Outline:
- Introduction
- Failed democracy
- Reasons
- Legacies of the military regimes
- Conclusion
Democracy is a system of government in which all the people of a country can vote to elect their representatives. Through this system, the aim is to create stability and certainty in society. Public approval of a political party to form government gives it political legitimacy and social support to manage public affairs, and formulate and implement policies. At the center of this system is the idea of fundamental rights, political equality, social justice and individual freedoms.
According to the resolution of the Constituent Assembly, Pakistan adopted democracy within an Islamic framework as a form of government since its birth. Unfortunately, the application of the democracy in the country remained irregular and unsatisfactory for the following reason:
Democracy works successfully anywhere when the people, as a whole, are educated and well informed. As a large number of people in the country are illiterate, they do not know what is happening in the country. How a poor and illiterate can make sensible decisions in the electoral process?
Pakistan is an agricultural country where most of the people earn their living from field labour. The landlords exploited this situation to control and direct the lives of millions of farm labourers. Feudal lords prevented these land workers to get educated and rise up socially. Industrial bigwigs and military educators also kept the common people out of political arena.
In this sorry state of affairs, intellectuals, scholars, learned and devoted people are mostly kept out of the electoral process or power corridors. Consequently, the ruling elite are always selected from the rich and the affluent and the same ruling families return to power again and again.
The development of democracy, let us not forget, has been hampered by the troublesome legacies of the military regimes, including war in Afghanistan, the rise of drug culture, the rise of terrorism, the growth of provincialism and sectarianism. The arrival of the Afghan refugees caused a free flow of arms into the country.
Sindh in particular has become the hotbed of crimes. The production and smuggling of drugs like heroin not only increased the number of drugs addicts but also enriched the drug merchants. The drug mafia began controlling politics, offering bribes in assemblies to boost their parties.
Democracy is a natural system for an ethnically diverse and culturally pluralistic society like Pakistan. And this is why after every failed and discredited dictatorship, we turned to democracy. We need to make out democracy better in the interest of the common man. And it is a collective social enterprise that we cannot leave to the dominant elites.
