AS the information minister on Tuesday proclaimed that the people of KP had “welcomed” the imposition of governor’s rule and emergency in the province, he seemed to be forgetting that citizens had also distributed sweets and celebrated when the late Gen Pervez Musharraf overthrew Nawaz Sharif’s government almost to the day, 27 years ago.

The parallel is not exact: one was a military coup, the other a constitutional provision invoked by an elected government. Yet, the lesson holds. Public approval, however genuine, did not legitimise the removal of an elected government then, and it cannot by itself justify the removal of an elected government in KP now. If anything, the minister’s remarks are a reminder of how rarely Pakistan’s political class draws the obvious lessons from its own history.

There are two official versions of why the KP government has been dismissed. On Sunday, the interior minister was far more circumspect than the information minister while providing the state’s rationale, insisting that the decision was “not political” and “only security-related”. He had been negotiating with the PTI till the eleventh hour, trying to avoid imposing governor’s rule and emergency on the province, he said. “Our issue was entirely terrorism-related, and we want[ed] to take you on board on it,” he asserted, addressing the opposition. The information minister, on the other hand, alleged the PTI had an “unholy alliance with terrorists”. Which of those two narratives, offered from the same platform, was true? If a political party was colluding with terrorists, why was the state negotiating and not making arrests based on the ‘evidence’ the information minister claimed to possess? The disconnect suggests that the government has yet to settle on a coherent justification for a decision of this gravity.

Meanwhile, KP Governor Faisal Karim Kundi has said his advisory council will take its policies from Islamabad. Why not from the people of KP, who will be most affected by them? Perhaps unwittingly, the governor has sent the clearest possible signal that KP’s mandate is being held in abeyance. What the government in the centre and the governor’s new set-up in KP need to realise is that their words are not reaching only the leaders of a rival party, but also being heard by all those who helped elect those individuals to office. If winning the confidence of the people of KP is not a priority at this stage, it ought to be. Governor’s rule is, by constitutional design, a temporary measure. The centre must say clearly how long it intends it to last, what it hopes to achieve in that time, and how the province’s elected mandate will be restored. Anything less will only confirm the impression that this was never solely about security.

Published in Dawn, October 14th, 2026