The once and future republic.

IN Saki's short story 'The Jesting of Arlington Stringham', the politician of the same name remarks in parliament that 'the people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.'

The people of Pakistan would doubtless agree: we have, in the words of another commentator, 'a superabundance of the unresolved past.' Take these few spring days in March, when we mark Pakistan's dawn (March 23, 1940), when we repress any memory of its dusk (March 25, 1971), and when we pick between a republican guard and an actual republic.

It shouldn't have had to be a choice. By rights, this was a day about the Constitution, about the soaring notes of its preamble, about the sanctity of the vote. In an alternative universe where Ayub never got his extension and Ghulam Muhammad was turfed out of the civil service,perhaps it could have been.

But whatever our unhappy history, the unresolved past is now returning as nightmare: this latest '23rd March' resembles few that have come before. The social contract is unravelling, the Constitution is in peril, a coalition of slack-jawed dynasts is driving us to default, and the deep state fumes as the walls of its coercive apparatus - a pyramid built on fear and silence - start to wobble under the weight of Imran Khan's populist revenge.

Yes, we are awash in more history than we know what to do with. But the tragic optics of this Pakistan Day must prompt a change in course; even as we celebrate our bankruptcy with a string of tanks, turrets, and all manner of big, pointy appendages.

Because, central to any Republic Day - a name we've long stopped calling March 23 - is the health of our democracy. This year, however, it's accompanied by mass revulsion; by a sense that at the highest levels of state, the worst possible decisions are being taken with head-banging constancy. In sum, the democratic project is coming undone. And yet, to paraphrase a deeply flawed democrat, to a crisis of the spirit, there must be an answer of the spirit: it is now even more vital to understand why we have a Republic Day at all, what its genesis was, and how it can guide us back to the light today.

We make a start 83 years ago, when the greatest leader this country has seen threw down the gauntlet in Minto Park: there was to be a separate state for the Muslims of India, come what may. The Lahore Resolution remains Pakistan's opening act, despite the rather absurd theories it spawned later - that the resolution was a...