EVERY decade in Pakistan’s history has seen a moment when a robust defence of democracy as the best form of government for a country like ours is needed. The never-ending struggle for supremacy between the democratic and non-democratic forces make it necessary. One of the key ways in which non-democratic forces advance their argument is to amplify all the bad things that happen under democratic rule, and all the flaws that democratically elected leaders bring to their position. They advance the idea that a more selfless leadership will be better for the country since it will put the national interest above its own. This is the central argument which numerous non-democratic forces have used to try and justify their intervention in politics and governance. But there is a flaw in this premise. No leadership is selfless. Not in the political arena. Every contender for leadership emerges only by harnessing the powers inherent in society. Non-democrats, for example, have had the organised power of their respective institution behind them. And therefore, they have not been able to operate outside the limits set by their own affiliation with the institution that supplied them with the power to rule and to attack other institutions — which cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as selfless actions taken for the sake of the country. In fact, to use the words of Hamilton in the Federalist Papers — the founding documents of the American system — democracy is predicated on the idea that human beings, or at least those who seek power and thereby become players in the political arena, are “ambitious, vindictive and rapacious”. The idea that people (or at least those who enter the arena of politics) are inherently selfish, self-serving, rapacious and ambitious was ingrained in the philosophical traditions from which democracy arose. Hume wrote that, when devising a system of rule, “every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest”. Montesquieu asserted that “[c]onstant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it … it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power”. Kant took the argument even further, effectively saying that it should be possible to build a system of rule even for a nation of devils, because a rightly arranged constitution forces their selfish inclinations to check one another, producing an outcome identical to what good moral character would have produced. Both democracy and the market are designed to harness the worst motivations of individuals — towards the pursuit of the common good of all. The list goes on and on. Democracy is premised on the idea that rulers will bring bad motivations to their position, and it works on this premise to build a system where the separation of powers and the accountability and transparency that come with it will work to constrain these motivations, and channel them towards the collective good. This is one foundational element that democracy has in common with the other big idea that emerged at around the same time: the market as the organising principle of economic life. The market also assumes that human motivations are greed and self-interest. When we meet greedy and self-interested people, most of us are usually not impressed. But taken collectively, the idea behind the market was to harness these energies towards the pursuit of the collective good. Both democracy and the market are designed to harness the worst motivations of individuals — towards the pursuit of the common good of all. They aim to do this by pitting these bad motivations against each other and via a scheme of separation of powers where no single branch of government should exercise sway over the entire apparatus of state. Today, if there is any separation of powers left in the country, it is the federal versus the provincial governments. Little wonder that a demand materialises from silent places for undoing this as well. When one points to the defects of individual democratic rulers, parties or governments, one should remember that non-democratic forms of government are not going to be without defects of their own. But they will be better at ensuring their defects are not amplified in the national conversation, so the common citizenry is left with the impression that only democratic rule has defects. The bigger problem is that non-democratic rulers, meaning those who come to the political arena via a route other than the ballot box, have no checks on their motivations, because they usually stand above the separation of powers and all mechanisms of accountability that any political system has. As such, their self-serving motivations get a free, unchecked rein; our own history bears witness that their periods of rule ended up doing lasting damage to Pakistan. This is what must be kept in mind when working through the conversation these days around breaking up the provinces, or creating new ‘administrative units’. The first question to ask is ‘where is this demand coming from?’ Is it coming from below or above? There is a demand, for instance in south Punjab to create a new province and that demand has been acknowledged by all three major democratic parties in the country today. But where is the demand in the rest of the country? The bottom line is this: if the demand to restructure the federation is not coming from below, then it should not be pursued. The federation is not a toy to be played with, and not someone’s snack to be cut up into bite-sized nuggets because a handful of people think that by doing so some kind of benefit will follow. The writer is a business and economy journalist.khurram.husain@gmail.comX: @khurramhusain Published in Dawn, August 13th, 2026