An initially indignant international community has virtually equated a fair trial for Sharif with legitimacy for the military regime. A legitimacy Pervez Musharraf would like to comprehensively secure with a referendum, a stamp of public endorsement for his ascent and for his unchallenged continuance in power, in January. What else could a dictator ask for?

As history has illustrated time and again, dictators always win referendums. In any case, Mushar-raf is likely to seek a mandate for an immensely populist economic agenda, not for the suspension ofdemocracy.

Indeed, faced with the depressing spectacle of Bhutto furnishing sprawling mansions in England with 30-ft-long cut-glass tables and curtains worth tens of thousands of dollars and of the Sharif family coughing up millions in outstanding debts, the people of Pakistan are perhaps justified in seeking a change any change from a decade of yo-yoing between the only alternatives that democracy seems to offer. But only if it were that simple, only if the tea leaves provided some scope for optimism. The authorities may dwell at length on fundamental rights, yet with the Constitution being kept in abeyance, such statements amount to na-ught.

In fact, for all the talk of the military regime preparing the country for true democracy, it has already made tentative steps towards press censorship. The Attorney General of Sindh has pleaded that the media be barred from reporting Sharif's "political" statements. If this caution is occasioned when there is not even a hint of a domestic challenge to thegenerals, how will they react in case accountability remains a rallying slogan, in case they fail to fulfill their promises of utopia?

If the generals are selling vision of utopia back home, they are compelling the international community to engage with them by presenting horrifying pictures of a possible future, of a failed state a nuclear one, to boot of the flashpoints this would catalyse. Engage with us, is the message, for only we in the army in this land of failing institutions can ensure a semblance of normalcy, a return to order. Yet, the installation of this military re-gime has given fresh confidence to groups like the Lashkar-e-Toiba to organise ever more obtrusive conferences, to men like Mast Gul to emerge from relative obscurity. If Pakistanis are confronted by confusing ambiguities, the plight of concerned observers around the world is not any better.

But such are the contradictions of dictatorship. And now that Musharraf has played his hand, New Delhi would do well to formulate a workingresponse, a response that acknowledges and addresses the dualities unfolding in Pakistan.