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Pakistan’s progressive diaspora intellectuals are critical of military dictators of the past. Under Field Marshal Asim Munir, the writer argues, many retreat into euphemism, naming victims but not the system, its prisoners or the man who commands it.
By PROFESSOR JUNAID S AHMAD
“The clerks began to play the game of political passions.” — Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals
Julien Benda feared intellectuals who betrayed universal principles for political passion. Pakistan has produced something more contemptible: intellectuals who betray principle for personal convenience. They have not been conquered by ideology. They have been subdued by the prospect of an unpleasant airport interrogation, a cancelled invitation, or a disrupted summer in Lahore.
For two decades, Pakistan’s diaspora scholar-activists built careers explaining the country to the West. They corrected journalists, lectured policymakers, decoded civil-military relations, and reminded every available audience that Pakistan’s generals did not merely guard the state; they governed it from behind the curtain.
Now the curtain is gone. The general stands centre stage. And the experts have developed collective laryngitis.
Pakistan under Field Marshal Asim Munir is not an interpretive puzzle. It is a military-dominated order in which the army chief functions as principal diplomat, political arbiter, security overlord and custodian of permissible public speech. The country’s most popular opposition leader remains imprisoned. His party has been battered through arrests, prohibitions, defections and administrative sabotage. Journalists are disciplined, courts pressured, activists abducted, protesters criminalised and dissent routinely translated into the language of terrorism, treason or foreign conspiracy.
Apparently, however, one must wait until the dictator retires before calling the system a dictatorship.
Ayub Khan may be condemned safely. Zia-ul-Haq can be anatomised at conferences. Pervez Musharraf can be denounced between catered panels on constitutionalism. Dead dictators are wonderfully civilised: they revoke no passports, telephone no relatives and interfere with no festival invitations. The safest tyrant is always the one already embalmed by history.
The living ruler is another matter. Listen to much of Pakistan’s progressive diaspora commentary and you will hear every abstraction except the relevant name. There is “democratic backsliding,” “institutional imbalance,” “authoritarian drift,” “shrinking civic space” and, that exquisite monument to intellectual cowardice, “the establishment.”
There are prisons without jailers, repression without repressors, terror without authors.
There is, above all, no Asim Munir.
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This silence would be merely pathetic were it not so politically obscene. Munir has become one of Pakistan’s most internationally recognisable figures. Foreign capitals increasingly treat him as the country’s decisive authority. Western commentary openly describes him as Pakistan’s dominant political actor. The same scholars who spent years complaining that the West ignored Pakistan now confront a world talking constantly about Pakistan — and pretend its central ruler is an optical illusion.
The bloodshed in Pakistan-administered Kashmir reveals what this cultivated vagueness conceals. Protesters mobilised around representation, electoral manipulation and reserved legislative seats. Security forces were accused of firing on civilians. Dozens were reported killed. Communications were severed. Journalists were obstructed. Authorities disputed casualty figures, invoked armed infiltrators and reached, with the reflexes of a nervous empire, for the usual vocabulary of militancy and foreign conspiracy.
The precise number of dead may be contested. The political machinery producing dead citizens is not.
Kashmir is not an aberration at the margins of an otherwise constitutional republic. It is the logical outcome of a security state that regards public aspiration as sedition. The same reflex operates in Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit-Baltistan and the Pakistani heartland: stigmatise dissent, criminalise organisation, obscure responsibility and present coercion as patriotism. When citizens demand representation, the state searches them for foreign fingerprints. When they demand justice, it diagnoses them with terrorism.
And what does the progressive intellectual do? Select one morally photogenic victim, issue a suitably mournful sentence, and decline to identify the order manufacturing victims by the thousand.
Thus Mahrang Baloch’s persecution may be called “horrifically unjust,” as though it were a freak storm rather than the predictable output of authoritarian rule. The victim can be named. The jailer must remain grammatically invisible.
This is not solidarity. It is moral taxidermy: the preservation of politically convenient victims after every trace of dangerous context has been removed.
The hypocrisy becomes rancid when these same intellectuals speak with heroic fluency about Palestine, Hindutva, Trumpism, colonialism and global fascism. Their advocacy may be admirable. But universalism that expires at the passport office is merely careerism in revolutionary costume.
Yes, speaking about Pakistan may bring consequences: family pressure, surveillance, cancelled travel, poisoned professional networks. Fear is real. But fear explains silence; it does not transform silence into wisdom. An intellectual unable to speak truth because it may inconvenience him is not practising strategy. He is managing access.
More disgraceful still, many who cannot pronounce Munir’s name remain perfectly capable of mocking Imran Khan and sneering at his supporters. Khan’s own accommodation with the military, his treatment of opponents and his contributions to coercive politics deserve criticism. But one did not need to worship Benazir Bhutto to oppose Zia’s persecution of her. One did not need to canonise Lula da Silva to understand the meaning of his imprisonment.
A political prisoner becomes symbolic not because he is flawless, but because the state compresses an entire conflict into his body.
Khan’s cell is therefore larger than Khan. It announces that no civilian politician, however popular, may possess legitimacy independent of Rawalpindi. His imprisonment, isolation and political exclusion communicate the regime’s essential doctrine: the people may vote, organise and speak only so long as their choices remain militarily acceptable.
Pakistan’s left once claimed to understand precisely this. Yet its signature contribution to the present catastrophe may be a vocabulary of contempt for the millions who turned against military domination. “Youthia” became less an insult than an intellectual sedative — a way to avoid asking why ordinary Pakistanis, especially in Punjab, had ceased to revere the army. Imranophobia became an alibi for dictatorship.
These intellectuals need not become PTI partisans. They need only recover the elementary courage to describe reality. They may criticise Khan and still oppose his persecution. They may defend Baloch and Kashmiri movements without romanticising every actor. They may condemn military rule without absolving civilian collaborators.
But they must name the system. They must name its prisoners. And they must name the man.
History will remember Asim Munir without difficulty. The harsher judgement will fall upon those who built careers denouncing military domination, then discovered — when military domination arrived in its most naked form — that muteness was nuance, cowardice was complexity and self-preservation was political wisdom.
The dictatorship already possesses generals, judges, propagandists and prisons.
It does not require progressive stenographers.
History is not asking Pakistan’s intellectuals to become martyrs. It is asking them to stop behaving like courtiers terrified of losing their invitations.
Professor Junaid S Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan.
