SYSTEMS collapse when promises are not honoured. In a democracy, institutional health is measured by how each branch — legislature, executive and judiciary — upholds its commitments. One such commitment is to conduct elections within 90 days of the dissolution of an assembly as required by the Constitution. Commitments exist for the collective good. They collapse when they are negotiated to secure personal or institutional ambitions — such as when a law is tailored to protect the tenure of the chief justice.
Democracy, as currently practised, is designed in a way that cultivates a kind of collective inanity. Representatives surrender their own thinking, and the promises they made to the people, to the party; the parties, in turn, obey the whip and toe the line. Truth is not considered valuable in and of itself; it is a tool in a box, taken out when useful and put away when not. This can be seen in the 26th and 27th Amendments, and the Peca and NAB amendments, each tied by its defenders to the ‘public good’. Those who supported these laws gave more importance to optics that would present them in a favourable light, than to truth itself.
Against what standard, then, should these promises be measured? Political and economic stability rests on a fairly simple premise: legislatures exist to enact laws that promote peace and security. The role of the executive is to create an environment where people are not afraid of voicing their concerns. The role of the judicial branch is to ensure that the system rests on justice, and not oppression. Measure the promises made against these standards to see where we actually stand and at what point the system collapsed.
But that is hard to ascertain when the language we use around politics and economics has grown hollow and vague — and our thinking along with it. George Orwell made a related point in his essay Politics and the English Language. He argued that the language we use around economics and politics has become hollow, flatter and vaguer, and our thinking about politics and economics, too, has become flatter and vaguer with it. When we are asked for our opinion on an issue, Orwell says, we are handed a menu of clichés and readymade platitudes, and we limit ourselves to rattling these off. A leader can say ‘the system has collapsed’ — a sentence constructed to sound like an admission while holding no one accountable. The question is — whose system has collapsed, and at whose hands? A government will announce ‘negative growth’, instead of admitting a recession, because the euphemism does the work the truth is not permitted to do.
Why has the system collapsed and at whose hands?
The Constitution — a social contract — ought to be upheld by those tasked with implementing it. Any contract dies the moment one party stops honouring it. Ghalib wrote: “Qatre mein dijla dikhai na de aur juzv mein kul/ Khel larkon ka hua, deeda-i-beena na hua.” If the river cannot be seen in the drop, if the whole cannot be found in its smallest part, then this is not insight but a child’s game. A missed deadline, continuous disregard of judicial pronouncements, a compromised electoral system, a mandate believed to be stolen — these are not separate failures to be tallied. Each one reflects a total collapse, visible in a single drop, for those willing to actually see it.
Sanctity of promises constitutes the bedrock of society. It is what makes or breaks a relationship. The trust of our citizens has been eroded so many times that changing words in the Constitution now means little, when what was needed was to uphold the document in the first place. An environment is now being created for further constitutional amendments, sought through the same people who broke the last set of promises. That we allow this cycle to repeat itself is not merely a failure of politics; it is a failure to look ahead.
Kant identified why we so rarely see clearly enough to demand better. In his essay on enlightenment, he wrote that human beings remain in a self-imposed immaturity, mainly out of cowardice and laziness, unable to use their own understanding without another’s guidance. We have outsourced our thinking, and our belief, to the people we follow and the technology we depend on. Praising the interior minister for saying, on camera, what was once only said in drawing rooms is nothing more than silliness. This attitude mistakes candour about dishonesty for honesty itself. What we need is not a minister admitting what is said behind closed doors, nor another amendment. We need to respect our people and to honour the promises made to them in the Constitution.
The writer is a lawyer based in Karachi.
Published in Dawn, August 24th, 2026
