In Pakistan, the language of governance is rarely plain. Wrapped in velvet syllables, harsh decisions are softened through euphemism—a strategic deployment of indirect, sanitized terms that obscure the severity of political realities. Whether describing forced evictions, economic austerity, or authoritarian encroachments, political actors turn to a repertoire of soft words that veil, rather than reveal, state intentions.
Consider the phrase “rationalization of subsidies”—an anodyne expression that masks the withdrawal of crucial financial support for the poor. “Restructuring” becomes a euphemism for layoffs; “streamlining” justifies downsizing entire ministries. The semantic displacement here is deliberate: pain is disarticulated from policy.
Military operations offer another illustrative terrain. Euphemisms like “surgical strikes,” “neutralizing threats,” or “collateral damage” flatten human suffering into clinical abstraction. These terms serve a dual purpose: they preserve public tolerance while offering plausible deniability. War is thus reframed as precision.
Similarly, democratic backsliding is rendered palatable through bureaucratic lexicon. “Administrative realignments,” “special arrangements,” or “interim setups” often signal the erosion of constitutional governance. Such terms cloak exceptionalism in the illusion of order. Even censorship is diluted—disguised as “content moderation,” “regulatory compliance,” or “narrative management.”
The media amplifies this euphemistic discourse. News tickers report “encounters” instead of extrajudicial killings, or “miscreants apprehended” in lieu of profiling dissenters. The repetition of such sanitized vocabulary gradually rewires public cognition—numbing critique, depoliticizing suffering, and naturalizing injustice.
But euphemism is not only a state tool. Political parties deploy it in their own branding. The slogan of a “New Pakistan” evoked systemic overhaul, yet often functioned as a semantic mask for old patterns of patronage. Promises of “structural reforms” or “merit-based appointments” became fig leaves of transformation, retaining the underlying architecture of exclusion.
This linguistic strategy reflects an epistemic contradiction: power in Pakistan seeks visibility through narrative control, yet also invisibility in consequence. Euphemism becomes the rhetoric of plausible virtue, wherein the state appears responsible without being accountable.
Yet resistance exists. Satirical poets, independent journalists, and digital dissenters increasingly decode and subvert euphemistic jargon. Through parody, re-naming, and exposure, they re-inject the language of reality into the public sphere. Where the official lexicon obfuscates, counter-discourse reasserts the clarity of pain.
Euphemism is more than a matter of style—it is a linguistic architecture of power, shaping how citizens perceive policy, agency, and justice. As long as words remain velvet cloaks for iron decisions, democratic scrutiny will remain dulled. The path forward lies in linguistic clarity—a political ethics of saying what is, not merely what sounds bearable.
