The week before Pakistan’s 2024 general election, there was a sudden downpour of torrential rain in Karachi, completely unprecedented for February. Apocalyptic, it turned the roads into rivers, leaving cars and motorcycles half-submerged and pedestrians wading through knee-deep filthy water with their trouser legs rolled up.

As an omen, it felt a little on the nose. But it painted a timely picture of the state in which past governments had left Karachi, once the capital and the beating heart of the nation, now rotting and bedraggled after an expensive and never-ending drainage project left the streets dug up for months on end, flooding every time it rained.

If a simple thing like rain could shut this city down, I wondered, then what was going to happen when we went to the polls?

This was my first election. When I was growing up in Karachi, I was too young to vote in the three elections that took place around the period of military rule in the nineties. By the time I was eighteen, I had moved to London to study and was forced to sit out the next two elections – overseas Pakistanis can’t vote remotely. I’ve voted in three British general elections, along with the EU referendum, but this year I had made a trip to Karachi and at thirty years old was going to be voting in my home country for the first time.

A bit naively, I was brimming with hopeful anticipation, if not outright optimism – but I seemed to be the only one. The mood across Karachi was one of cynical apathy. My childhood friends, who had remained in Pakistan or returned after university, were more interested in planning New Year’s Eve parties than in discussing politics. “When is the election again?” one of them asked, offhandedly, as if he’d forgotten a friend’s birthday. Even my mother, who had spent the last election canvassing door-to-door, was subdued, and muttered that she might abstain.

When I asked who they were voting for, my friends shrugged. So did my mother’s chatty neighbour, and the shopkeeper at the kiosk where I buy cigarettes, and my waxing lady, and the waiter serving me tea at my favourite roadside cafe. That shrug is a universal manifestation of the Pakistani attitude towards democracy: a mix of scepticism, irritation, and resignation. It’s the drunk uncle at your wedding who has to be escorted out, the guest who overstays their welcome and eventually becomes toxic.

Can you blame us? For years, the nature of government in Pakistan has been both cyclical and dynastic, shifting hands between the Sharif family’s Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) party and the Bhutto family’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). The only outlier in recent years has been the three and a half years under Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, a tenure that was cut short by a vote of no confidence that left Khan in jail — which means no prime minister in our history has ever been able to complete their term. Other dramatis personae on the grand stage of the Pakistani theatre include the Muhajir nationalist Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), and the religiously driven Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI) and Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) parties.

It’s a revolving door, with politicians shifting allegiances with dizzying urgency and calculated strategy. For the past year and a half, the country existed in a state of limbo, under the leadership of a caretaker government, while elections were delayed further and further. Now the moment had come.

But for the average Pakistani, the question of who wears the crown is less of a concern than the cost of living crisis, the shortage of gas, electricity, and water, the crumbling infrastructure, and the abject poverty in which a vast majority of the country lives. Not only are they tired of seeing the same old faces, they’re also convinced that no new government will be able to fix what past ones couldn’t.

So in the weeks leading up to the elections, as Karachi shook itself off and recovered from the collective hangover of the wedding season that spans December and January and is affectionately known as Decemberistan, there was a quietness across the city. Any pre-election excitement on the streets was purely two-dimensional: posters of smiling electoral candidates plastered walls, telephone poles, and the backs of rickshaws, and party flags fluttered from telephone wires and balconies, all a variation of red, black, green, and white, making them impossible to distinguish between.

The Election Day

Even the campaign trail seemed more subdued than usual. Protests and rallies organised by PTI were violently suppressed, and many of its leaders were in jail or had been bullied out of politics. The Election Commission of Pakistan had effectively disbanded the party by taking away their symbol, the cricket bat – which has always been synonymous with Khan, a former cricket legend who likes his cricket analogies and is nicknamed Captain by his followers – and forcing them to run as independent candidates under different symbols.

So it wasn’t only apathy, but fear that had been instilled into the usually hot-blooded Pakistani people. Specifically, it was fear of the shadowy establishment – a sinister catch-all umbrella term that people feel is safer to use than directly referring to the military or other state agencies, one which brings to my mind the Empire from Star Wars. But it isn’t as cartoonishly villainous as it sounds, nor is it as overt as our previous military dictatorships have been under Pervez Musharraf or Zia-ul-Haq — it’s more insidious than that, an oppression that hides behind the veil of democracy, wears it as a grotesque mask that everyone politely pretends not to notice.

On the day of the election, the streets were eerily empty, devoid of the frenzied Karachi traffic characterised by blaring horns and motorcycles narrowly dodging being clipped by a car’s bumper.

But the silence ran deeper than that; it extended into the virtual world. The mobile and internet services had been down since morning, and would be off until after midnight — a precautionary measure by the government to prevent terrorist attacks; the Election Commission later blamed this for the delay in counting the votes. It also meant that a sense of general chaos and confusion ran through the city, as people, disconnected from each other and the wider world, were at a loss for what to do that day.

“I don’t know where my polling station is,” my mother’s chatty neighbour bellowed down from her balcony. “Do you?”

She wasn’t the only one. All across Karachi, people were realising that their polling station was half-way across the city rather than in their own constituency. Even within the same household, family members found they were registered to different polling stations. I could name at least a dozen people who didn’t vote because they couldn’t get to or didn’t want to make the trek to their polling station. Was it the usual disorganisation or an intentional form of weaponised incompetence designed to cut down the voter turnout?

“Are we sure we’re going to the right place?” I asked my mother, as we drove past a police van on our way to our polling station. All along the street were information booths, each decked in the flags and symbols of the parties they represented, with queues of harassed-looking people waiting to be guided to their polling stations by exhausted volunteers.

We were not, in fact, in the right place — our polling station had been changed, and a PTI volunteer redirected us to it. It was in a girl’s college, its walls adorned with smiling posters, not of political candidates, but of its highest achieving students.

As we entered, we passed a man scrutinising a sign on the wall which listed all the different symbols representing each party’s candidate next to their names, a copy of what the ballot paper would look like. There was a tiger for PML-N, an arrow for PPP, a kite for MQM… and then a dizzying array of symbols for the various independent candidates, ranging from a duck to a drum to an eggplant. It was like looking at a children’s school workbook. But in a country where 60% of the population is illiterate, the images, trite and cartoonish as they may appear, are essential for a lot of voters to recognise their candidate. By taking away the universally recognised bat symbol, the electoral commission had made things even more complicated for PTI supporters.

By the time the results were almost finalised, it was clear that no party had enough of a majority to form a government — though the PTI candidates insisted they had won more seats than the final results would show. A coalition would have to be the only solution. Reports began to pour in, of covert meetings between parties that claimed to hate each other, of generals visiting Adiala Jail to offer secret deals to Imran Khan. Inevitably, independent candidates, many of them PTI, began defecting to PML-N, their loyalty compromised by bribes or threats.

Insidiously, it felt as though we the voters were being kept in the dark, as if in the darkest underbelly of the nation shadowy figures were debating our fate while we were forever locked out of the room where it happens.

What’s happening? my friends back in London kept asking me, morbidly fascinated, as if they were watching an episode of Game of Thrones. What’s happening? our family abroad demanded, perplexed but also smug that they were sitting comfortably far from the chaos. What’s happening? quipped the boys I was talking to on dating apps, using it as a talking point once they realised I was Pakistani.

What’s happening? I wondered. Who was winning? Was anyone winning? Certainly not the country. The ink on my thumb faded, leaving only a slash of blue-black on my nail, and we still didn’t have a government.

Aftermath

By the time I returned to London, there was still a faint impression of ink on my thumbnail, which I couldn’t bring myself to scrub off with nail polish remover, and we still didn’t have a government. Yet within a month, during which protests were stamped out and hushed meetings were held and speculations abounded, we ended up with a coalition between the PML-N and PPP, who formed a majority by joining with six other parties, including many PTI candidates who swung their allegiances. It feels we’re back to square one, in line with the inevitably cyclical nature of government in Pakistan, spearheaded by two parties who spent their campaigns tearing each other down only to join hands when the chips were down. Naively, I can’t help but be disappointed.

Then again, who am I to say? I write this sitting in London, an ocean away from my country, with the benefit of retrospect and distance. In less than a month, I’ll be voting in the UK’s next general election: crossing the street to the polling station at the school opposite my flat, watching the results rolling in over pizza and beers with friends, with a guarantee that by the next morning we would have a government. Yet the UK is also buzzing with a deep-seated anxiety, an ill-willed resentment towards the current government and a thirst for change that’s mixed with scepticism about what the alternative might offer. I see many of the same patterns – that anxiety about outsiders destabilising the country, in this case manifesting in the form of vicious anti-migration sentiments, and the same resentful apathy permeating through the public.

Different though it was from past ones, this election felt symptomatic of Pakistan’s fraught relationship with democracy, an abusive relationship where one constantly plays the other for a fool. It’s a relentless cycle, a game of musical chairs on a loop while we the people can only watch passively, falling back on apathy because it’s less painful than anger. Like our cricket team, which plays like a dream and then at the last minute fumbles and drops the ball, often literally, Pakistan’s tussle with democracy seems to be one which inches us ever so close to where we need to be, before abruptly ricocheting two steps backwards.

Perhaps democracy just doesn’t work in a country like Pakistan, where it is constantly being interrupted before it can run its course, where the majority of people are more concerned with their basic needs being met than the nuances of the democratic system, or perhaps because we as a nation vote for people rather than parties or ideologies. Perhaps it’s the very nature of those in power, with politicians desperate to hold on to their seats while the military uses their failings as a pretext to interfere, forming a destructively symbiotic relationship. It feels as though democracy has stagnated here, and only violent upheaval will correct the cracks in the system.

I wonder if things will change, or whether we’re doomed to repeat history until it wears us into the ground.