Pakistan does not need a hard state. It needs a development state. Egypt is a hard state; Vietnam is a development state. Anyone serious about Pakistan's future must understand the difference. The obvious counter-example is India. It has remained a democracy since independence, its military has stayed out of politics, and its economic performance has been substantially better than Pakistan's. That matters. The military's repeated interventions have profoundly affected Pakistan's civilian institutions, political parties and the state itself. Civilian supremacy and constitutional government are therefore part of Pakistan's problem. But India does not establish that democracy, or free and fair elections, is a sufficient theory of development. Its experience is one part of a larger historical record.

India's transformation also depended on factors that have little to do with elections: an enormous domestic market, human-capital accumulation, an entrepreneurial sector, institutional continuity, gradual liberalisation after 1991, global integration and technological capability. India itself contains enormous variation—some states have built far greater productive capacity than others under the same national democratic system.

I recently exchanged views on X with Salman Akram Raja, the PTI's secretary general, over precisely this question: can a state impose economic development through coercion, or does sustained progress require political freedom and democracy? Salman wrote: "The myth of a state that runs on coercion, somehow imposes economic development and fills the coffers of the state while denying the people basic human dignity is nonsense that history has exposed again and again. Such a state is not a 'hard' state but a lawless farce that hollows out the state. For every coercive-development state in East Asia there are dozens of failed dictatorships in Africa and South America. Every Pakistani dictatorship has left the country structurally and economically weaker."

Ilhan Niaz, a history professor at Quaid-e-Azam University, responded that "the West’s industrial modernisation owes nearly nothing to democracy since in those cases democracy was the outcome, not the cause, of said modernisation. This holds even in the context of the US/UK. Also, much of the capital for European modernisation was furnished through overseas colonial expropriation, enslavement, genocide. In other societies, while it is correct that there are many failed autocratic governments, practically all cases of successful transition to industrial society occurred under enlightened dictatorships. In South Asia, we have poor quality and arbitrary governance regardless of form of government. So the choice here is between a bad democracy or a bad autocracy.”

The exchange illustrates a deeper problem in Pakistan's debate: the search for a single theory of development. Democracy or dictatorship, markets or the state, liberalisation or protection, inclusive institutions or strong government—one is presented as the missing ingredient. There is no one theory of development, and history provides no universal blueprint or predetermined sequence through which countries become prosperous.

That proposition is relevant today. Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi has declared that Pakistan's governance system has effectively "collapsed," triggering fresh speculation about the current hybrid setup. Given Naqvi's position and his close association with Field Marshal Asim Munir, the remark cannot be dismissed as rhetoric. But the more important question is what kind of state Pakistan has been building. The debate is again about who should rule—civilians, the military, or some hybrid—when changing who occupies the commanding heights does not automatically change the political economy beneath them.

Here Salman Raja's argument, despite its moral force, falls short. To describe coercive developmental states as "lawless farces" because many dictatorships failed is to substitute moral condemnation for comparative analysis. A state that denies human dignity and relies on arbitrary coercion is obviously undesirable, but that does not explain why some authoritarian states transformed agrarian societies into industrial economies while others became predatory failures, or why some democracies developed rapidly while others stayed trapped in patronage and low productivity. For a leader deeply involved in Pakistan's constitutional debate, reducing this to coercion versus democracy is surprisingly thin.

Raja is not wrong to criticise authoritarianism; but he is asking the wrong question. Development is not produced by coercion any more than by democracy. What matters is whether a state can build productive capabilities, accumulate human capital, foster technological learning, mobilise investment and discipline rent-seeking. Regime type matters, but it is neither sufficient nor universal as an explanation.

Dani Rodrik, the Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School and one of the world's leading development scholars, made this point in One Economics, Many Recipes. General economic........

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