In the throes of national turbulence—whether natural disaster, political upheaval, economic collapse, or pandemic—Pakistan’s statecraft routinely turns to a distinct language: a grammar of crisis designed not merely to inform but to control, justify, and perform. This rhetorical shift is marked by an urgency that folds time, concentrates power, and suspends debate.
Key to crisis grammar is the mobilization of metaphors: the state “battles” inflation, “fights” the virus, “wages war” on terror. These martial constructions recast governance as warfare, transforming citizens into “soldiers,” “frontline workers,” or “sacrificing patriots.” In doing so, responsibility is collectivized, criticism delegitimized, and obedience aestheticized.
The grammar is also modal and moral. Phrases like “we must act,” “it is imperative,” and “there is no alternative” pervade government briefings, press conferences, and executive orders. These utterances invoke modality of necessity to frame emergency measures as inevitabilities rather than political choices, thus reducing space for democratic deliberation.
Equally potent is the deployment of passive voice—a syntactic hallmark of obfuscation. Decisions are made, policies are enacted, arrests are carried out—but by whom? The erasure of agency allows the state to operate behind a fog of technocratic anonymity while distancing itself from consequences.
Crises also give rise to euphemistic neologisms. Economic failures become “adjustments,” police crackdowns are termed “security operations,” and civil liberties are “temporarily suspended for the greater good.” This lexical sanitization reframes oppression as policy and mistakes as prudence.
The media plays an amplificatory role, often mirroring the state’s tone and metaphors. Emergency broadcasts adopt a lexicon of sacrifice, unity, and threat, curating national mood as much as reporting events. In such moments, journalism risks becoming stenography, its interrogative ethos lost in the performative haze of national emergency.
Importantly, crisis grammar has afterlives. Once normalized, its structures bleed into everyday governance—allowing extraordinary surveillance, prolonged detentions, and curtailed dissent to continue long after the initial crisis has passed. The state’s language becomes a Trojan horse for enduring authoritarianism.
Yet within this grammar lies resistance. Citizens reinterpret imposed metaphors, turning symbols of fear into memes of critique, or exposing contradictions in official rhetoric through counter-narratives and satire. Linguistic creativity becomes a tool of political resilience, challenging the very logic of emergency.
To reclaim democratic space, it is vital to interrogate the language of urgency—its metaphors, its verbs, its silences. Crises are real, but their framing is always rhetorical. Recognizing that fact is the first step toward accountability.
Pakistan does not lack crises—but it must learn to govern beyond them, without theatrics, and with a language that respects deliberation, transparency, and dignity.
