by AASIM SAJJAD AKHTAR
In the aftermath of the 27th Constitutional Amendment, there has been much conjecture about the increasingly dystopian direction of Pakistan’s militarised polity. But to date there is no street mobilisation to reflect this ostensibly popular sentiment. At the risk of oversimplification, I submit that there are two related explanations for what is happening — or not — in Pakistani society and politics today: coercion and consent.
The coercion part of the story is well-known, but articulated in fragmentary ways. The party which clearly won the popular mandate in the February 2024 general election with its leader in jail was forcibly prevented from forming the government. It has continued to face waves of repression ever since.
But there are also other political and social forces contending with the coercive apparatus of the state. Take Ali Wazir, farcically jailed for more than two years, represents many residents of the Pakhtun tribal districts who have been resisting militarisation of their homelands for decades. The current hybrid regime has recently started naming and treating the Afghan Taliban as an adversary, but Ali Wazir and others who have warned of the blowback of the state’s Afghan policy for decades remain in jail.
Then there is Mahrang Baloch, another voice from a peripheral region who has also been in jail for almost a year. She is pilloried as being a ‘soft recruiter’ for Baloch militants, but as is the case with political dissidents in this country, no concrete evidence has been presented to back up the allegation. Despite representing a wide cross-section of Baloch society, she is being met only with colonial statecraft.
Consent can mean choosing silence for fear of coercion.
There are many nameless others who face the big stick. Residents of katchi abadis and street vendors in metropolitan Pakistan routinely suffer eviction from their homes and livelihoods in the face of land grabs. Fishing communities, landless farmers and mountain dwellers face even more land, mineral, water and forest grabs in the peripheries. Blue- and white-collar workers who dare organise themselves in trade unions are fired and criminalised. Intellectuals who do not toe the line are silenced.
Seen thus, coercion is widespread. But there is little that binds the various social and political forces experiencing it together. Indeed, the ideological orientations of most dissenting groups are significantly opposed — the PTI, for instance, practised repression on leftists, worker-peasant formations and ethnic-nationalists when it was infamously on the ‘same page’ as the establishment.
This brings me to the consent part of the story. Systems of domination survive, and in fact, thrive, when they are able to ensure social control over enough of the population so that the ruling class can insulate itself from mass discontent. In Pakistan’s case, this equates to a critical mass of society accepting or even supporting coercion against dissenters in the name of the ‘greater national interest’.
But this does not mean that consenters are beneficiaries of the political and economic order. Consent can mean choosing silence for fear of coercion. It can also be explained by ideological influence, especially amongst educated segments of society — we saw many otherwise critically minded people fall in line behind the establishment after the military exchange with India in May.
Ultimately, however, consent cannot persist on the basis of ideology alone. Social control requires a material basis. When increasingly large numbers of ordinary people, who may not otherwise associate themselves with dissenters, fall into in-tense social and economic hardship, the system of domination rings hollow. Mass discontent bubbles below the surface in Pakistan today, even if it has not yet taken the form of organised politics except in some cases like the recent movement in AJK.
The 27th Amendment has not triggered public protest because there is no obvious link between its passage and the everyday hardships faced by working people. The ideology that will ultimately challenge and transcend the political and economic order will centre the material needs of working masses while resisting increasing militarisation of state and society.
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