Get the latest news and updates from Dawn
There is a silence smothering the landscape of Pakistan and it is a silence borne from fear.
The state grows more authoritarian each day, its mistrust for the voice of its people multiplying. The views of the masses, the printing presses, the online spaces, are met with charge sheets and FIRs. Silence has become the only guarantee of safety from the wrath of a system bent on gagging criticism. As the EU GSP+ assessment for Pakistan puts it: “limitations to the freedom of expression and access to information remain serious and persistent.”
It is tempting to label this problem as regime specific. After all, the coalition government demonstrates open contempt for dissent: the Law Minister warns of uttering anything against foreign policy, 27 YouTube channels of journalists are asked to be permanently blocked, and the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) is the latest innovation given free rein to label any opposition as anti-state. You are counted lucky if you get a sliver of due process rather than never being seen again.
But if justice is a system, so is authoritarianism. Constitutional democracy has always struggled to find its place in our history when the system of law we have built over seventy-eight years favours the autocrat. This system, not merely the people currently operating it, needs to be examined, dissected, dismantled. The current regime will one day fall, but for political speech to thrive the system must be broken.
