قافلے تعاقب میں، کچھ نئے سرابوں کے
جس قدر قَریں ہوں گے، دور اس قدر ہوں گے
— ریاض لغاری
The Paradox of Power in Pakistan: Manufacturing Stability, Eroding Legitimacy
Every state seeks stability as its ultimate purpose, yet the method of its pursuit defines its destiny. Pakistan, since its inception, has repeatedly sought stability through the mechanism of control rather than the more demanding art of consensus. This recurring institutional reflex, prioritizing managed politics over participatory legitimacy, has produced a tragic paradox: in seeking absolute security through centralization, the state continually erodes the very civic confidence and legitimacy that constitute the essence of durable power.
From 1970 to the present, Pakistan’s political history reads like a carefully rehearsed tragedy: each act begins with popular enthusiasm, passes through institutional co-option, and ends in systemic crisis.
Genesis of the Reflex: The Foundational Sacrifice
The general election of 1970 remains the defining moment when majority rule was abandoned in favor of a managed unity. The decision to override the democratic mandate of East Pakistan established the grammar of control that has since governed statecraft. It was here that the state’s foundational anxiety, fear of fragmentation, was transformed into a permanent doctrine of political engineering.
From Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to Nawaz Sharif to Imran Khan, each successive civilian leader emerged, at least partly, from institutional calibration. Each was cultivated to counter a rival, and each became dispensable once political autonomy exceeded its assigned boundaries. This was not a sequence of conspiracies but a reflection of an enduring structural habit: an inability to trust the self-correcting mechanisms of democratic pluralism. The state repeatedly substitutes genuine political evolution with administrative design, and mistakes manipulation for management.
The Structural Irony: Centralization as Fragility
Centralization, intended as a guarantee of coherence, has instead become the architecture of fragility. Power, political, fiscal, and administrative, remains concentrated in a few decision-making centers, most notably within Punjab’s demographic and economic dominance. The reluctance to form new administrative units such as a Saraiki province and the chronic delay of local body elections testify to a fear of genuine devolution.
Centralization suffocates the social contract between the citizen and the state. This concentration of authority multiplies political risk. By hoarding decision-making at the center, the system prevents renewal from below, ensuring that failure anywhere becomes failure everywhere. In contrast, functioning federations distribute both power and accountability. Devolution may disperse authority, but it also distributes resilience. Authority shared is authority strengthened. Devolution does not dilute sovereignty; it humanizes it.
The Elite Consensus and the Mirage of Peace
Pakistan’s ruling elite, an intersection of political dynasties, bureaucratic hierarchies, and corporate networks, has crafted a durable but exclusionary consensus. Its chief purpose is preservation, not transformation. Policy continuity, under this model, is not a virtue of stability but a mechanism of stasis. Economic concentration mirrors political centralization, ensuring that opportunity and representation remain tightly controlled.
The result is a hollowed social contract. For most citizens, the state appears as a distant, extractive entity, visible mainly through taxation, surveillance, and coercion. The public’s withdrawal into silence is interpreted by the elite as consent, when in fact it is exhaustion. Silence is not stability; it is fatigue mistaken for peace. This civic fatigue allows the managed order to endure until the next crisis renders it untenable again.
The Price of Silence: Securitizing Diversity
The alienation of peripheral identities, Saraiki, Pashtun, Baloch, and religious minorities, illustrates the high cost of mistaking inclusion for vulnerability. These are not crises of loyalty but of representation. The state’s instinct to securitize political dissent has transformed diversity from an asset into a perceived threat.
History has already delivered its warning. The Bangladesh precedent is not a historical grievance but a strategic warning: political suppression breeds strategic loss. When the ballot is denied legitimacy, the bullet becomes the language of the unheard. Large, plural societies such as India or Indonesia, despite their flaws, understood that cohesion demands devolution, not homogenization. Unity sustained by fear is, by nature, temporary. The nation that silences its peripheries soon finds itself speaking only to its echo.
The Intellectual Crisis: The Tyranny of Caution
Control, once institutionalized, seeps into the national psyche. In Pakistan’s universities, think tanks, and newsrooms, inquiry is increasingly governed by prudence. When fear becomes a professional instinct, societies cease to think before they cease to exist. The state’s quest for controlled narratives may secure temporary calm, but it simultaneously disables its own capacity for self-correction.
A mature polity tolerates disagreement as the price of vitality. A self-respecting polity must welcome dissent as the mirror of its conscience. Suppressing questions may produce short-term calm, but it ultimately deprives governance of self-awareness. The decay of thought precedes the decay of states. Repression breeds rumor; censorship breeds conspiracy; silence breeds decay. In the absence of intellectual contestation, governance loses its diagnostic instrument, the ability to hear itself think.
The Collectivist Vacuum
A society bound by control loses its sense of collective destiny. The idea of the common good, that citizens, despite differences, share a moral stake in one another’s welfare, has withered under the weight of cynicism. The logic of individual survival has replaced the ethic of collective responsibility.
No republic endures when citizens retreat into private safety and cease to care for the condition of others. The suffering of one group, region, or class, if ignored, soon corrodes the moral foundation of all. The measure of a society’s health lies not in the prosperity of its elites but in the dignity of its least powerful members.
A stable state must cultivate civic virtue: the belief that freedom and responsibility are inseparable, and that silence in the face of injustice is complicity, not prudence.
Resolving the Paradox: Toward a Strategy of Confidence
The paradox of power can be resolved only through confidence, not coercion. Stability earned through legitimacy endures longer than stability imposed through fear. The state must evolve from the politics of control to the politics of trust.
Four imperatives define this transition:
1. Revive Local Government: Empower municipalities and union councils as genuine incubators of participation. Democracy without local roots is a tree without soil. Local body elections must be held continuously, not as a bureaucratic ritual, but as a constitutional rhythm, so that leadership may emerge organically from the grassroots rather than being engineered from above.
2. Create Saraikistan: The creation of a Saraiki province is not an act of fragmentation but of federation. It would restore equilibrium among the constituent units, dilute Punjab’s disproportionate dominance, and strengthen the federation by aligning representation with both geography and identity. National cohesion grows when every region feels proportionately empowered, not permanently overshadowed.
3. Institutionalize Fiscal Federalism: Assign both resources and responsibility to provinces, transforming autonomy from rhetoric into reality. Power without responsibility breeds inefficiency; responsibility without resources breeds resentment.
4. Reinvest in Civic and Intellectual Spaces: Rebuild universities, media, and civil society as mirrors of national reflection rather than instruments of narrative control. A confident state invites critique; self-correction is the highest expression of strength.
True people’s power must return to its rightful owners, the people. Governance must spring from the governed, not descend upon them.
These reforms are evolutionary, not revolutionary. These are not acts of rebellion but of restoration. They do not dismantle the state; they restore its moral coherence; they make it think. Pakistan’s endurance will not come from sudden upheaval but from the patient construction of institutional trust.
The Test of Legitimacy
Power that rests on fear decays; power that rests on belief endures. Authority survives only when it aligns with conscience. Pakistan’s challenge is not to preserve control but to recover conviction, to remember that governance is a covenant, not a command.
When a state begins to fear the voices of its own citizens, it confuses silence with stability. History spares few nations that prefer obedience over participation. Strength, in its truest form, lies not in ruling without question, but in enduring the questions that truth demands.
Postscript: Why Care for Others’ Wounds
It is often asked: if one has no personal grievance, why speak of others’ pain? The answer is as old as the idea of freedom itself, because freedom is indivisible. Injustice tolerated in one corner soon shadows all others.
The social contract is not a private pact; it is a shared promise that the dignity of one protects the dignity of all. To stay silent in the face of another’s suffering is to consent, quietly, to one’s own future silencing. Citizenship is not measured by privilege, but by empathy, the courage to defend the rights of others even when one’s own remain intact.
Let us, then, raise our voices, not in anger, but in stewardship, to renew the fragile covenant between the state and its citizens. Let us reclaim ownership of a country too long managed, too rarely trusted.
Let us own Pakistan. Pakistan Paindabad.
