change. We prefer bravura — or a kind of cynical mirth — to gravity.

And we blithely have recourse to eclectic neologisms such as memogate or mediagate. We are loath to call a spade a spade. However, what we confront today is not just the aftershock of scandals of state but a crisis of far bigger proportions.

First, there is a crisis of confidence arising out of a countrywide erosion of faith in the ability of the government to deliver. The issues are well-known. The problem of energy looms larger than any other. We have seen violent street protests, more so in Punjab than elsewhere, over the recent power outages there. An undue release of water for hydropower generation, together with a failure on the part of our rulers to address the issue of building key dams, has accordingly been responsible for a severe water shortage.

The law and order situation, especially in Karachi, has more or less spun out of control, leaving people dead on an almost daily basis. The cycle of ‘terror’ continues in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, unabated. And despite some recent budgetary placebos, crippling inflation has put paid to any illusions we may have had about the overall package of democracy.

The poor are more bereft and, despite the Benazir Income Support Programme and other short-term poverty alleviation measures, demoralised than ever before. If nothing else, last year’s floods left no one in any doubt about that. What we saw in the rural areas of Sindh, for instance, was — the scramble for monetary handouts and air-dropped relief goods notwithstanding — rampant misery and its equally insidious twin, apathy.

In short, President Zardari’s strategic laissez faire — or conduct of government by default — is scarcely more plausible than Pervez Musharraf’s modified absolutism. We might reasonably have expected the emergence of something like a pastoral state after the trauma of prolonged military rule but what came about instead was a self-serving dispensation that merely catered to the few. That the president has been able to keep this house of cards in place is thought by many to mark him out as a master of the power game though this seems to consist largely of his ability to play on the venality of those around him.

What bedevils us further is a sort of crisis of authority. No one will deny that, ever since the dissolution of the NRO by the Supreme Court, a cloud has hung over the presidency. Vital questions had arisen about the holder of the presidential office in the Supreme Court’s verdict. The president’s constitutional cover had been blown and his legitimacy called into question.

Constitutional experts are given to holding forth at length on the issue of immunity. And we are by now all too familiar with the contents of Article 248. However, for the common man, that is now almost beside the point. The overriding issue, for him, is no longer legal but moral. Whatever the legal and constitutional merits of the case, it is the moral duty of the president, if only for the sake of the dignity of his office, to clear his name of the opprobrium imputed to it.

It is demeaning for the citizens of the country to have to live in the shadow of this and of related mud-slinging by various political leaders. The president must remember that, before all else, he is a symbol of the federation. And regardless of the flagrant decline in values and cynicism in the country, that still happens to be of consequence.

Needless to say, the Supreme Court has no dearth of detractors in a context where principle has virtually gone by the board. Not so long ago we saw the majority in parliament ranged against it. It seems not to have struck them that, instead of moving for constitutional exemption from contempt of court, it would serve them better to try to understand the rationale behind the dissolution of the NRO along with the disqualification of the former prime minister.

In all fairness, the Supreme Court’s landmark NRO verdict would seem to have been inspired, above all, by a desire on its part to start the country off, constitutionally, on a clean slate. Upholding the NRO would have meant laying, at a time when a new beginning was being made, a foundation of taint for future generations of Pakistanis and ratifying what would have been, in a way, the mother of PCOs.

In fact, the NRO was the poison chalice which our last military strongman had cynically prepared for the country’s savvy yet ultimately artless political leaders so as to ensure their moral subjection for all time to come. That precisely was what the Supreme Court judges, with remarkable foresight, had wished to pre-empt.

It would help, once and for all, to identify the enemy. It is the anarchist mindset which has evolved over time, conditioned by history and will, given half a chance, subvert the basic law for its own ends when it can. We have seen it at work in different guises in the past — in jackboots as well as civvies. We caught a glimpse of it recently vituperating against the Supreme Court at a press conference in Islamabad. It is ubiquitous. We must see to it that it does not make good again.

The writer is an author, poet and civil society activist.