Why regime change won't save free speech in Pakistan

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........

© Dawn Prism