In a country with weak democratic institutions, it remains to be seen where the army’s loyalties lie: with the beleaguered president or the elected government. Going by the MQM’s posturing it can be argued that perhaps all may not have been lost for Musharraf just yet. His loyalist party has hit back at the ANP and the PML-N by saying that they, like the MQM, are also regional and not national parties, as neither has secured much of the vote beyond their respective strongholds of the Frontier and Punjab. The assertion somewhat lessens the stigma attached to the MQM as being the representative of urban Sindh alone.

Talking of apologies over past conduct, which the PML-N demands of the MQM, and the MQM in turn demands of the PPP for launching military action against it in Karachi back in the ’90s, one still eludes: that owed to the former Chief Justice Sajjad Ali Shah by Nawaz Sharif whose supporters had attacked the supreme court, and Shah was subsequently sent packing. Such are the wages of long bouts of unrepresentative and autocratic rule to which Pakistan has been subjected for the majority of years since independence. Continuation of democratic rule alone can resolve these political schisms ailing the country.

The writer is an editor with Dawn, Karachi murtazarazvi@hotmail.com