A hard state?

THESE days we are repeatedly told that the Pakistani state has been soft on anarchy for far too long. This is the considered and stated position of many state officials as well as of many supporters of those in power. Common people may hold any number of positions that one finds distasteful but the same sentiments being voiced by those in power invite both scrutiny and concern. For the last three years, there has been much chatter about turning Pakistan into a ‘hard state’. No one has given an adequate definition of what this entails, but based on disparate statements and impulses, we can gather this has something to do with protecting the rights of the state and the decision-makers who staff it. These rights are being obtained via a frequently violent trade-off with the rights of the people of Pakistan. The projected consequence of such a trade-off is that protest of all shades becomes a privilege. Demands can only be voiced with due approval through vetted content and NOCs. Speech is to be regulated via defamation, criminalisation laws, and an apparently pliant judiciary till it takes on an acceptable hue, or preferably till it becomes an echo of the state’s. These impulses are neither unique to the Pakistani state nor are they exceptional to this current moment. Trysts with authoritarianism dot the country’s past and arguably lie at the roots of its state structure. British viceregal authority bequeathed an overdeveloped administrative apparatus, which has since then done exceedingly well to reproduce itself and the privileges of those who staff it. When given a chance, politicians of nearly all stripes — centralists, federalists, provincial magnates, or constituency-level bigwigs — have been more than happy to fortify this arrangement for their own and their clients’ benefits. And yet there is a question that should gnaw at anyone who thinks about the trade-off at the table. What is all of this for? If people are being asked to voluntarily or otherwise forfeit their constitutional or social rights, it only makes sense to interrogate what end goal this forfeiture is designed to serve. Beyond the protection of geographic boundaries, what other objectives do limits on individual liberty serve? Forfeiture of individual liberty is commanded by all states in service of some basic objectives. Usually the foremost of these objectives is territorial sanctity: no state tolerates geographic loss and will usually strip people of their rights, property and lives to prevent it. The Pakistani state is fairly typical in this manner. It deals with separatism/secessionism the way many other post-colonial states do, and with variable degrees of success. The bigger question on that front then is whether its strategy for preventing the rise or growth of this factor is useful at all. Beyond the protection of geographic boundaries, what other objectives do limits on individual liberty serve? Other states offer different types of answers. The case of China — paradigmatic for the 21st century — has a very simple one. It places limits on various forms of individual rights for the protection and promotion of the CCP’s endeavours. The main endeavour, since the 1970s at least, has been the growth and collective prosperity of the Chinese people via the unleashing of productive forces (labour and capital), both by the state and by private enterprise. The state under one-party rule decides the degree of this unleashing, its objectives, and ultimately the distribution of its fruits. In the previous century, socialist states decided that the true fulfilment of human life lay in getting rid of privatised forms of exploitation. And so a suspension of individual liberty was done in service of collective ownership of resources, commandeered by the state. Social democratic states in Western Europe decided to infringe on the rights of capital owners over their profit in order to redistribute benefits to the working class via taxation. The late-20th-century Asian Tigers took away social rights of the working poor to generate double-digit capitalist growth. There are other, less palatable answers too. The fascists in Germany stripped the rights, property, and lives of one minority group and various ideological dissenters (primarily the communists) in service of its ethnonationalist and expansionist agenda. At present, the ruling party in India targets individual liberties of specific segments, such as Muslims, to fulfil the cultural agenda of its majority base. In all of these examples, the use of state power is for some larger agenda; a larger agenda in the name of the public (or at least an important part of it), built on specific ideational values and postulates. Something being done in service of something bigger, grander, and to varying degrees, collective. So one must pose the question: what objective does this particular, three-year-old vintage of the ‘hard state’ serve in Pakistan? To date there is no coherent answer. We do not know what the killing of protesters — regardless of the agreeability of their demands — in AJK is going to achieve. What goal banning political movements in the peripheries serves. What Form-47ing election outcomes does. What the hollowing out of the opposition, judiciary, media or civil society helps obtain. If the answer is to maintain territorial integrity, then the vast majority of those whose rights stand stripped away carry no geographic ambitions. If the answer is to unleash GDP growth rates of the kind unseen in the last two decades, then one must reluctantly point out that the needle is yet to move up at all. If the answer is to project sovereignty and stature on the world stage at a time of global upheaval, the logical follow-up is a) whose stature and b) sovereignty in whose name? There are no ready grand answers at the end of this line of inquiry because there is likely no grand thought among those steering the ‘hardening’. The actual answers, if one were to hazard a guess, are probably several degrees more modest: the prolonging of duration in office, an improvement in personal quality of life, and the distribution of gifts and sinecures to a small coterie of loyalists at the expense of everyone else. The writer teaches politics and sociology at Lums. X: @umairjav Published in Dawn, August 3rd, 2026

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