PRIOR to 1971, the Pakistani state used to crack down on the press with a vengeance for any criticism of the state’s elite and military rule. This anxiety to stifle opposition in the name of national security swelled into a need to ‘protect’ West Pakistan from the democratic electoral results of 1970.

Over the last four decades, varieties of military rule and religious politics in Pakistan and Bangladesh have been challenged by civil and secular struggles. But there is no agreement on what constitutes legitimate democratic dissent.

Censorship used to be an evil associated with dictatorship but, paradoxically, the muzzling of free speech and expression in Pakistan today is a symptom of the deepening of democracy. An expanding, untraditional, hydra-headed media that has no fixed source has made censorship a difficult, unpopular occupation.

All players are being monitored by a watchful citizenry.

Despite cynicism and maligning from the right and left, democratisation and political parties have been digging in their heels in the trenches of governance. The national and provincial assemblies may still be male-

dominated but more pro-women laws have been passed now than when the country was headed by a woman prime minister. Previously, a conservative judiciary invaded the private realm and colluded with men to punish women accused of adultery, with little or no evidence. Now, it takes suo motu notice to protect women from underage marriages and abusive men.

Section 144 was the definitive tool for crushing pro-democracy protest in the 1980s and 1990s. Now, it is invoked to safeguard local bodies polls and to prevent lockdowns which deny people freedom of movement or threaten public peace.

Enforced disappearances were extra-ju­­dicial crimes exclusively targeting the lea­dership of underground Baloch dissent. Now, this is a method of intimidation levelled aga­i­­nst amateur opinion and social media satire.

The state has certainly not withered away but its capacity to tolerate ‘offence’ has altered. National honour is not measured by the purchase of F-16s but celebrated through a Pakistani Oscar-winning documentary condemning murders in the name of honour. The country’s security is being reframed through economic not strategic assets. A conservative government is weighing against the civil-military balance more than the liberal pretenders did.

The point is not to offend the purists by suggesting that it’s raining classical democracy. Most politicians, clergymen, bureaucrats and judges are not visionaries of democratic equality and redistributive wealth. Capitalist media has indeed produced and sustained a low level of political programming with whack-a-mole TV anchors who daily embark on moral crusades. But more than ever before, all these players are being monitored and challenged by a watchful and engaged citizenry.

Historically, the state has often been complicit in blasphemy accusations against vulnerable people but now, it advocates restraint and there have been cases when it has penalised vigilantism.

The retreat of government from leveraging state laws and religion for censoring thought and expression has meant that other patrons have assumed the authority to defend public religio-nationalist sentiment. The legislature and judiciary are redefining what constitutes citizens’ rights and public offence but the military and organised faith are determined to remain the self-appointed sentinels of imagined injury to the honour of the country and perceived insults to the divine.

Since 9/11, crimes committed to avenge perceived blasphemy have been justified in unhelpful, contradictory ways. Some apologists have argued that Muslims are innately more prone to ‘moral injury’. Others insist faith is not a driver of blasphemy accusations which are motivated by greed for material appropriation. Still others say free speech, dissent and satire are simply a disguise for Western Islamophobic racism and must be curbed or at least, religion be exempted. With the result that today a blasphemy allegation has become an undefined, invisible but deadly legitimate weapon that may be wielded against any individual who dares to think a free, random or offensive thought.

The unresolved place of faith in democratic politics means the post ‘war on terror’ period has seen tragedy turn into farce. Some ‘radical’ anti-imperialist activists who vehemently used to reject Western attempts to ‘save Muslim women’ have been only too happy to be rescued by their own Western dual nationalities and escape, when the state here took exception to their adventurism.

Religious militants have been heroes for the left wing in Pakistan, while digital activists are dangerous militants for our conservatives. Both accuse secularists of being ‘elitist’, until they themselves become the targets of religio-nationalist viciousness — then, their dissent is apparently, legitimate.

The writer is a sociologist based in Karachi.

Published in Dawn, February 1st, 2017