Pakistan is governed badly and doing badly. It is the only large, nuclear-powered state which has, in recent times, faced almost all manner of security and economic factors which have spelt doom for many smaller states, including economic collapse, massive terrorism, ethnic insurgency, nuclear disaster and environmental disasters.
Politics is a society's avenue to tackle its problems. All our other problems exist because our political system has not functioned democratically. But even today, over 75 years after attaining freedom, there are voices asking if democracy is suitable for us. But the case for democracy is clear globally. The Economist's democracy index has four categories. Full democracies have high quality of governance and protection of rights. Flawed democracies have free elections but have governance and rights issues. Hybrid regimes have regular electoral frauds and serious rights and governance issues. Authoritarian regimes have no political pluralism, and rights are severely abused.
Among the top 25 countries by per capita income, 22 are full democracies. Two others (Qatar and UAE) are not considered developed as their high incomes come from oil. Among the next 25 states, except for three oil-rich autocracies, the rest are full or flawed democracies that have become democratic in the last few decades. In contrast, among the bottom 25 by per capita income, almost every state is autocratic. Among the next 25 countries from the bottom, almost every state is either hybrid or autocratic. Between these two sets of 50 states each, there are another 90 states that are a mix of autocratic, hybrid or flawed democracies. Thus, development and democracy go hand in hand. They co-evolve and mutually reinforce each other. Almost every state that has collapsed, like Somalia, Yemen and Sudan, were long autocratic and deeply divided states, much like Pakistan. There are very few cases in which autocracies are doing well.
We next take a closer look at the five types of autocracies. Monarchy is the oldest form and is almost dead today. Only the six Gulf and Brunei monarchies have high incomes due to their oil riches. Theocracies, such as Afghanistan and Iran, are struggling. There are "Big Men" (strong men) autocracies centred around a long-ruling towering autocrat like Idi Amin, which almost all do badly.
Then there are one-party autocracies or hybrids. A few of them have done well, almost all in East Asia: China, Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia till recently, and Botswana.
Some suggest the recipe of a government of experts backed by the army. This was briefly experimented with in Bangladesh, but it failed
Turkiye, Ethiopia and Bangladesh are fast becoming one-party states, but their greater autocracy is associated with slower growth.
But there is a much longer list of one-party states that are not doing as well or even doing poorly, even in East Asia (North Korea, Laos and Cambodia) and beyond (Russia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Cuba, etc.). A serious issue with the replicability of this regime type is that most other states do not have a strong and able party that can deliver progress. All the successful ones listed above were freedom or revolutionary parties, most of whom developed strong capacities and grass-roots presence during their political struggles before gaining power. Our freedom party, the (All India) Muslim League, was highly elitist and non-grass-roots even before the country gained freedom and got sidelined soon after.
Among military autocracies, only Taiwan and South Korea did well, and both are doing very well today, even under democracy. But in the world, there are over 50 military regimes that have failed: in Myanmar, Egypt, Sudan, West Africa, and Latin America. At the same time, there are many more countries which have done better after military rule: Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkiye, Brazil, Chile, and Nigeria.
Some suggest the recipe of a government of experts backed by the army. This was briefly experimented with in Bangladesh, but it failed. So, there is no empirical evidence to back up this idea. Also, such ideas are not supported by any serious political scholarship or experts. Such ideas almost always come from non-expert economists, bankers, and others with no expertise in governance, and that too in the form of tweets or, at most, brief op-eds.
Out of its 76 years, Pakistan has been a flawed democracy with free elections only for 16 years, and that too in three distant eras (1972-77; 1989-90 and 2008-2018). Even in the last two eras, army interference was high. Thus, it has not been given the time to gain the fruits of gradual democratisation. The rest of the period has been hybrid (28 years) or military rule (32 years). From 1947 to 1958, it had a hybrid regime. Since 1958, it has been ruled either by generals or by parties whose elite founders were brought into politics by generals (Bhutto, Nawaz and Imran), with generals rigging all of our nearly 20 national elections and referenda, except the four above. Thus, it is ludicrous to place the blame on democracy for its ills and to suggest that the way forward for us is autocracy.
Those arguing for a ten-year emergency to replace all the top political and bureaucratic posts with experts may say that Ayub's expert model did not go far enough in inserting enough experts. But this is the most risky part of their argument
Some point to the high growth rates under army rule. But a deeper analysis shows the real extent of their damaging impact. Some praise Ayub's era as our best era. His was not technically a military regime, but more a government of experts as he had resigned from the army in 1958; his parliament was largely a rubber stamp; he appointed experts in his cabinet, and our bureaucracy then was highly efficient. The GDP growth under Ayub peaked at 5.8%, but it was 4.8% under Bhutto. Even this is not a big difference. But take Ayub's first five years only to fairly match Bhutto's term length, and his falls to 4.9%. Ayub also gained from a booming global economy (capitalism's golden age), huge but transient US aid and unfair milking of Bengalis. Bhutto had oil shocks, global stagflation and big floods, but not aid or milking.
Yet Bhutto did better than Ayub on many key axes: poverty rose under Ayub but fell under Bhutto; our export-GDP ratio was only about 7% under Ayub but 12% under Bhutto; the trade-deficit-GDP ratio was about -7% under Ayub but only -4% under Bhutto and investment grew by only 12% under Ayub, but it was the highest ever at 35% under Bhutto. But there were big issues with Bhutto's autocratic era, too, e.g., nationalisation was overdone and a harassed and deskilled bureaucracy badly ran state units. Ayub's elitist model fueled the 1971 partition and dissent even in peripheral regions in the West. Ironically, he fell because of protests in these areas, but the biggest cities benefited the most from his elitist growth. His basic democratic political model fell with him. Thus, ten years of governance by experts gave neither durable economic nor political progress but a partition. The pattern was the same under Zia and Musharraf's superficial growth due to transient US aid, which lasted only three to four years but which fed huge extremism and violence that has lasted decades.
But those arguing for a ten-year emergency to replace all the top political and bureaucratic posts with experts may say that Ayub's expert model did not go far enough in inserting enough experts. But this is the most risky part of their argument. This mass-scale replacement vision reflects the same messianic and puritanical zeal that many revolutionaries had, who destroyed the existing system without being able to replace it with something better, resulting in huge chaos and doom. Pakistan, in its current precarious position, cannot afford such risky and poorly thought-through experiments, which will end in chaos given the scale of social engineering involved, which will invariably be overseen by dumb morons in Pindi.
Instead of such iffy schemes, I have suggested for months the Congress model, where the Gandhi family appointed competent cabinets while they ran the party after Rajiv's death. This democratic gradualism is found in many countries and is much more suited for our current situation. The chances of our generals adopting merit are no higher than those of our politicians doing so. Let's finally give democracy an extended run by holding fair elections.