South Korea has been thrown into political turmoil by its Parliament's decision to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol because of his decision to impose martial law on one of Asia's most vibrant democracies. His fate is now in the hands of the Constitutional Court, which has up to six months to decide whether to remove or to reinstate him.

No matter how the court verdict goes, Yoon's parliamentary impeachment makes the crucial point that in no democratic country can even the most powerful leader - be he or she the president or the prime minister - relegate to himself or herself powers that run contrary to the wishes of the people as expressed through their elected representatives. Certainly, those representatives can squabble among themselves - because that is what they are elected to do - and they can also fail to reflect their constituents' wishes honestly and accurately. In that case, the next election would decide the fate of those law-makers.

But in no case can a country's executive head arrogate to himself or herself an autocratic power to act in a way that negates the separation of powers between the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary or the separation of powers within Parliament itself, both between the government and the opposition and between ministers and other parliamentarians of the ruling party.

I am not saying that Yoon was guilty of these faults: It is up to the Constitutional Court to decide whether his parliamentary impeachment stands or falls. All that I am saying is that in a mixed presidential-parliamentary system such as South Korea's, the president cannot forget that parliament exists, and parliament exists to remind him or her that it indeed exists. Constitutional authority is the combination of power and legitimacy.

Had Yoon followed the Bangladesh Revolution of July more closely, and had he seen what happens to those who misjudge the mood of the people, he might have been deterred from taking the extreme step of declaring martial law to preserve the presidency, that is, himself, from opposition forces that he insinuated were arrayed with external forces hostile to South Korea - a charge that is improbable to the point of being astonishing. Why would the opposition align itself with North Korea, a country whose despotic political system, if imported into South Korea, would destroy the very democracy that has made it possible for the South Korean opposition to be in parliament after that country's very nasty experience of martial law in previous decades? Why would a parliament opposed to the imposition of martial law in South Korea draw sustenance from the politics of North Korea, a system that is effectively run through martial law by other characteristics? Pray, why? The South Korean people saw through the presidential subterfuge and supported parliamentarians as they blocked Yoon's laughable formula of preserving democracy through martial law.

Bangladesh is rather different. The Bangladesh military's studied refusal to mount a coup, which would have taken the country back to its martial law days, made all the difference in upholding the democratic rights of the Bangladeshi people.

That said, South Korean politics, as they are playing out, do hold lessons for Bangladesh. The previous government in Dhaka ruled for 15 manipulative years through a combination of two factors. The first was its ability to make the Jatiya Sansad "Awami League-friendly", so to say, by deterring the opposition, particularly the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), from contesting elections through large-scale intimidatory legal action undertaken against the BNP's top-tier leadership. The second factor was the BNP's decision to boycott parliamentary polls, a choice driven by its own inability to install, nurture and then field second-tier and third-tier leaders who could have run for election in the absence of the first-tier leadership. How many opposition leaders conceivably could have come under the government's deterrent legal net?

As it turns out, the Awami League has fallen from power, the BNP and its potential allies have a fair chance of going for it, and much is at stake for Bangladesh's economy and society in the lead-up to the next election. Now, Bangladeshis can draw a democratic leaf out of the South Korean book. Yoon knew that he had made a great mistake when parliamentarians physically challenged the soldiers guarding parliament to enter it and resist the declaration of martial law. He backed down. At that moment, South Koreans knew that they had won. They had proved that authority means only that power which is installed by legitimacy. No authority can last, at least not very long, without legitimacy. And when authority frays, power, that fickle companion, parts its coquettish ways with the holder of power. Power goes the other way, till that way, as well, proves to be a dead end. Then, power, the eternal beloved, looks for a new partner. The old partner falls through the trapdoor of history.

My point is that those in power, no matter what they call themselves or what others call them, have to remember that they are servants and not masters of the people. It is difficult to do so when the powerful are surrounded by loyalists, yes-sayers, time-servers, charlatans and the like. However, at the end of every political saga, history punishes the most powerful the most brutally because it was they who had enabled the lower political classes to survive and thrive.

The current South Korean political saga will end one day. A new one will begin. The extant Bangladesh saga, too, will end, and it will be succeeded by the ways of politics yet unknown. Meanwhile, the anonymous bulk of people who go by the name of voters need to remember that they are the true masters of their place on earth, whether it is Bangladesh or South Korea or anywhere else.

The moment that voters forget that their votes place mortals in power, the powerful will begin to feel immortal and to treat citizens as slaves whose votes are nothing but a form of homage.

That is a universal truth. Beware.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow of the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com