SINCE Mohammed bin Salman’s rapid ascension to heir apparent of the Saudi throne, his pronouncements to radically reform the kingdom have come in tandem with broad crackdowns on his subjects.

In recent days, according to reports in the international media, at least 11 activists, mostly women, have been swept up in the security dragnet. International rights groups are expressing concern that the detainees, their whereabouts unknown, are being held without charge and interrogated without access to legal representation.

Meanwhile, a Saudi state security agency issued a statement branding these activists — several of whom have been women’s rights campaigners for decades and faced imprisonment before — as ‘traitors’ working with ‘hostile foreign elements’ to undermine the kingdom. Only weeks before the ban on women driving is due to be lifted, it is pertinent to ask: is this the new Saudi Arabia the millennial crown prince promised, in which women are entitled to drive — but not to speak?

Read: Some are paying a high price for feminism in the ‘new’ Saudi Arabia

Along with hope, there was scepticism of Mohammed bin Salman’s chimerical vision, big as it was on touting a neoliberal rebranding exercise yet thin on any discussion of genuine political reform.

Following a spectacularly orchestrated media blitz to woo the West that would have rankled many in his still deeply conservative kingdom, the recent arrests might indicate an attempt to appease hard-line regressives at home.

The Saudi women’s movement represents one of the last remaining spaces of civil rights advocacy in a country where protests are illegal and dissent is quashed. Women in patriarchal societies are often treated as expendable collateral — and their rights the first to be bargained away — in any renegotiation of power, but no modernisation drive can succeed without their emancipation.

The crown prince has been notably silent in the face of actions that clearly contradict his progressive public posture and his professed commitment to a relative relaxation in the state’s control over personal freedoms. That inevitably raises the question as to whether there are, after all, constraints on his power in the kingdom.

Published in Dawn, May 25th, 2018