Pakistan democratic history is quite blurred and intricate. Mostly based on hereditary and transmissible network model. In recent decades, the paternalistic arrangement has remained the pivotal and linchpin factor.
The mere fact is that no political leadership has ever sincerely tried to introduce democratic norms in their own parties’ working mechanism, which led to failure to evolve party as an institution.
The incumbent political leadership emerged as governing elite through manipulative electoral process. It undermines the legitimacy of democracy leading to ignoring the meritocracy.
These anti democratic norms have been fortified by the state organs in connivance to few ruling elite families to perpetuate their total grip on the governance system. So, the electoral process is only
serve to the Status Quo.
The elections are meant to facade democratic legitimate governance models to obtain foreign loans from international financial institutions besides showing civility among other nations.
The real challenge in 2024 elections will remain that whether election results will fetch positive ramifications on our economy and will be able to engender public and investors’ confidence in post elections setups?
The major political contestants are in their old age and are ignored of youth desires and needs mostly are focusing on traditional slogans based on capricious and whimsical commitments although they will succeed through nexus manipulation demoguguery but will not be able to translate them on ground. Lack of moral youth support and scarcity of financial resources along with daunting economic challenges like huge public external and internal debt, twin deficits, uncontrollable inflation, high interest rate, unprecedented unemployment,
brain drain, low FDI so on and so forth will not leave reasonable space for the next government to make structural and institutional reforms.
In such a scenario, the incoming government needs to evolve some solutions out of the box. Otherwise, economic outlook post elections may not be different.
(Writer Raja Amer Iqbal is a renowned businessman and industrialist. In 2016-17, he served as President Rawalpindi Chamber of Commerce and Industry)
