Scripts of Control: How Political Language Constructs Power in Pakistan
In Pakistan’s political discourse, the question of agency—who is responsible, who acts, and who is held accountable—is rarely addressed with grammatical transparency, and more often obscured through a carefully curated blend of metaphor, abstraction, and passive constructions that shield power and redirect blame, a phenomenon Teun van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach explains as the ideological encoding of discourse through the interplay between mental models and social dominance.
When political actors describe national events in phrases like “the economy was derailed,” “conspiracies were hatched,” or “the establishment has taken notice,” they are deploying more than rhetorical shorthand—they are constructing what van Dijk terms context models: shared representations that help listeners mentally organize social knowledge in a way that subtly reinforces elite narratives while minimizing transparency about actual agents or mechanisms.
Passive voice plays a crucial syntactic role in this ideological concealment, where agency is diffused or erased entirely—statements such as “violence broke out,” “media was manipulated,” or “funding was withdrawn” remove actors from the scene, allowing powerful institutions to distance themselves from their own interventions while shifting public scrutiny toward external abstractions or conveniently vague threats like “foreign hands” or “external elements.”
This discursive maneuvering is not confined to political speech alone but is deeply embedded in media commentary and talk show formats, where certain terms—such as “corrupt mafias,” “imported agenda,” and “anti-state narratives”—are invoked with such frequency that they cease to invite interrogation and instead activate pre-loaded mental scripts, turning complex realities into binary oppositions that facilitate emotional reaction while disabling critical thought.
Van Dijk’s socio-cognitive model is particularly useful in explaining how political communication in Pakistan operates on the principle of ideological schemata, where language encodes a worldview in which certain actors (the military, judiciary, religious figures) are framed as protectors of national interest, while others (opposition parties, human rights advocates, foreign critics) are cast as destabilizers, creating a linguistic architecture that privileges conformity and delegitimizes dissent.
This is evident in how televised debates frequently assign moral weight to syntactic structures—for example, statements like “they sold the nation’s sovereignty” or “they looted public wealth” personalize failure and criminalize disagreement, while phrases such as “national integrity must be preserved” or “the system needs stability” depersonalize institutional excesses and recast power as paternal guidance.
What results is an asymmetric distribution of agency, where blame is concentrated on individuals while institutional power is naturalized and rarely interrogated, and where victories are narrated in active voice (“we brought peace,” “we restored pride”), while failures are narrated in passive or abstract terms, ensuring that the ideological burden of success and failure is unequally distributed.
Furthermore, code-switching between English and Urdu is tactically employed by political elites, with English used to communicate legal or technocratic legitimacy in policy statements or international interviews, and Urdu used for emotive resonance during rallies or televised appeals, a bilingual framing strategy that allows actors to manipulate register and audience simultaneously while controlling the semantic tone of their messaging.
This manipulation of linguistic form is not incidental; it is the core of how Pakistan’s political class stages itself, drawing on deeply entrenched social scripts and activating mental associations that align language with legitimacy and silence with consent, a phenomenon observable across speeches from civil-military leadership, parliamentary sessions, and state-aligned media programming.
As van Dijk repeatedly emphasizes, language does not merely reflect social reality—it constructs it, and the more opaque the grammatical structures and vaguer the agency, the easier it becomes for dominant groups to reframe events, shift responsibility, and sustain ideological narratives without ever appearing to speak dishonestly.
To undo this discursive architecture, Pakistan’s political literacy must evolve to include linguistic literacy—citizens, journalists, and educators alike must learn to ask not just what is being said, but how it is said, by whom, and for what purpose, because it is within these syntactic choices and semantic silences that power hides, unchallenged.
