Decline is not destiny. Institutions do not fail because they are poorly designed; they fail because responsibility within them is gradually surrendered. Pakistan’s Parliament, comprising the National Assembly and the Senate, today stands as a case study in this abdication. Conceived as a bicameral system to balance popular will with federal wisdom, it was meant to restrain excess, deepen representation, and convert disagreement into durable law.

Instead, it risks drifting into procedural survival without moral authority—present in constitutional form, absent in national consequence.

For four decades, since the controlled restoration of parliamentary life in 1985, Pakistan’s Parliament has survived what many democracies would not: military coups and presidential dissolutions, assassinations and long exiles, hybrid regimes, judicial interventions, and repeated political upheavals.

Yet endurance is not legitimacy. Today, both Houses remain intact, but weakened in public faith, presiding over a democracy that functions mechanically while failing substantively.

Pakistan is right to remind itself that it remains among the very few Muslim-majority countries where parliamentary democracy persists through popular voice. This is a country where a military ruler resigned under the shadow of impeachment; where a lawyers’ movement restored a deposed judiciary; where media—despite pressure and censorship—continues to challenge power; and where political awareness reaches villages, streets, and teashops alike.

A nation of nearly 250 million is not ungovernable. But it is increasingly misrepresented, misled, and disenchanted with its central democratic institution.

Since 1973, Pakistan has amended its Constitution twenty-seven times in just over five decades, mirroring the twenty-seven amendments of the U.S. Constitution since 1789. Yet the similarity in numbers masks a stark difference: in the American case, amendments were rare, debated widely, and anchored in national consensus.

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In Pakistan, amendments have too often been reactive, personality-specific, or regime-driven. Offices are recalibrated, clauses inserted, and powers redistributed, yet the lived failures of governance remain untouched.

When was the last serious parliamentary debate on education standards, on public health emergencies such as polio eradication, or on the collapse of national sports—hockey, squash, cricket, and football? Pakistan has a sports........

© The Friday Times