There is a silence smothering the landscape of Pakistan and it is a silence borne from fear.

The state grows more authoritarian each day, its mistrust for the voice of its people multiplying. The views of the masses, the printing presses, the online spaces, are met with charge sheets and FIRs. Silence has become the only guarantee of safety from the wrath of a system bent on gagging criticism. As the EU GSP+ assessment for Pakistan puts it: “limitations to the freedom of expression and access to information remain serious and persistent.”

It is tempting to label this problem as regime specific. After all, the coalition government demonstrates open contempt for dissent: the Law Minister warns of uttering anything against foreign policy, 27 YouTube channels of journalists are asked to be permanently blocked, and the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) is the latest innovation given free rein to label any opposition as anti-state. You are counted lucky if you get a sliver of due process rather than never being seen again.

But if justice is a system, so is authoritarianism. Constitutional democracy has always struggled to find its place in our history when the system of law we have built over seventy-eight years favours the autocrat. This system, not merely the people currently operating it, needs to be examined, dissected, dismantled. The current regime will one day fall, but for political speech to thrive the system must be broken.

To achieve this, we must confront the ghosts of the past while resisting new innovations for control.

Confronting our inheritance

Dissent was a dangerous commodity in the British empire. An illegitimate and insecure enterprise, it maintained control through an arsenal of violence and legalised repression motivated by a single imperative: control. Hence, the Indian Penal Code, adopted and barely revised by Pakistan, contained several restrictive provisions on speech justified in the name of maintaining security and order.

Repression, in other words, was built into the DNA of the newly independent state. What distinguishes this government is the enthusiasm with which it borrows from that inheritance.

Three examples demonstrate the haunting presence of the past.

Consider first, Section 124A of the Penal Code, sedition, enacted by the colonial state to control political dissent. This offence boiled down to anything that incited ‘bad feelings’ against the government. It was considered ‘a masterpiece of uncertainty’ by some academics with Gandhi himself describing it as the “prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen.” The offence, routinely deployed against the struggle for independence, continues to exist in Pakistan’s statute books (barring Punjab where it was finally struck down by the Lahore High Court’s Shahid Karim J.).

Its spectre has been allowed to cross into the online space. In early 2025, the coalition regime made one of Pakistan’s most oppressive laws merciless. The Prevention of Electronic Crimes (Amendment) Act, 2025 cleared Parliament in 15 minutes. Mirroring its old counterpart in its vague provisions and freedom to prosecute commentary against the government, it is a masterpiece of uncertainty in its own right.

That uncertainty benefits only the state. Peca, at its core, now serves to protect state officials from criticism and hound journalists to prison. Its ruthless ambiguity is modern Pakistan’s equivalent of sedition for the online space. Men who serve at the pleasure of the federal government hold a monopoly on defining what serves as the ‘truth’, with no defences for honest reporting, satire, opinion, or even jokes. Few laws are able to fit the definition of ‘Orwellian’ so completely: between January and July last year, 99 cases were filed against journalists for alleged anti-state activities.

Despite swearing a constitutional commitment to free speech, the regime continues to force its people to live under laws that bear an eerie resemblance to a past that saw the critical voice as the gravest crime.

Peca may be the new prince of our penal laws, but the court is crowded with aspirants. Criminal defamation survives here after most of the world has discarded it. So does the offence of promoting ‘enmity’ between groups, of uttering words that tend to ‘public mischief,’ and a recent favourite: the power to forbid people from gathering at all.

Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code hands the bureaucracy unchecked power to prohibit public gatherings. It was a cherished restriction introduced by the colonial administration because the breadth of the clause allowed them to effectively eliminate political protest. As India’s independence movement gained momentum, it began to be used routinely for this purpose whenever, according to the British, seditious speeches would be made. In a 1986 legislative review in India, it was described as one of the colonial era’s ‘Black Laws’ fit only for repeal.

We still hold to it, deployed whenever there is even a hint of protest, whether for Palestine or for the rights of women. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan described the power as equipping the state with the ability to pass blanket orders forbidding citizens from all assemblies of five or more people. This is justified by rote invocations of ‘security risks’ and deteriorating ‘law and order’. “Such powers,” it concludes, “constitute a wholly disproportionate restriction on the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and open up a dangerous avenue for politically motivated decisions to be imposed under the garb of necessity”.

There is no official tally of how often it has been imposed, but under this government it has grown routine enough to gut the right to protest of any meaning: against the Aurat March, solidarity for Gaza, and opposition protests. It is woven so deep into national life that Abrar-ul-Haq even mentions it in his song ‘Billo de Ghar’.

O jiddon kadhya jaloos gareeban,

te sheher che chuttali lagg gai

But what if the message still fails to land? Then the law falls back on a more violent species of colonial control: the act of preventive detention, which allows individuals to be imprisoned without trial for crimes they haven’t even committed.

This particular parasite has enjoyed many hosts throughout our history: The Security of Pakistan Act, 1952; the Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance, 1960 (MPO); the Defence of Pakistan Ordinance, 1965; the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997; Actions (in Aid of Civil Powers) Regulations, 2011; and the Protection of Pakistan Act, 2014, are all examples of enactments which featured colonial models of preventive detention that can be traced back to the East India Company Act of 1793.

The MPO frequently drags this ghoul out of its crypt, letting the Executive strip a citizen of liberty without any conviction in the interests of vague grounds of public safety. And we know by now that political opponents are particularly dangerous for insecure regimes. The EU’s GSP+ Assessment states that such laws “[risk] blurring the line between legitimate law enforcement measures and enforced disappearances.” One report states over a hundred and eighty opposition workers were detained under the MPO in February of this year.

What these ghosts demonstrate is how Pakistan’s legal framework has the suppression of speech embedded in it. When we talk of restoring democracy, we must confront a system that is adopted from the past, revised for the present, and laid out as a minefield through which dissent must navigate to survive.

New systems

While the imprints of an authoritarian past must be exorcised from our legal system, we must also be conscious of new frameworks being deployed to eliminate liberty altogether. These actions must be resisted before they take root, becoming impossible to replace later. More laws enter the fray to combat free speech, such as the Punjab Defamation Act, which makes it easier for public officials to bring cases of defamation against journalists.

As one reporter speaking to the Digital Rights Foundation described: “When I read the Punjab Defamation Act, I realised that [the government] doesn’t want anyone reporting against them… [The Act] places the burden of proof on you to prove your innocence. Additionally, the fines imposed under the Act are so high that I don’t think any journalist can afford it on their average salary.”

Meanwhile, in KP and Balochistan, speech is shackled under the weight of the Anti-Terrorism Act, the fog of war, and the ever-present possibility of enforced disappearances. Basic instruments for speech today, like the internet, are switched off at will in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, to no consequence.

Technology is vital today for the proliferation of new forms of speech, but with it has also come insidious new models to curb dissent. A massive surveillance framework has been implemented across Pakistan, in open defiance of repeated constitutional guarantees that such actions violate fundamental rights. Married to a body of law that criminalises dissent, it produces a regime of control that even the colonial state, for all its ambitions, could never have crafted.

Two systems exist to enable this: the Lawful Intercept Management System (LIMS) and the Web Monitoring System (WMS).

Since at least 2007, LIMS has enabled surveillance of telecom activity in Pakistan by the security apparatus without a court order or warrant. No telecommunication provider dares to push back. For years it was an urban legend, discussed in hushed tones and flatly denied, until Justice Babar Sattar dragged it into daylight in 2024 and declared it illegal. But an independent judiciary is about as dangerous as free speech.

An instantaneous suspension of the judgment pending an appeal was ushered via the 26th and 27th amendments, and LIMS survives to continue watching, by Amnesty International’s estimate, more than four million people at any given time. The state’s response to the scandal was to issue a notification authorising ISI officers to intercept and trace calls under Section 54 of the Pakistan Telecommunication (Re-Organization) Act. Another instance of the law working to cloak lawlessness in the veneer of legality.

Mirroring the work of LIMS in the online space is the WMS utilised by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to monitor and censor internet activity since 2018. The WMS is deployed to function in a similar vein to China’s Great Firewall by blocking entire social platforms, throttling traffic, shutting down the internet. To this day, it is not clear on what legal basis it operates; the government and the post-27th amendment courts have shrugged aside and ignored all questions.

But these are questions that go to the root of every civil liberty we hold, particularly when they are being funded through the public’s money — the very public that the state mistrusts and fears. “LIMS and WMS 2.0 are funded by public money, enabled by foreign tech, and used to silence dissent, causing severe human rights harms against the Pakistani people,” observes Jurre van Bergen, Technologist at Amnesty. So, the entire nation lives in the fear of their private life being exposed.

What that fear feels like is best expressed by those living with it. A Baloch activist described it: “For the past few months since the crackdown intensified [against Baloch activists], I have stopped using my SIM for fear of being [forcibly] disappeared or arbitrarily detained…They [the authorities] told my family that if I turn on my phone for even a few minutes they will be able to trace my location and will pick me up. They also warned that phones of all my family members are being traced in hopes that they will lead them to me.”

Surveillance outside any legal regime demonstrates the state’s inherent reflex to reach past every constitutional limit whenever it can. This surveillance directly ‘chills’ free expression whether through arrests, detention, or simply impeding the registration and funding of human rights NGOs.

A chilling effect

Living under a system of repressive laws that can at any time be deployed against critical speech leads to what is known as a ‘chilling’ effect. This is the destination every authoritarian regime travels toward: a population so terrified of uttering the wrong words that they choose to stay silent. This is where we stand today, and no change of government will move us until the system, past and present, is pulled down.

To arrest someone for speech that is ‘anti-state’, ‘terrorist’, or ‘false’ has become far too easy under Pakistan’s legal system. Conviction is beside the point. The ordeal of court appearances, harassment by law enforcement, and the cost of legal proceedings is punishment enough. Those brave enough to take the risk dwindle as time passes, thrown into jails or battling flimsy FIRs as the system exhausts the resilience of the ordinary individual.

And the one institution that might have stood in the way has been carefully muzzled. As these pages have shown, the stripping away of an independent judiciary through the 27th amendment has aggravated the problem. Where once judges pushed back on the PECA Ordinance, struck down the law of sedition, exposed LIMS, or reprimanded the heavy handedness of the FIA, today those same courts have fallen silent under the shadow of the Federal Constitutional Court.

Without free speech there is no democratic system, hybrid or otherwise. Today’s regime will one day be gone, but the precedent they have set, between law and lawlessness, will require a heroic effort to undo: long, painful, patient. But it is the only strategy that will ever return our voices to us, and with them, this country’s destiny.

Header art by Mohsin Alam.