SO now that the by-election advertised as the most ‘epic’ political contest in recent history is behind us, the corporate media is making sure that the ‘breaking news’ supply line keeps flowing. The latest rhetorical question to keep us all occupied: will the disqualified prime minister come back to the country?

If one story featuring a (discredited) politician were not enough, keeping Nawaz Sharif company on the media waves is his great rival Imran Khan, who, by all accounts, is suffering from a pretty lean public relations patch himself. I find it interesting that there has been such little comment on Khan’s recent downturn in fortunes. He emerged clearly after the last general election in 2013 as Sharif’s biggest competitor, and it was widely believed, particularly during the dharna charade, that he enjoyed the implicit support of the establishment.

Cue a sexual harassment scandal within the PTI followed quickly by allegations of irregularities and non-disclosure in party funding, and the once high-flying Khan has been cut quickly down to size. Have the powers-that-be decided that he is not their man after all?

One can speculate endlessly about the intrigues in our corridors of power, but there is always one abiding theme that structures Pakistani politics: politicians cannot remain too popular for too long. Indeed, if the choreographers play the game right they ensure that the politician-bashing is done by the politicians themselves.

If democracy is about people, it can only thrive through their support.

We all know how the PML and PPP treated each other during the 1990s — both party leaderships acknowledged their short-sightedness while in exile during the Musharraf years. Yet the establishment’s power lies precisely in the fact that it can manipulate old habits; if the PPP and PML-N won’t do it to each other, then the PTI and PML-N will.

There is no sign, sadly, that the establishment’s cunning will be countered by a genuine coming together of all ‘democratic’ forces anytime soon — this would require a fundamental break with the basic premise that has guided Pakistani statecraft for the best part of seven decades.

While there have been very brief periods of exception, Pakistan’s (many uniformed) rulers have sustained themselves and an au­­thoritarian structure of power by renting out the country’s strategic location to the highest available bidder. Some would call this realpolitik. I prefer to call a spade a spade: Pakistan is a rentier state.

The breaking free of enslaved peoples around the world from the yoke of European colonial empires was arguably the most significant development of the 20th century. It follows, therefore, that the actual experience of post-colonial ‘freedom’ has arguably been the biggest disappointment in the recent history of the world.

Even if one were to argue that some former European colonies buck the trend, most countries that gained formal independence betw­e­en the 1940s and the 1970s have evolved into havens of authoritarianism in which abuse of power is the norm and the egalitarian imp­u­lses of the immediate post-independence era have dissipated with the institutionalisation of a cynical, patronage-based public sphere.

Ironically, the most depressing examples are the countries endowed with substantial natural resources. There is a well-known literature in development studies on the so-called ‘resource curse’ that afflicts many African countries. Meanwhile proximity to the US has condemned many Latin American societies to rapacious (pro-Washington) elite capture. Pakistan is also a country whose rulers have benefited from its strategic geopolitical location, while its people have mostly suffered suffer for the same reason.

In my understanding one of the main reasons why Nawaz Sharif has fallen completely out of favour with the establishment is his insistence that the PML-N is entitled to deal directly with the Chinese. Remember how Zardari’s PPP was skewered for trying to do business with Washington without the intermediation of our uniformed guardians?

Some would argue that local elites making Faustian bargains with big powers is the way of the world, and that the Sharifs and Zardaris of the world have no choice but to play the game by its established rules. My take is that Pakistan’s ‘democratic forces’ can only hope to win the game when the rentier state (and its attendant mentality) is abolished, or, at the very least, fundamentally challenged.

In many ways, I am making a simple point: if democracy is about the people, then it can only thrive through the support of the people — trying to take on the establishment via the leverage provided by foreign powers is foolhardy, precisely because the latter turn their back on ‘democratic forces’ whenever they like.

We’ve been fed a lot of polemic recently about (Trump’s) America and its mistreatm­ent of Pakistan. In fact, it is Pakistan’s (real) rulers who mistreat Pakistan’s people — the Americans, Chinese and everyone else who can will befriend and demonise at will, and we who are subjects of a rentier state should know better than to be surprised.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, September 22nd, 2017