IT is said that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I am generally suspicious of such adages but in some cases they are unerringly accurate. Our security establishment is one such case. For our self-proclaimed holy guardians, the exercise of untrammelled power has become almost second nature.

Generally, when most of us think about structures of domination we focus on individuals and decisions made in the highest echelons, or what are often called, the corridors of power. After all three military generals have ruled this country for half its existence.

More generally the military top brass has cultivated and sustained monopoly powers for the best part of six decades, with pro-establishment politicians and high-ranking civilian state functionaries fulfilling secondary roles.

What distinguishes the coercive apparatus of the state from politicians and civilian state institutions is its so-called command and control system that, in theory at least, makes the establishment a cohesive machine with tentacles spread out far and wide.

In other words, functionaries at the lowest levels of the military institution are as important to the smooth functioning of the machine as those at the other end of the spectrum. Indeed, it can be argued that it is the former that truly inculcate fear in the hearts of ordinary people by making themselves conspicuous as the eyes and ears of a coercive state.

The lowest ranking policeman at a checkpost can strike the fear of God into a passer-by, and often does, with petty bribes the only means of preventing excesses. Even scarier are the proverbial ‘agency-wallahs’ who do their bidding in plainclothes. It matters little whether the spooks that knock on people’s homes late at night or harass them on the streets are privy to the grand designs of their bosses. What matters is that they can act in the name of the state virtually with impunity.

The Baloch long march enters the garrison city of Rawalpindi today. Enough has been said about the march and its background. However, it is worth dwelling on what the marchers experienced in the last few days before reaching their destination, if only as a microcosm of the tribulations to which the military establishment and its intelligence agencies subject political dissidents in this country.

As one might expect with a protest movement of this kind, the marchers have relied on everyday forms of support from the communities they have encountered along the way. This has extended to arrangements for night stays.

From the time they entered Gujarat district, they found volunteer offerings of a place to sleep hard to come by. The knee-jerk explanation would be that Punjabis have refused to express common cause with the Baloch protesters. In fact, the unwillingness of local communities to give of themselves is explained by the fact that ‘defenders’ of the public interest, in plainclothes, of course, have made the lives of everyone with even a remote connection to the marchers a living hell.

The state personnel — uniformed and otherwise — that have ‘accompanied’ the marchers through their travels in the Potohar region have also performed the role of principal harassers whenever the onlookers and video cameras have faded from sight. The TV media was even forced to report an incident post-facto near the town of Sara-i-Alamgir in which the marchers were subjected to verbal abuse and accused of fabricating the entire missing persons issue to undermine Pakistan.

In the event, the participants of the long march have not flinched and now appear to have made it to their planned destination. Will they achieve their objectives? Anyone with an iota of political savvy knows that thousands of disappeared Baloch are not going to be returned to their homes anytime soon, and that the military establishment will continue to do as it pleases in Balochistan for the forseeable future.

So what will it take for the spooks and their paymasters to be cut down to size? How many more East Pakistans and Balochistans do we need to create before we come to terms with the fact that those who demand their democratic due are not ‘enemies of the state’?

I wish there were an answer to this question that was not indeterminate, and hopeful to boot. That there isn’t cannot be explained only by the actions of the most powerful components of the establishment. Instead we need to recognise that the many functionaries of the coercive state apparatus who do the so-called ‘dirty work’ are just as drunk on power as those they serve.

Straightforward it is not, but undoing this structure of power is imperative. Those who have given up everything deserve nothing less.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.