Sample Essay: Democracy in Pakistan — Hopes and Hurdles

Topic

Democracy in Pakistan: Hopes and Hurdles (FPSC Competitive Examination 2018 — English Essay, Topic 10)

Recurring theme: democracy and governance in Pakistan has appeared in at least seven papers — 2009, 2012, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2024 and 2025.

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Rough Work

Exam Rough Work (what you actually write in the hall: about 200 words)

• Keywords: democracy / hopes / hurdles. Asks whether the problem has changed from interruption to quality.
• Type: analytical-argumentative. Thesis: the crisis is now one of quality, not interruption; deepen democracy, do not suspend it.
• Hopes: 2013 first full-term handover, repeated 2018 and 2024 (sure); 18th Amendment April 2010, Art. 58(2)(b) abolished (sure); 7th NFC provincial share 57.5% (sure); lawyers' movement 2007-09 (sure); about two-thirds under 30 (sure).
• Institutional hurdles: no PM full term: Gilani 2012, Sharif 2017, Khan 2022 (sure); hybrid regime label (verify index); dynastic parties; weak parliament; RTS failure 2018 and the February 2024 count dispute (sure).
• Structural hurdles: electables and clientelism; IMF programmes 20+, 2024 facility (verify count); low tax-to-GDP (sure).
• Counter: unsuited to democracy; growth under Ayub and Musharraf; East Asian model. Rebuttal: 1970 election, Awami League 160 of 300, March 1971 (sure); East Asia had land reform and disciplined bureaucracies (sure).
• Way forward: intra-party elections; publish Form 45s; tribunals on time; Art. 140A local government; parliamentary budget office and committees.
• Discourse: narration in 1971 and 2013; description of polling day 2024; argumentation in the counter-argument section.
• Hook: 79 years on, the question has changed shape. Closing idea: having a democracy versus being one.

Full thinking (study version)

Steps 1–2 of the playbook — roughly 25 minutes on the rough sheet, before any outline exists.

The box

Topic:    Democracy in Pakistan: Hopes and Hurdles
Keywords: democracy / hopes / hurdles  — a two-column title
Type:     Analytical-argumentative
Scope:    1947–present, Pakistan only. Civil-military, parties, parliament,
          elections, fiscal capacity. NOT democratic theory in the abstract.
Thesis:   The crisis has migrated from interruption to quality.

Topic → Prompt (the decode)

Literal: list the good things, then the bad things.

Why that reading fails: a hopes column and a hurdles column with nothing joining them is the single commonest script on this topic and is worth about 45. A two-part title is an invitation to balance, not a licence to avoid an argument.

Hidden debate: has the nature of the problem changed? The old problem was interruption — the army removing governments. The new problem is quality — elected governments that cannot legislate, tax or decide. If the hurdle has moved, the remedy has moved with it.

The second question hiding underneath, which most candidates duck: should Pakistan keep trying at all? The guided-democracy argument is live in Pakistani drawing rooms and must be answered, not ignored.

Brain dump (3 minutes, unfiltered — grouped as the points land)

The hopes

• 2013 — first full-term handover from one elected government to another; repeated 2018 and 2024
• 18th Amendment, April 2010 — Article 58(2)(b) abolished, Concurrent List deleted
• 7th NFC Award — provincial share raised to roughly 57.5%
• Lawyers' movement 2007–09; private media liberalised from 2002
• Roughly two-thirds of the population under 30; urbanisation loosening rural patronage

Institutional hurdles

• No prime minister has ever completed five years — Gilani disqualified 2012, Nawaz Sharif 2017, Imran Khan removed by the first successful no-confidence vote in 2022
• Security and neighbourhood policy effectively outside cabinet reach — internationally classified a hybrid regime
• Dynastic parties: PPP, PML-N, ANP, JUI-F, the Chaudhrys — intra-party elections pro forma
• Parliament: sitting days below the constitutional minimum, quorum broken, ordinances, unresourced committees
• Elections: RTS failure 2018; Form 45/47 dispute 2024

Structural hurdles

• Electables migrating between parties before every election; biradari and landholding
• Clientelism is rational from below — a voter sensibly elects an intermediary when the state delivers unreliably
• 24+ IMF programmes; the 2024 facility governs tariffs, subsidies and the exchange rate — the very questions elections are fought over
• Tax-to-GDP among the lowest in the region

The counter-argument's evidence (state it at full strength)

• Fastest growth under Ayub in the 1960s and Musharraf in the early 2000s
• Mass illiteracy, ethnic and sectarian cleavages, chronic insolvency
• The East Asian "development first, democracy later" model

The rebuttal (this is the decisive material)

• 1971 — the Awami League won 160 of 300 seats, power was not transferred, and by December the country had lost its eastern wing and more than half its population
• Ayub's growth came with the 22 families and East Pakistan's alienation
• Musharraf's rested on post-2001 inflows and left an energy crisis and entrenched militancy
• The East Asian comparison fails on its own terms — those states had land reform, disciplined bureaucracies and export discipline; Pakistan's authoritarian periods built none of it

Way forward

• Genuine intra-party elections, published membership registers, party finance disclosure
• Independent audit of result transmission; publish constituency-level Form 45s; tribunals deciding within the statutory limit
• Article 140-A local government — still unimplemented
• Parliamentary budget office; professionally staffed standing committees

Stance (one sentence)

Pakistan's democratic crisis is no longer one of interruption but of quality; because the machinery has proved durable since 2008, the answer is to deepen democracy rather than to suspend it.

Clusters

Sequence

Hopes first — deliberately, so the essay reads as analysis rather than lament and the examiner is not being asked to endure three pages of national self-criticism → institutional hurdles → structural hurdles → counter and rebuttal → way forward → a conclusion built on the distinction between having a democracy and being one.

Cut — and why

• The 27th Amendment. Deserves its own essay; inserting it here unbalances the section and dates the script.
• Kashmir and foreign policy. Adjacent, not this topic. Scope discipline.
• Constitutional history of 1956 and 1962. Background inflation — one clause about the coups does the same work in a tenth of the space.
• Naming which party did what after 2018. Partisanship is the fastest way to lose an examiner.

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Outline

• I. Introduction
  • Thesis: Pakistan's democratic crisis is no longer primarily a crisis of interruption but a crisis of quality. The principal hurdle has migrated from the barracks to the party and the ballot box; yet because the procedural machinery has proved more durable since 2008 than its critics predicted, the rational response is to deepen democracy rather than to suspend or abandon it.
• II. The Hopes: What the Record Since 2008 Has Established
  • A. Three consecutive civilian transfers of power
    1. The 2013 handover, the first of its kind in Pakistan's history
    2. Repetition in 2018 and 2024 amid economic stress and insurgency
  • B. The Eighteenth Amendment and the repair of the federal bargain
    1. Abolition of Article 58(2)(b) and deletion of the Concurrent List
    2. The Seventh NFC Award and the provincial share
  • C. An assertive judiciary, media and civil society
  • D. A young, urbanising and politically mobilised electorate
• III. The Hurdles: Institutional
  • A. The civil–military imbalance and the hybrid arrangement
    1. No prime minister has completed a full five-year term
    2. Policy domains outside effective cabinet reach
  • B. Dynastic parties without internal democracy
  • C. A parliament that legislates little and scrutinises less
    1. Sitting days, quorum and rule by ordinance
    2. Committees convened irregularly and resourced inadequately
  • D. Contested electoral administration
    1. The Result Transmission System failure of 2018
    2. The contested consolidation of results in 2024
• IV. The Hurdles: Structural and Economic
  • A. Clientelism, electables and the economics of the constituency
  • B. Economic fragility and the narrowing of sovereign policy space
    1. Repeated IMF programmes and the delegation of electoral questions
    2. A tax base too narrow to fund what governments promise
• V. The Counter-Argument and Its Rebuttal
  • A. Counter-argument: Pakistan is unsuited to democracy, and guided or technocratic rule performs better
    1. Growth under Ayub Khan and Pervez Musharraf
    2. The East Asian development-first model
  • B. Rebuttal: the authoritarian record is empirically worse, and 1971 is the decisive evidence
    1. The 1970 election, the refusal to transfer power, and secession
    2. Why the East Asian comparison fails on its own terms
• VI. The Way Forward
  • A. Enforce intra-party democracy and transparent candidate selection
  • B. Insulate and digitise electoral administration
    1. Independent audit and publication of primary result forms
    2. Electoral tribunals deciding within the statutory period
  • C. Restore local government as the missing tier of the system
  • D. Rebuild parliamentary capacity through the committee system
• VII. Conclusion

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Essay

Seventy-nine years after independence, the debate about democracy in Pakistan has changed its shape without changing its temperature. For most of the twentieth century the question was whether elected government would be permitted to exist at all, and the answer was supplied four times by the army rather than by the electorate. That question has largely been settled, at least in its crudest form: no direct military takeover has occurred since 1999, and three consecutive assemblies have completed their constitutional terms. The contemporary question is different and in some respects harder. It is no longer whether Pakistan will hold elections, but whether the governments those elections produce can legislate, tax, deliver services and survive scrutiny. The hurdle, in other words, has migrated from the barracks to the party and the ballot box. Pakistan's democratic crisis is therefore no longer primarily a crisis of interruption but a crisis of quality. And precisely because the procedural machinery has proved more durable since 2008 than its critics predicted, the rational response is to deepen democracy rather than to suspend or abandon it.

The first reason for optimism is the continuity of elected assemblies. In 2013 an elected government completed a full five-year term and handed power to another elected government for the first time in the country's history; the sequence was repeated in 2018 and again in 2024. This is a modest achievement measured against mature democracies and a considerable one measured against Pakistan's own past, in which roughly half the years since 1947 were spent under direct military rule. Furthermore, the transfers occurred amid severe economic stress and an active insurgency, conditions under which earlier systems had collapsed. Habituation matters in constitutional politics: each completed term raises the political cost of the next interruption, and the norm that governments are removed by votes rather than by proclamations has begun, unevenly, to acquire the status of an expectation.

The second hope is structural and is embodied in the Eighteenth Amendment of April 2010, the most consequential constitutional reform since 1973. It abolished the president's power to dissolve the National Assembly under Article 58(2)(b), the clause through which three elected governments had been dismissed in the 1990s. It deleted the Concurrent List and devolved education, health and agriculture to the provinces. And it was accompanied by the Seventh National Finance Commission Award, which raised the provincial share of the divisible pool to roughly fifty-seven per cent. The significance lies less in the administrative rearrangement than in the political one. A federation whose eastern wing had seceded in 1971 over the denial of provincial rights chose, four decades later, to settle the same dispute by consensual amendment passed unanimously. Devolution has been implemented unevenly and its fiscal consequences remain contested, but the bargain itself repaired the constitutional foundation on which any durable Pakistani democracy must rest.

A third hope lies in the institutions that now contest state power rather than merely serve it. The lawyers' movement of 2007 to 2009 mobilised an urban professional class in defence of judicial independence and demonstrated that constitutional questions could generate mass politics. Private electronic media, liberalised from 2002, broke the state's monopoly on broadcast information, and although its record includes sensationalism and commercial capture, it has made the concealment of events materially harder. Civil society organisations, bar associations and an expanding digital public sphere now subject official conduct to continuous commentary. These actors are neither uniformly principled nor uniformly effective; nevertheless, a polity in which power is publicly argued over is structurally different from one in which it is silently exercised. The persistence of legal challenge matters because democratic institutions require citizens who can contest a decision without rejecting the constitutional system itself.

The fourth hope is demographic. Roughly two-thirds of Pakistanis are under the age of thirty, and each election introduces millions of first-time voters whose political formation owes little to the alignments of the 1980s. Urbanisation has loosened the grip of rural patronage networks in Punjab and Sindh, and smartphone penetration has given younger voters direct access to political argument that bypasses both the state broadcaster and the local intermediary. The consequence is visible in the volatility of recent electoral outcomes and in the mobilising capacity of movements built largely online. Such an electorate is harder to manage, which is inconvenient for party managers and healthy for democracy, since accountability depends precisely on the ruler's uncertainty about the ruled. Youth participation gives democracy a future constituency, but that energy will endure only if political parties permit younger members to influence their programmes and internal decisions. Young voters also need open party structures so that political participation offers a path to responsibility rather than another form of dependence on established leaders.

Against these hopes stand hurdles that are more entrenched, and the first among them is the persistent imbalance between elected and unelected institutions. No prime minister in Pakistan's history has completed a full five-year term: Yousaf Raza Gilani was disqualified by the Supreme Court in 2012, Nawaz Sharif was disqualified in 2017, and Imran Khan was removed through the first successful vote of no confidence in 2022. The mechanisms differ and each had its own legal and political logic, but the pattern of premature termination is consistent enough to constitute a structural feature rather than a series of coincidences. Moreover, key domains of policy, particularly national security and external relations with immediate neighbours, have in practice remained outside the effective reach of cabinet deliberation. International classifications place Pakistan among hybrid regimes. A system in which the electorate determines who governs but not what the government may decide delivers the form of popular sovereignty while withholding a substantial portion of its content.

The second institutional hurdle lies inside the parties themselves, which demand democracy from the state while declining to practise it internally. Leadership of the principal parties has passed within families across generations, and candidate selection is typically determined by the party head rather than by any competitive process among members. Intra-party elections, though required by law, are frequently pro forma. The consequence is a leadership cadre selected for loyalty rather than for competence or local legitimacy, and a legislator whose career depends on pleasing one individual rather than one constituency. Nevertheless, the phenomenon is not uniquely Pakistani, as the political histories of India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka demonstrate. The distinction is that in those cases dynastic parties have periodically been defeated at the polls by organisations built on cadre rather than kinship, whereas in Pakistan the alternatives have tended to become dynastic in turn.

The third hurdle is the enfeeblement of parliament as a working institution. Legislative output is modest, sitting days are frequently below the constitutional minimum, quorum is regularly broken, and successive governments of every political complexion have resorted to ordinances to bypass debate. Committees, which in functioning parliamentary systems perform the detailed scrutiny that the floor cannot, are irregularly convened and rarely resourced with independent research capacity. Consequently, budgets pass with limited examination and major statutes are enacted in single sittings. A legislature that does not scrutinise cannot hold an executive accountable, and an executive that is not held accountable by parliament will be held accountable, if at all, by institutions that no one elected. When legislators cannot examine a spending proposal in detail, responsibility shifts toward officials and party leaders who face less public scrutiny.

Electoral administration constitutes the fourth institutional hurdle, and it has become more contested rather than less. The Election Commission is constitutionally independent, yet the credibility of successive general elections has been disputed by whichever party lost them, and the disputes have concerned not merely the outcome but the integrity of the count itself. The failure of the Result Transmission System in 2018 illustrates how a technical shortcoming becomes a legitimacy crisis. In February 2024 mobile telephone services were suspended on polling day, and results arrived slowly through the night and the following day, with the consolidated count contested by several parties. Furthermore, when the losing party's objection is systemic rather than constituency-specific, the resulting assembly begins its term with contested authority, which weakens its capacity to take unpopular decisions precisely when such decisions are most needed.

Beneath the institutional hurdles lie structural ones, of which clientelism is the most pervasive. Large parts of rural Pakistan return candidates known as electables, whose electoral value derives from biradari networks, landholding and the ability to mediate between citizens and the administration rather than from party programme. Such candidates migrate between parties before each election, and their arrival converts a party's manifesto into an afterthought. The mechanism is rational from below as well as above: where the state delivers police registration, school admission and tubewell connections unreliably, a voter sensibly elects an intermediary rather than a legislator. Consequently, the vote becomes a transaction in local access rather than a verdict on national policy, and accountability is directed at the constituency rather than at the country.

Economic fragility supplies the second structural hurdle, and it narrows democratic choice directly. Pakistan has entered repeated programmes with the International Monetary Fund, most recently a multi-year facility agreed in 2024, and the conditions attached to such programmes govern tax rates, energy tariffs, subsidy levels and the exchange rate regime. These are the classic subjects of electoral competition, and their effective delegation to an external creditor means that parties campaign on questions they cannot decide. Moreover, a tax-to-gross-domestic-product ratio among the lowest in the region deprives government of the fiscal capacity to deliver what it promises, while a narrow base concentrates the burden on those least able to evade it. Democracy without fiscal sovereignty produces disillusionment mechanically, since the electorate observes that changing the government does not change the policy.

The cumulative weight of these hurdles gives rise to a counter-argument that recurs in Pakistani public discussion with remarkable regularity, and intellectual honesty requires stating it at full strength. It holds that Pakistan, with mass illiteracy, deep ethnic and sectarian cleavages, a hostile eastern border and chronic insolvency, is structurally unsuited to competitive democracy. That its elections merely rotate rent-seeking elites. And that the periods of most rapid economic growth, notably the 1960s under Ayub Khan and the early 2000s under Pervez Musharraf, coincided with authoritarian rule. From this premise the conclusion follows that a technocratic or guided arrangement would deliver development first and democracy later, in the manner attributed to several East Asian states.

The rebuttal is empirical rather than merely normative, and it is decisive. The growth of the 1960s was accompanied by an extreme concentration of wealth and by the political alienation of East Pakistan, and it ended in a decade of unrest. The growth of the early 2000s rested substantially on post-2001 external inflows and left behind an energy crisis and an entrenched militancy. More fundamentally, the single greatest catastrophe in Pakistan's history followed directly from the refusal to honour a democratic result. The Awami League won an absolute majority of National Assembly seats in the 1970 general election, power was not transferred, military action followed in March 1971, and by December the country had lost its eastern wing and more than half its population. No authoritarian episode in Pakistan has produced a benefit remotely comparable to that cost. Furthermore, the East Asian comparison fails on its own terms, since the states invoked possessed disciplined bureaucracies, land reform and export-oriented industrial policy, none of which Pakistan's authoritarian periods established. The argument for guided rule, in short, is an argument from a record that does not support it.

Reform should make existing democratic rules effective, beginning inside the parties. Political parties receive legal recognition, electoral symbols and public standing from the state, and the state is therefore entitled to require genuine internal elections, published membership registers, and candidate selection through transparent processes rather than personal nomination. The Election Commission possesses the authority to verify intra-party polls and should exercise it with consequences attached. Moreover, requiring parties to disclose their finances to the same standard demanded of candidates would address the opacity through which dynastic control is financed as well as exercised. The Elections Act 2017 and the Constitution already provide important procedures; sustained enforcement matters more than another ambitious announcement.

Electoral administration requires insulation and technological credibility in equal measure. Appointments to the Election Commission should continue to rest on bipartisan parliamentary consensus, while the result transmission architecture needs independent audit, published source code and full public release of constituency-level primary result forms within a fixed period of the count. A dispute about arithmetic can be settled by publishing the arithmetic. Furthermore, an electoral tribunal system that decides petitions within the statutory time limit rather than years afterwards would ensure that the remedy for a disputed seat is judicial rather than agitational, which is how legitimacy crises are defused in functioning systems.

The restoration of local government is the most neglected reform and possibly the most consequential. Article 140-A obliges the provinces to devolve political, administrative and financial responsibility to elected local governments, yet local bodies have been left unelected for long stretches in several provinces, and where they exist they are frequently denied funds and functions. Consequently, the state is absent at precisely the tier where citizens encounter it, and the vacuum is filled by the electable intermediary described earlier. Empowered local government would convert clientelism into service delivery, create a competitive training ground for political leadership outside dynastic networks, and relieve national legislators of the local errands that presently consume their attention.

Parliament, finally, must be rebuilt as an institution rather than merely convened as an assembly. This requires enforcing the constitutional minimum of sitting days, restricting ordinance-making to genuine emergencies, funding an independent parliamentary budget office capable of costing government proposals, and resourcing standing committees with permanent professional staff. The committee room, not the chamber, is where scrutiny occurs in every mature parliamentary system, and it is the cheapest institutional investment available to Pakistan. A parliament that can interrogate a budget line by line acquires authority that no amount of rhetorical assertion can supply, and authority is the commodity in which elected institutions in Pakistan have been poorest.

The balance of hope and hurdle is genuinely open. Pakistan has established that elections will be held, that assemblies can complete their terms, that provinces can receive their share by agreement rather than by force, and that power can change hands without a proclamation. These are not small achievements for a state that lost half its population to the denial of a democratic verdict. What Pakistan has not established is that elected government can decide the questions that matter, that parties will govern themselves by the rules they demand of others, or that the citizen's vote will purchase a public service rather than a personal favour. That is the distinction between having a democracy and being one. Nothing in the record suggests that the remaining distance must be covered by some alternative system, and attempts to shorten the journey by suspending it have cost the country more than patience ever did. The hurdles are real and mostly self-inflicted; but a self-inflicted obstacle is, by definition, one that the same society retains the power to remove.

Check before use

• Recheck claims about the 2018 and 2024 elections against official records and relevant court findings.
• Confirm demographic figures, fiscal indicators and any recent changes to electoral law.