As if the harvest of shame that we have reaped in the form of the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO), the Raymond Davis affair, the Mehran Base attack, the Abbottabad operation, Memogate and the Salala attack was not enough, now we have been condemned to hear that the head of this 180-million-strong nuclear-armed state had ‘run away’ from the realm for some real or imagined apprehensions. Is it not weird? And weird it should be when the Opposition declares parliament ineffectual, hence, infructuous; when the chief executive exults at a chance smile from his ‘crossed’ army chief; when the apex court, disregarding the principle of reciprocity, converts a letter from a Canadian of Pakistani origin into a petition questioning the government’s credibility as the guardian of national security; and when the economy should show mortal crisis and yet shrill jingoism gets all the sharper. Not a day goes by when we do not get to hear about the impending doomsday for the government, if not democracy. Some highly fertile minds even portray the graphic details of how and when this system would be wound up by the jackboots in cahoots with the robes. Some celebrated hacks just refuse to stop playing the gods, divining ever new scenarios of doom and gloom. But in the same breath they also lament the pervading sense of uncertainty nurturing political instability and economic deterioration. Sometimes, they wonder in frustration why the situation never goes the way they project. Many a magician lost the bet on the president’s return home. They lost because they do not reckon the two key factors that are pivotal to so far saving this government for all its economic and governance failures. One, the establishment’s refusal to sink in the politico-cultural shifts within the country, and globally. It continues to believe it can still ‘manage’ the political system the way it did in the past. But it cannot. Statecraft is no more beholden to muscle power alone. The state’s raw power has been supplanted with a ‘soft power’, an extension of efficient governance, economic development, public welfare, rights and liberties, and the social compact. Therefore, even if the people may want to see this government go, they want a corrective not a retrogressive replacement, which is definitely not a military takeover. That explains why President Zardari returned from his ‘sick leave’ at a time when the powerful forces are baying for him. For instance, the right-wing media is now accusing him and Ambassador Haqqani for causing even the Abbottabad debacle, letting the military leadership off the hook. The Opposition is using the Memogate scandal to guillotine him. The army and intelligence leaderships have vouchsafed for their once nemesis, Mansoor Ijaz, embarrassing the government. And the apex court is also relentlessly pursuing the NRO, and now the Memogate issue, pushing the government into a deepening morass. Two, it may sound oxymoronic but true that none of the above mentioned forces wants a complete wash out of the current political structure, for all its dirt and ugliness. They are mindful of the logical culmination of this ethically thick political discourse. They would rather prefer a soft changeover, not a tectonic shift. Hence, they are not trying extreme political or adventurist methods. They are exploring technical, moral or legal ways to oust Mr Zardari. Indeed, they are wary of history and its vengeance. Forget about the English, American, French or Russian revolutions, their own annals are spattered with innocent blood that was shed in the name of national security and accountability. From Iskander Mirza’s promulgation of the first countrywide martial law to General Zia’s dark era to Musharraf’s blood-soaked polity, every quest for a clean system has stuck the country in a deeper political and structural mess. It is not that the system is incorrigible; it is because our political and state grandees have a huge stake in political instability, commotion and even violence. An extraordinary situation has provided an extraordinary opportunity to them to cast new moulds of power structures and vested interests. Just look up the index of the nouveau riche, both khaki and civvy, at the end of every authoritarian regime. Luckily, revolutions are not always predictable. In fact, revolutions by definition are situations obtaining in a massively unreadable way, unfolding only in the most bizarre and uncontrollable manner. They occur when the handles of controls are lost to those who rise with the crest of commotions. No one had predicted the October Revolution in Czarist Russia. Similarly, none could see the wheels of history turning so fast against despotism in the Middle East and North Africa. Moreover, revolutions are not always prone to causing tempestuous events and cataclysms. Some quiet and unfelt changes may also lead to far-reaching fallouts. The Perestroika and Glasnost movement was quietly begun by Gorbachev in the twilight years of the USSR. But he did not imagine that it would soon unravel the whole Communist bloc that straddled much of the globe. Save a few tragic events, the whole of the Warsaw Pact system and the USSR dissolved like a house of cards, without any violence or wars. Since 1989, Europe and the world have never been the same again in terms of geopolitics. Some academicians even propounded the theory of the ‘end of history’, as if ending the bipolarity of the world was history’s only objective. In our case, too, a seemingly benign event can trigger a malignant metastasis. The chain of recurring ‘crises’– the institutional ‘wars’, the undoing of the NRO, the Abbottabad debacle, the Memogate scandal, the economic downturn and the ongoing Pak-US standoff — point to the fact that the powers-that-be can no longer control events; that there are systemic disjoints and interest-based conflicts that the state’s existing machinery is finding hard to mend, let alone resolve; that the primordial struggles between labour and capital, democracy and despotism, war and peace, poverty and affluence, and oppression and social justice have intensified. Whether the state can successfully mediate between these conflicting forces depends upon the concessions that it accords to the vast numbers of disadvantaged and wronged citizens. Or else, the situation would take a violent turn if the privileged and powerful forces used the state’s repressive methods. True, one-sixth of the world population still lives below the poverty line and the weak and marginalised continue to be repressed in the least developed states. But then these states are dwindling in number. After Latin America, now Africa is undergoing a process of democratisation and pacification. Not only are people vying for a constitutional polity, fauna, flora and the elements are also coming under a protective legal umbrella. Democracy, development and climate are the modern gospels. If we also want to see good governance, social cohesion, internal and regional peace and economic and social development, then we must remove institutional disjoints and socio-political and foreign policy-related conflicts. And that requires bold socio-political and economic reforms, not conspiracies and shaming scandals. The writer is a lawyer and academic. He can be reached at shahabusto@hotmail.com