Democracy in Pakistan is still a question mark

livemint.com:

Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party get a stay from the Supreme Court on his conviction by a lower court for his alleged defamation of people named Modi. In the US, Donald Trump faces a battery of charges that range from a conspiracy to defraud the US, obstruct an official proceeding and deny citizens their rights, all related to the storming of its Capitol on 6 January 2021, to the former president’s alleged theft of state secrets and misreporting of hush money paid to an adult film star as a business expense.

While India is the world’s biggest modern democracy, the US is the oldest. Neither’s judiciary is perfect, but they both command significant confidence in their capacity to tell false allegations apart from the truth when it comes to leaders in the dock.

The same cannot be said of Pakistan, a country armed with nukes where ex-Prime Minister Imran Khan was charged with graft in selling off official gifts and jailed for it last week, an event that must be seen in the context of its muddled path to maturity as a democracy. It’s not just about free and fair elections.

How freely a country’s independent institutions function reveals how mature it is. In Pakistan, however, the institution that has both visibly and invisibly had the most autonomy is its army.

Instead of being answerable at all times to an elected authority, it is an establishment unto itself that has long sought to call the shots in theatres that have no warfare of the kind it was set up for. So, as Pakistan heads for polls to its 342-seat National Assembly later this year, a hidden army hand in Khan’s troubles has been spied by the de facto regime’s critics who see the ex-PM as a target of top-brass wrath for turning his back on them after achieving