Will the February 18 election change Pakistan? Yes and no. Let’s consider the negative first. If change relates to structures of power, the answer is largely a ‘no’. The army will retain its primacy in the system; political parties will not emerge as reformed entities; institutional inefficiencies will remain intact; the poltergeist of political instability will keep haunting the house; and terrorism will continue to threaten the country.

Yet, and this is important, much will also change.

The continuing movement for the restoration of the judges, the emphasis on the sanctity of the constitution, the stress on national consensus to resolve political and other issues and the new political consciousness is just one aspect of a change already in the offing. Its potential at this stage is not to be seen in terms of its ability or otherwise to effect a change; it can’t. But it’s a competing discourse that has started as a trickle and could become the riverhead of a perennial watercourse.

The second important point is that the seeming instability this movement has brought to Pakistan is akin to breaking eggs to make an omelette. The civil society wants stability but of a dynamic kind — stability that comes through aggregation of interests, the din of politics, not the cacophony of silence.

To this extent and more, most western analysts have got the events in Pakistan wrong. Leaving aside terrorism, never before has Pakistan evinced more resilience and dynamism than it has since March 9, 2007 when a serving general, Pervez Musharraf, tried, unsuccessfully then, to oust the chief justice of Pakistan.

... contd.