A Catch-22 moment. Again. The capital is being barricaded with containers to contain people marching towards it. It comes as no surprise that democratic institutions, which were meant to protect people's rights, now need protection themselves; the Constitution, which should guard against aggression, needs security; the judiciary, which safeguards justice, needs safeguards; and parliament, which represents the people, confines itself and withdraws from them—all at D-Chowk. In other words, the citadels of the power elite, which promised to safeguard people's rights and protect them from one another's wrath, are being sealed off from the very people they were meant to serve.
Why do institutions, the Constitution and other structures that should secure people's rights and redress their grievances need protection from the very people whose grievances they have failed to address? Do they not provide a constitutionally mandated way out? When institutions and the Constitution serve the privileges of the powerful elite instead, they expose their own hollowness rather than protect people's rights. In other words, when these citadels are made to serve Orwellian designs, they and their architects ultimately find themselves caught in an Oedipal trap. Thereafter, every move against the people, however confident, creates a fatal predicament—a Zugzwang for the country's ruling elite.
Yet the elite continues to contain the people, confining them to metaphorical corners of the country, accompanied by the drumbeats of media lackeys and others whose perks are tied to this brute system. The power elite, having tried its best to keep the people at a distance and deny them the prospect of prosperity, remains acutely aware of its guilt and the liabilities it seeks to conceal. Now, the elite and its institutional appendages find themselves caught in the same classical traps associated with Oedipus and Croesus of Lydia. Should they retreat, they will fall. Should they advance, they will certainly fall. Why has the power elite crossed the Rubicon in its confrontation with the people? What gave it Icarus's wings, and why does the system now seek an escape through containment?
It's the elite that has legitimized and institutionalized their pelf, plunder, and power through institutional scaffolding and constitutional assaults so extensively that these very structures have lost their own strength and security.
Pakistan's ruling elite has experimented with martial law and other repressive arrangements. Yet none of these has cost it as much as democracy has. Democracy? You might wonder. Yes—the façade of democracy, the institutionalisation and constitutionalisation of dictatorship, and the militarisation of democracy. Beguiled by this façade, the elite, in its pursuit of hybridisation, piled sin upon sin, engaged in illegalities, secured vested interests and legalised everything that served its purposes, excluding and marginalising the people in the process. Meanwhile, support bargained for abroad and support cultivated among a deluded domestic public helped sustain its position. For decades, external backing has been supplemented by public support and trust that the elite has done little to earn or sustain.
However, everything has its limits. So does the democratic façade, which has been used to drag along the rotting carcass of dictatorship. When forced to choose between the struggle for survival and enticing political slogans, people, however much they may be kept in the dark, tend to prioritise the former. Today, all sides appear exhausted. The democratic façade is struggling to breathe, as are public trust and support for the power elite. More importantly, the elite has legitimised and institutionalised its pelf, plunder and power through institutional scaffolding and constitutional assaults to such an extent that these very structures have lost their strength and security. Consequently, institutions intended to safeguard people's rights and security now fear the very people they were meant to protect, seeking security from those they have failed.
This is not checkmate for the elite—not yet. It overlooks the fact that the most effective containment is rarely achieved through containers; it is achieved through the rule of law and the Constitution. True containment lies not in containing the aggrieved and their grievances, but in restraining the aggressors. Having deliberately discarded every avenue of redress and crossed the Rubicon, the power elite now finds its own anaemic institutions contained by containers, without acknowledging that self-containment is hardly a path to liberation. The containers embody a paradox: intended to stop the marchers, they instead contain the Constitution and the very institutions that sustain the elite's power. Nor is this containment limited to D-Chowk. The apparent targets are the marchers; the less visible casualties are the gasping rule of law, the battered Constitution and the crumbling democratic facade.