Elections, now.

CRISIS is an overused term in Pakistan, but there is little else that can adequately describe the current state of affairs. A long-brewing crisis of the economy is now playing itself out in agonising detail. Inflation is at its highest in five decades, food and fuel costs are pushing thousands of working class households deeper into poverty, and the finance ministry's gross mismanagement has translated a difficult global economic context into a catastrophic domestic one.

There is also a multipronged political crisis currently afflicting all major institutions. The National Assembly is dysfunctional for several reasons, most notably the existence of an unwieldy coalition in government and the absence of the largest political party, the PTI.

In the face of PTI's popularity, the military establishment is witnessing a severe curtailment of its ability to curate and bend political outcomes to its will. Instead of reflective withdrawal, it is responding with coercion. And the judiciary, while facing its usual crisis of external pressure and partisan expectations, now appears stricken with significant internal fracturing as well.

These crises have been in place for the better part of 10 months. The latest addition has been a crisis of the Constitution, ie, of the nature of the state itself. It was the sole outcome of an intransigent PDM government refusing to go for provincial elections, egged on further by a fractured judiciary.

While legal analysts debated the finer points (and score line) of the Supreme Court's ruling over an election date for the Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa assemblies, the ECP belatedly caved in and provided a time frame for the first week of May. The president has now announced April 30 as the poll date.

Nothing, however, changes the fact that any delay beyond the 90-day limit, for whatever reason, is a violation of the Constitution. And if a state does not have regular answers to the most basic of questions - when do people choose their government, who gets to form it, and how do laws get made - it opens the door to discretionary turmoil.

Fifteen years into closing the chapter on the last martial law regime, the fact that such questions have not been conclusively resolved shows regression rather than progress.

The past months have shown what growing popular support can do for a political party's prospects, regardless of the establishment's position.

There is no one solution to these multifaceted crises. Each has its own...