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Democracy depends not only on elections, but also on public trust in the institutions that enforce the rules.
From Islamabad to Delhi to Kathmandu, the struggle is not only over who wins power, but who is trusted to enforce the rules.
By The Wider Lens Desk
Politics & Policy | South Asia
In early October 2026, two major South Asian countries found themselves arguing over a similar question in different circumstances: who gets to decide where the limits of political competition lie?
In Pakistan, the federal government imposed emergency measures and governor’s rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a province governed by the party of jailed former prime minister Imran Khan. The government cited a deteriorating security situation and the provincial administration’s alleged failure to address terrorism. Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) rejected the move, describing it as a political attack on an elected provincial government.
In India, opposition parties challenged the Election Commission over the revision of electoral rolls, alleging that the process threatened the integrity of elections. The Commission has defended its procedures, while legal questions surrounding the process have reached the Supreme Court.
These disputes are not identical. Pakistan’s emergency measures raise questions about federal power, provincial autonomy and security. India’s controversy concerns electoral administration and whether the rules governing voter registration are being applied fairly. But both bring a larger democratic question into focus: what happens when citizens or political parties stop trusting the institutions that are supposed to administer the rules of political competition?
This is the referee problem.
Democracy depends on more than holding elections. It also depends on whether election commissions, courts, police forces and other public institutions can exercise their authority fairly, transparently and within the law. When those institutions are widely perceived as favouring one side, even a lawful decision can struggle to command public confidence.
That perception does not automatically prove misconduct. An opposition party can lose a fair contest and still accuse the referee of bias. A government can face genuine security threats and still exercise its powers disproportionately. The difficult task is to distinguish political allegations from evidence—and lawful authority from the abuse of it.
Across South Asia, that distinction is becoming increasingly important.
What Makes a Referee Trustworthy?
A functioning democracy requires institutions that can do more than announce a result. They must be able to explain how they reached it, demonstrate that established procedures were followed, and allow meaningful challenges when those procedures are disputed.
Election commissions decide how voters are registered and how votes are counted. Courts interpret the law and determine whether public authorities have acted within their powers. Police enforce public-order rules, including restrictions on demonstrations. Constitutional arrangements determine how power is distributed between national and regional governments.
These institutions do not need to satisfy every political participant. They do, however, need rules that can be examined and decisions that can be challenged through credible procedures.
A government can win an election lawfully and still lose the trust of citizens who believe the process was unfair. The reverse is also possible: an institution may follow the law and still face accusations from a losing party unwilling to accept the result.
The answer cannot be to treat every accusation as proof. Nor can it be to dismiss every complaint as political manoeuvring.
The more useful test is whether claims can be checked against published rules, court decisions, credible election observation and the institution’s own record of conduct.
This is where the stakes of losing become important. If political actors believe that losing office will expose them to selective prosecution, exclusion or the loss of basic protections, they have stronger incentives to treat defeat as a threat to survival. If they believe that the rules will remain fair after a change of government, accepting defeat becomes easier.
Political scientists sometimes describe this as a zero-sum trap: a system in which one side’s victory is seen as the other side’s permanent defeat. It is a useful hypothesis, not a universal explanation. The cases across South Asia show why it deserves examination.
Pakistan: A Referee Contested From Two Sides
Pakistan’s institutional challenge has two overlapping dimensions. The first is the familiar conflict between an elected government and its opposition. The second is the long-running question of how much influence the military and other unelected centres of power exercise over civilian political life.
The distinction matters because not every dispute involving the government is evidence of military intervention, and not every security decision is necessarily politically motivated. But the broader balance of power cannot be understood by looking only at the seats won by political parties.
In November 2025, parliament passed Pakistan’s 27th Constitutional Amendment. The changes restructured aspects of the judicial and military command systems. The government defended the amendment as an institutional and administrative reform; critics argued that it concentrated power and weakened judicial independence. Chatham House scholar Farzana Shaikh described it as a move closer to authoritarian rule.
That is an expert assessment, not a judicial finding. Yet the disagreement itself raises an important question: how can citizens assess institutional independence when the rules governing institutions are being changed by the very political actors whose decisions those institutions may later be asked to review?
The PTI dispute illustrates the problem from another direction.
Imran Khan has been imprisoned since August 2023, and his party has repeatedly described the legal cases against him as politically motivated. Those claims should be assessed case by case rather than accepted or dismissed as a single political narrative. The legal status of individual convictions, appeals and court orders matters.
In early October 2026, PTI supporters sought to organise a march towards Islamabad amid restrictions on occupying public roads. The government cited public-order requirements and a court order. A week later, the federal government imposed emergency measures and governor’s rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, arguing that the provincial administration had failed to respond adequately to terrorism.
PTI rejected the government’s justification and said the action was an attempt to remove an elected provincial administration.
The legal details matter. The emergency proclamation under Article 232 and governor’s rule under Article 234 are distinct constitutional measures with separate requirements and procedures. The emergency must go through the prescribed parliamentary approval process; governor’s rule has its own constitutional limits. The government’s stated security rationale, the opposition’s objections and any subsequent judicial review must therefore be considered separately.
The central question is not whether security threats exist. Pakistan faces a real militant threat, particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. The question is whether extraordinary constitutional powers are justified by the evidence, used proportionately and subject to effective oversight.
That is the difference between examining a government’s justification and simply accepting it.
The referee problem also extends beyond Islamabad and party politics. Pakistan’s provinces have long raised concerns about resources, representation, language and the distribution of authority between the federation and the regions.
In May 2026, Amnesty International documented the case of Dad Shah, a Baloch man whose family said he was taken from his Karachi home by officials believed to belong to the Counter Terrorism Department. Amnesty reported that police registered the family’s complaint against unidentified persons. The case does not establish the scale of enforced disappearances across the country, nor does it by itself prove who was responsible. It does, however, illustrate the difficulty a family faces when it cannot establish who has taken a relative or obtain a meaningful answer from the authorities.
Freedom House rates Pakistan “Partly Free” in its 2026 assessment, citing the military’s influence over political life, weaknesses in accountability and restrictions affecting political and civil liberties. Such ratings are expert assessments based on defined criteria, not a substitute for examining individual cases. The security threat posed by militant groups is also real and cannot be ignored.
Taken together, these issues reveal why the Pakistani debate cannot be reduced to a simple contest between a government and an opposition. It concerns the relationship between elected authority, unelected power, public security, provincial autonomy and the institutions meant to hold all of them accountable.
India: A Competitive System With a Referee Under Challenge
India should not be treated as a mirror image of Pakistan. It has a different constitutional structure, a different balance between civilian and military institutions, and a long history of competitive elections in which governing parties can lose power.
The 2024 general election demonstrated that competition still matters. The Bharatiya Janata Party won 240 of the 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, falling short of an outright majority. It remained in government with the support of its allies, while the opposition INDIA bloc won 232 seats.
That result is important. It shows that electoral competition can constrain a governing party. It does not, by itself, settle every question about the fairness of electoral administration or the broader condition of democratic institutions.
The current dispute concerns the revision of electoral rolls and the role of the Election Commission of India. Opposition parties have accused the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, of favouring the ruling party and have challenged aspects of the revision process. The Commission has defended its procedures. The Supreme Court has considered questions relating to the process, but the existence of a legal challenge should not be confused with a final finding that the Commission acted unlawfully.
An additional concern has been raised by parties within the ruling alliance. In September 2026, three allies reportedly sought clarification from the Commission amid questions about its decision-making. Their intervention does not prove the opposition’s allegations, but it shows that concerns about institutional credibility are not necessarily confined to the government’s political opponents.
A claim that approximately 130 million voters were removed from the rolls has also circulated in connection with legal challenges. That figure should be attributed to the petition or source making the claim unless it is independently confirmed against official data. A change in draft rolls, a verified deletion, an administrative correction and an unlawful exclusion are not interchangeable categories.
Broader democracy assessments offer another perspective, although they use different methods. Freedom House rated India “Partly Free” at 62 out of 100 in its 2026 assessment. The V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report 2026 classifies India as an electoral autocracy in its regime classification. These are institutional assessments based on their respective methodologies. They should be presented as such, rather than as court findings or proof of any specific allegation about voter registration.
The distinction between India and Pakistan remains central to the argument. In India, the question is whether a large elected government and the institutions administering elections can maintain public confidence amid disputes over electoral rules, civil liberties and the treatment of critics. In Pakistan, the question also includes the influence of unelected institutions and the constitutional relationship between the federation and elected provincial governments.
The two cases share a question about trust, but they do not provide evidence for precisely the same diagnosis.
Three Political Exits, Three Different Stories
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal experienced major political upheavals between 2022 and 2025. They are often grouped under broad labels such as “unrest” or “coups”. That obscures important differences in how each crisis unfolded and how political authority subsequently changed hands.
Sri Lanka: A Constitutional Succession After Economic Collapse
In 2022, severe shortages, economic hardship and public anger drove mass protests in Sri Lanka. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country and resigned. Parliament then elected Ranil Wickremesinghe as president under the constitutional process.
Later elections brought Anura Kumara Dissanayake and the National People’s Power coalition to office. The transition demonstrated that a mass movement can force a political change while the formal constitutional system still determines who succeeds the departing leader.
But removing a government does not automatically resolve the deeper institutional problems that produced public dissatisfaction. Sri Lanka’s subsequent reform record has been contested, with questions remaining about constitutional change, accountability and the treatment of Tamil families and rights activists.
The lesson is not that constitutional succession failed. It is that a change of leadership and a reform of institutions are two different achievements.
Bangladesh: A Mass Movement and the Withdrawal of Military Support
Bangladesh’s 2024 uprising began with student-led protests over public-sector job quotas. The movement expanded amid a deadly crackdown and broader opposition to Sheikh Hasina’s government. Hasina left the country in August 2024.
The military’s role requires particular care. Reuters reported that, on the eve of Hasina’s departure, the army chief and senior officers decided that troops would not open fire on civilians to enforce a curfew. The reporting was based on interviews with serving officers and other people familiar with the discussions. It helps explain why the government lost crucial military backing at a decisive moment.
That evidence does not establish that the military led the protest movement or that every aspect of the transition was a military coup. It supports a narrower conclusion: the army’s refusal to enforce the final curfew by firing on civilians was an important factor in the collapse of Hasina’s government.
Bangladesh’s subsequent political transition has also raised questions about accountability and inclusion. In November 2025, Hasina was sentenced to death in absentia by a tribunal over crimes against humanity. She rejected the proceedings as politically motivated, while the tribunal and interim authorities maintained that she was answerable for the crackdown.
A legal verdict, the defendant’s rejection of it and the public’s confidence in the process are separate matters. A society emerging from mass violence must be able to pursue accountability while ensuring that proceedings are credible, evidence-based and subject to appropriate legal standards.
Bangladesh’s 2026 election produced a decisive result, but the Awami League was barred from participating. An election can be competently administered and still raise questions about the exclusion of a major political competitor. Those issues should be examined together rather than allowing one to erase the other.
Nepal: Protest, State Violence and a New Electoral Mandate
Nepal’s 2025 uprising followed a social-media ban and wider anger about corruption and political privilege. The protests turned deadly. Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli resigned, and the country moved towards a new election.
In March 2026, the Rastriya Swatantra Party won 182 of the 275 seats in the House of Representatives. The election gave the party a substantial mandate after a crisis that had exposed deep public frustration with the political establishment.
But questions about the state’s response to the protests remain. Reports put the death toll at 77, with more than 2,000 people injured. A commission examined the crackdown, but its report had not been made public in the reporting available for this article.
An election can establish who has the mandate to govern next. It cannot, by itself, determine whether excessive force was used against protesters or whether officials responsible for unlawful conduct will be held accountable.
These three cases are not the same, and none should be casually labelled a coup. Yet each returns to a related question: when formal political channels fail to absorb public grievances, what happens next—and who is held responsible for the consequences?
The Cost of Coercion—and the Identity Trap
When political conflict moves from institutions into the streets, the consequences can be severe. Nepal’s protest deaths and injuries, Bangladesh’s deadly crackdown and the use of restrictions around political demonstrations in Pakistan show different forms of confrontation between public authority and dissent.
The cases do not establish a single regional pattern of violence. Nor do they prove, without further evidence, how much coercion changes public trust over the long term. That would require reliable surveys and other systematic research. But they demonstrate why the treatment of protest is a central test of democratic accountability.
A government has a legitimate responsibility to protect public safety. Demonstrations can disrupt daily life, damage property or put police and bystanders at risk. Courts may impose lawful restrictions on particular forms of protest. None of that removes the obligation to use force lawfully, proportionately and with accountability.
The crucial question is whether the rules are applied consistently—and whether those who enforce them can be investigated when they cross the line.
Identity politics adds another layer of pressure. Across South Asia, political parties mobilise voters around religion, language, ethnicity, region and national belonging. Such appeals are not automatically illegitimate. Identity can be a meaningful expression of community, history and political representation.
The danger arises when political rhetoric turns opponents into enemies of the nation, the faith or the community. In that environment, impartial enforcement can itself be portrayed as betrayal. Leaders may find it easier to defend their own side than to accept the same rules for rivals.
The evidence differs by country. Freedom House has reported concerns about anti-Muslim hate speech and communal violence in India, militant attacks against minorities in Pakistan, and continuing harassment affecting Tamil families and rights activists in Sri Lanka. These are different phenomena with different histories and causes. They should not be collapsed into a single explanation.
One hypothesis is that identity-based mobilisation can weaken accountability when political loyalty becomes more important than the performance of public institutions. If voters see the opposing camp as an existential threat, they may be more willing to overlook failures by their own leaders.
That mechanism deserves investigation. It should not be treated as a proven explanation for every political decision in the region.
The Strongest Arguments Against the Referee Problem
The referee argument is useful only if it can survive serious objections.
First, security threats are real. Pakistan’s government says its emergency measures respond to a failure to confront terrorism in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Militants have carried out deadly attacks, and a government cannot simply ignore them. The relevant questions are whether the constitutional conditions for emergency powers were met, whether the response was proportionate and whether meaningful oversight remains available.
Second, elected majorities matter. Pakistan’s 27th Amendment passed through parliament with the required majority. India’s governing coalition has won elections and retains a democratic mandate. A majority’s exercise of lawful authority is not inherently an abuse. The test is whether it respects constitutional limits and the rights of those who did not vote for it.
Third, opposition parties also have responsibilities. A political movement cannot claim unlimited freedom to occupy roads or disregard court orders. Public order and the rights of ordinary citizens matter too. The existence of restrictions does not automatically make them illegitimate; their legal basis, necessity and application must be examined.
Fourth, referees can work. India’s Supreme Court has considered challenges relating to electoral administration. Election officials may face scrutiny from members of their own institutions. Bangladesh and Nepal have held elections after upheaval. These are meaningful institutional developments, even when wider questions remain unresolved.
Finally, accusations of bias can be strategic. Any party that loses may call the referee unfair. This is why allegations should be tested against published procedures, independent observations, court outcomes and the conduct of the institution itself.
The argument, then, is not that every government manipulates every institution, or that every opposition complaint is justified. It is that democratic confidence depends on whether institutions can demonstrate their fairness when the stakes are high.
Five Reforms That Could Strengthen Public Confidence
If the problem is the referee, the response should focus on making institutions more transparent, accountable and capable of acting independently of those who hold power.
1. Make election administration more transparent. Election commissions should publish clear procedures, explain major decisions and disclose the legal basis for significant changes to voter-registration processes. Where the law permits, dissenting views within commissions should be recorded. Courts must be able to review whether the process complies with the law.
2. Protect judicial independence while preserving democratic accountability. Judicial appointments should follow transparent procedures, with safeguards against any one political actor controlling the process. In Pakistan, debates over the new Federal Constitutional Court and the wider judicial structure make this particularly important. Reform should be assessed against the actual constitutional text, not merely the claims of supporters or critics.
3. Establish clear rules for protest and public-order restrictions. Governments should explain restrictions on demonstrations, specify their legal basis and provide accessible routes for urgent judicial review. Road closures and other restrictions should be proportionate, time-limited where appropriate and applied consistently to political groups across the spectrum.
4. Strengthen accountability for policing and enforced disappearance. Allegations of unlawful detention must be investigated independently. Families should be able to discover where a detained person is held and obtain timely legal remedies. Pakistan’s documented cases of alleged enforced disappearance underline the need for effective legal protections, independent investigation and enforceable duties on public authorities.
5. Create credible forums for regional grievances. Disputes over revenue, representation, language and provincial autonomy should be addressed through standing, rules-based institutions rather than left to escalate into recurring political crises. Federal systems work best when regional governments have meaningful constitutional roles and transparent ways to resolve disputes with the centre.
None of these reforms requires assuming that every official acts in bad faith. A government that believes its decisions are lawful should benefit from institutions capable of demonstrating that fact. Transparent procedures can make legitimate decisions more credible and make abuses easier to identify.
The Citizen at the End of the Chain
Political disputes are often described as battles between leaders, parties and institutions. Their consequences, however, reach ordinary people.
For a family in Karachi, the referee may be the police station that records a complaint and the legal system expected to investigate it. For a voter in India, it may be the process that determines whether a name appears on the electoral roll—and the court that can examine whether the process followed the law. For a young Nepali, it may be the state’s response to a demonstration, followed by an election held after the government falls.
These experiences are different. They do not establish that all South Asian countries face the same democratic crisis or that every institution has lost public trust. They do show why the credibility of institutions matters beyond the immediate contest for office.
South Asia does not lack elections. Bangladesh and Nepal have held elections after major upheavals, and India’s competitive political system has demonstrated that governing parties can lose ground. Pakistan’s political disputes, meanwhile, show how questions of federal authority, security and civilian power can become inseparable from the legitimacy of the institutions that administer them.
The challenge is not simply to ensure that elections happen. It is to make the rules understandable, the institutions answerable and the process open to meaningful scrutiny.
Dissent is not, by itself, an obstacle to governing. It can be a warning that citizens no longer trust the way decisions are being made. The appropriate response is neither to assume that every protester is right nor to treat every critic as an enemy. It is to make the evidence available, enforce the law consistently and allow institutions to be challenged without fear.
Countries will never eliminate political disagreement. They can, however, build systems in which disagreement does not have to end at a barricade, in a courtroom without public confidence, or in a street filled with violence.
The test of democracy is not whether everyone accepts every outcome. It is whether citizens can reasonably trust the rules—and whether those who enforce them are accountable when that trust is broken.
Sources and Further Reading
Time-sensitive developments in this article are current to 12 October 2026. Political allegations are attributed to the parties making them; institutional ratings reflect the methodologies of the organisations cited.
Al Jazeera — What do emergency and governor rule in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa mean?
Al Jazeera — Pakistan imposes emergency rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
Al Jazeera — India’s BJP loses its parliamentary majority in the 2024 election
The Week — Opposition march over the Election Commission and voter-roll revision
Business Standard — NDA allies seek clarification amid the voter-roll controversy
Reuters — Bangladesh army refused to suppress protest, sealing Hasina’s fate
Khaosod English — Bangladesh tribunal sentences Sheikh Hasina, November 2025
International Crisis Group analysis, published by Daily FT — Sri Lanka’s political reset
The Wider Lens publishes analysis that distinguishes documented events, attributed political claims and the author’s interpretation. Institutional ratings and disputed allegations should be read in the context of the sources and methods cited above.
''Illustration generated with AI''
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