Pakistan looks more ready for democratic transition than it has ever since the General took over reigns in 1999. State of Democracy in South Asia, a major study in the five countries of the region carried out in 2005, found that Pakistanis too have a healthy appetite for democracy. The Indian Express-Dawn News-CNN-IBN poll shows that their support for democracy has actually gone up in the last two years, as has their trust in the courts. Correspondingly, their tolerance of army’s role in politics has sharply declined since 2005. All this is good news for prospects of democracy. The only worrisome sign is that the level of trust in the Election Commission, an institution that may be called upon to play a crucial role in democratic transition, continues to be very low.

The picture from India offers a perfect contrast in terms of both long-term attitudes as well as short-term political assessment. Going by the “iron law of Indian democracy” one should expect a ruling party in its fourth year of office to begin losing its popularity. And if it is a Congress government, one should expect this change to be visible first of all in big cities where the BJP has done particularly well in the last two decades. But this survey of the top 20 cities offers no such evidence. If anything the UPA government and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have gained a few points in popularity, if compared with the big city respondents in the previous State of the Nation Survey carried out in January this year. The approval rating (per cent of respondents who are “satisfied” with the work) of the UPA government is 73 per cent and that of the PM as high as 77 per cent. These figures represent a gain of 25 and 20 points respectively, largely because the NDA voters in the big cities are less unkind to the current rulers than they were a few months ago. To be sure, this reading could be exaggerated. The two surveys are not exactly comparable and this one is not strictly a representative sample. Therefore it is difficult to estimate the range of error here. To err on the safer side, one can conclude that there is no evidence of decline of support for the ruling coalition.

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