“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 meaner: 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 poisoned summer in Lahore. The context is not metaphorical.
At a Washington gathering, a Pakistani-American academic reportedly admitted that speaking about Palestine was easier than speaking about Pakistan because criticism at home could mean intelligence harassment, pressure on relatives and trouble during visits. A Palestinian scholar whose family had suffered in Gaza supplied the devastating reply: “May your problems always be so small.”
For two decades, Pakistan’s diaspora scholar-activists built careers explaining the country to the West. They corrected journalists, lectured policymakers and reminded every available audience that Pakistan’s Generals did not merely guard the state; they governed it from behind the curtain.
Without Guardrails
Now the curtain is gone. The General stands center 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 acts as principal diplomat, political arbiter, security overlord and custodian of permissible speech. The country’s main opposition leader remains imprisoned. His party has been battered through arrests, defections, prohibitions and administrative strangulation.
Apparently, one must wait until a dictator retires before calling the system a dictatorship.
Ayub may be condemned safely. Zia can be anatomised at conferences. Musharraf can be denounced between catered panels on constitutionalism. Dead dictators are wonderfully civilised: they cancel no passports, telephone no relatives and interfere with no festival invitations.
Fog of Outrage
The safest tyrant is always the one already embalmed by history.
The living ruler is another matter. Listen to Pakistan’s progressive diaspora commentary and you will hear every abstraction except the relevant name: “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.
Kashmir and the Pattern
The bloodshed in Pakistan-administered Kashmir exposes what this cultivated vagueness protects. Protesters mobilised over representation, economic grievances and twelve legislative seats reserved for refugees residing elsewhere in Pakistan. The Joint Awami Action Committee was banned under anti-terrorism law. Communications were severed. Marches were obstructed. Security forces were accused of firing upon civilians.
The casualty figures remain contested because the blackout made independent verification brutally difficult. Protest organisers reported dozens killed; authorities acknowledged far fewer and alleged that armed actors had infiltrated the demonstrations. What is not contested is the method: proscription, blackout, lethal violence and the conversion of political grievance into a security emergency.
Kashmir is not an aberration at the margins of an otherwise constitutional republic. It is the distilled logic of a security state that treats public aspiration as sedition. The same reflex operates in Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit-Baltistan and the Pakistani heartland: stigmatise dissent, criminalise organization, erase responsibility and market coercion as patriotism.
When citizens demand representation, the state searches them for foreign fingerprints. When they demand justice, it diagnoses them with terrorism.
Some Murmurs but Not Enough
To their credit, activists have held solidarity demonstrations in Islamabad, Lahore and elsewhere; progressive groups in Lahore protested alongside students, workers and lawyers, only for police to arrest dozens. Restrictions and roadblocks also impeded gatherings in Karachi.
These acts of courage deserve recognition. But scattered protests, however principled, are not yet the national intellectual revolt demanded by the scale of the crime. A few brave voices do not absolve an entire class that has trained itself to whisper.
What does the progressive intellectual do?
Select one morally photogenic victim, issue a mournful sentence and refuse to identify the machine producing 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 may be named. The jailer must remain grammatically invisible.
Silence is not Wisdom
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 the 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 careerism in revolutionary costume.
Fear is real. Surveillance is real. Family pressure cancelled travel and poisoned professional networks are real. But fear explains silence; it does not transform silence into wisdom.
An intellectual who cannot speak truth because truth may inconvenience him is not practicing 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 accommodation with the military, persecution of opponents and contribution to coercive politics deserve unsparing criticism. But one did not need to worship Benazir Bhutto to oppose Zia’s persecution of her.
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. The people may vote, organise and speak only while their choices remain militarily acceptable.
Pakistan’s Left once claimed to understand precisely this. Yet “Youthia” became its intellectual sedative: a substitute for asking why millions of 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 while opposing his persecution. They may defend Baloch and Kashmiri movements without romanticising every actor. They may condemn military rule without absolving its civilian accomplices.
Courage to Name the System
But they must name the system.
They must name its prisoners.
And they must name the man.
History will remember Asim Munir without difficulty. Its harsher judgment will fall upon those who built careers denouncing military domination, then discovered — when it arrived in its 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.
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