This week Pakistan's interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi, said that an unnamed party chief was furious at being denied a role in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's new governor's rule. Everyone knew, he meant Maulana Fazlur Rehman. Naqvi added that this was the politician whose party's air tickets the establishment used to arrange. He meant it as an insult. No one in government treated it as a scandal, or asked who paid, from which budget, or which other parties flew on the same account. The confession was the weapon. The offence was taken for granted.
Fazl's own case is constitutional. Both sides had accepted him as mediator between the government and PTI. He says he watched the government agree to the opposition's demands and then walk away. The government then invoked Articles 232 and 234, imposed an emergency and governor's rule — the fourth in the province's history and dismissed the PTI-led provincial government. If law and order were the reason, Fazl asked, why not Balochistan first? In a federation, he said, provinces own their resources and make their own laws.
What neither side disputed is more revealing. Naqvi did not deny that the establishment sponsors politicians; he said Fazl had been sponsored. Fazl does not object to the establishment's role in politics; he objects that his bargain was broken. In 2024 Naqvi thanked Fazl for helping pass the 26th Amendment. A year later Fazl refused to back the 27th, when his votes were reportedly no longer needed. Two decades earlier his alliance had given General Musharraf's Legal Framework Order constitutional cover through the 17th Amendment. Neither man argued that the establishment should stop dispensing favour. They argued about who had received it. In this system votes are not a mandate. They are collateral, deposited with the establishment and redeemed for office. This is the cycle Pakistanis know by heart: the military interferes, politicians compromise, elections are manipulated, and it begins again. The harder question is why nearly eight decades of resistance have failed to break it. Why do politicians persecuted by the establishment return to seek its favour? And why has a society that has repeatedly shown it can resist never turned that resistance into lasting change?
The generals did not do this alone. The state was captured, but politicians held the door open. They passed the amendments that hollowed out the institutions meant to restrain power. They bent the federation to serve the provinces that hold the centre. They abandoned the unions, students and civic movements that might have resisted. Every surrender was sold as realism. Toeing the establishment line was rationalised as the only way to do politics: first a tactic, then a habit, finally a creed. Each party that bent the rules to win swore it would be the last, and each built the trap the next one walked into. That is why politicians, more than anyone, are responsible for Pakistan’s democratic reversal. The generals took power; the politicians handed over the keys. Politics became a contest over who controls the state, not over what the state owes its citizens.
The pattern was set early. The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in 1954 and the coup of 1958 established that unelected institutions could override elected ones. In 1970 the Awami League won an absolute majority in the National Assembly. The establishment refused to transfer power, turned to repression, and in 1971 lost the country's eastern wing. Pakistan did not break up because democracy went too far. It broke up because its rulers refused to honour a democratic majority. Civilian leaders learned to live inside this system rather than dismantle it. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto mobilised the poor with the language of social justice, then centralised power and crushed his opponents. Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif endured dismissal and persecution, yet each at times welcomed establishment intervention against the other. Their 2006 Charter of Democracy, the 18th Amendment and the peaceful transfer of power in 2013 promised an end to the game. The promise never bound them.
Imran Khan's rise in 2018 was aided by military backing, and in office he built no cross-party front for civilian supremacy. His removal by a no-confidence vote in April 2022 was constitutional in form. What followed was not. His imprisonment, the restrictions on PTI and the disputed 2024 election raised a basic question: can a mass movement compete freely once it falls out with the establishment? PTI-backed independents won the most directly elected seats but not a majority, and the PML-N and PPP formed the government. The principle at stake is not that any leader must be allowed to rule. It is that rules cannot be rewritten, selectively enforced or backed by coercion to produce a preferred result. Pakistan has lived through military rule before. What makes this moment different is that it no longer requires a coup. Ayub, Yahya, Zia and Musharraf seized power outside the Constitution, and that was their weakness: what was taken by force could be challenged by courts, movements and elections, and was. The Movement for the Restoration of Democracy defied Zia. Lawyers marched until a sacked chief justice was restored. Two rival parties signed a charter to keep the generals out. Each time, something outside the regime pushed back.
This time the arrangement has been written into the Constitution by an elected parliament. The 26th Amendment gave the executive decisive weight over judicial appointments and the benches that hear constitutional cases. The 27th created a Federal Constitutional Court to take constitutional cases away from the Supreme Court, made the army chief Chief of Defence Forces — the constitutional head of all three services and gave the field marshal lifelong immunity from prosecution. Calling this a hybrid regime flatters it. Hybridity implies some balance between civilian and military power, however uneven. That balance is gone. Parliament used its own two-thirds majority to legislate away its relevance, and Pakistan has crossed from a hybrid to a hard state: one that governs through coercion rather than consent, pulls resources towards the centre, and treats dissent, provincial autonomy and even mediation as security problems. A coup suspends the Constitution. This rewrites it and borrows its legitimacy. What an amendment entrenches, only a two-thirds majority can undo, and the only parties that could assemble one are the parties that passed it.
The checks that once broke regimes are neutralised at once. The courts have been restructured. The two signatories of the Charter of Democracy now govern together inside the arrangement it was meant to end, leaving no mainstream party outside it. The only party with a mass vote has its leader in prison and its last government, in Peshawar, dismissed. Parliament no longer deliberates; it ratifies. This month a joint session endorsed the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa emergency within days. The Election Commission presided over a vote whose results remain disputed. Caretaker administrators graduate into ministers, as Naqvi did when he went from caretaker chief minister of Punjab to the interior ministry.
A coup suspends the Constitution. This rewrites it and borrows its legitimacy. What an amendment entrenches, only a two-thirds majority can undo, and the only parties that could assemble one are the parties that passed it.
Nor is there any pressure from outside. Past military rulers depended on foreign patrons and eventually exhausted them. This order has a victory narrative at home, built on the 2025 conflict with India, and is courted abroad as a security partner. Success abroad has become a licence at home. So the system no longer bothers to hide. Past regimes denied their manipulation. Now an interior minister jokes about the establishment buying a party's tickets. A system stops pretending only when it no longer fears being found out. Fazl's question about Balochistan has an answer, and it has nothing to do with security. Balochistan's chief minister, Sarfraz Bugti, belongs to the PPP and was installed jointly by the PPP and PML-N under the same formula that produced the federal government. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa voted for the wrong party. Governor's rule is not imposed where violence is worst. It is imposed where the provincial government does not belong to the centre.
This is the geography of capture. Punjab holds more than half the population and 141 of the National Assembly's 266 general seats. Add Sindh's 61, and a federal majority can be built without a single seat from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or Balochistan. The PML-N governs from Lahore, the PPP from Karachi, and together they hold Islamabad. The officer corps and the senior civil service have long been drawn disproportionately from Punjab. Pakistan is a federation of four provinces run as a partnership of two, with the army as senior partner. The smaller provinces are where the militancy is, where the minerals are, and where the state increasingly rules through emergencies, operations and appointed administrators rather than elected governments. It is telling that this week's case against Peshawar was argued from Lahore by Punjab's chief minister, its information minister and an interior minister who made his career there.
Underneath it all is a fight over money. The 18th Amendment placed a large share of national revenue beyond the centre's reach, and a security state with growing ambitions wants it back. The provinces' revenue, land and minerals are the prize. That is why the first draft of the 27th Amendment proposed reopening the constitutional protection of provincial shares in the National Finance Commission award, and why the defence minister now finds himself insisting that talks with the United States over minerals have produced no contract. The merged tribal districts show how the bargain works in practice. In 2018 the provinces promised them 3 percent of their NFC share and the federal government Rs100 billion a year. By the provincial government's account, Rs132 billion of the Rs700 billion due had arrived by 2024, and the provincial 3 percent never came. Naqvi asks why Fazl was silent while the tribal areas were denied their share. The better question is who denied it. The provinces that withheld the money are the ones whose parties now run the federation.
None of this is the fault of ordinary Punjabis or Sindhis. South Punjab, where Fazl chose to speak this week, is as neglected by Lahore as Peshawar is by Islamabad, and rural Sindh's poor gain little from the PPP's hold on power. What dominates is not a people but an elite — the feudals, contractors, generals and bureaucrats of the two largest provinces which has learned that the centre is easiest to hold when the smaller provinces are governed rather than represented. Pakistan has been here before. In 1955 One Unit abolished the western provinces to neutralise Bengal's majority. The method has changed. The instinct has not. The response to Fazl showed the mechanism at work. His constitutional objection was answered with the army chief's custodianship of the Holy Mosques and the funerals of martyrs. The irony cuts both ways. Fazl's politics grew in the soil Zia prepared, where loyalty to faith and loyalty to the state were fused. Now that fusion is turned on him: disagree with the state and you dishonour its martyrs. The fault lies not with Islam or ordinary believers but with the powerful, who invoke Islamic values while presiding over corruption, tax evasion, land grabs and impunity. When faith becomes a loyalty test, dissent becomes deviance, symbolism replaces policy and minorities are exposed. A religion that shields rulers from scrutiny has been turned from an ethical standard into an instrument of power.
Pakistan once had organised forces that could have resisted. Trade unions, student movements and progressive writers challenged feudals, industrialists and generals, and taught ordinary people to see poverty as a political outcome, not a personal misfortune. The PPP's accommodation with feudals blunted Bhutto's radicalism. Zia crushed the organised Left, weakened labour and banned student unions in 1984. The Soviet collapse and the global turn to market economics weakened labour even in established democracies; in Pakistan they finished the job. Dynasties, patronage and personality cults filled the space. The questions that matter disappeared: who owns the land, who gets subsidised credit, who wins contracts, who evades tax and who pays for the state's failures. Citizens divided by personal loyalties cannot organise around wages, schools or taxation. Their anger is intense, but its targets change while the structures stay untouched.
Militancy in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is real and cannot be ignored. But security cannot become a pretext for extinguishing an elected mandate. The government must show why extraordinary measures were necessary, what safeguards apply and when constitutional rule will return. Restoration cannot be made conditional on the dismissed party's political compliance. Mehmood Khan Achakzai has warned that Sindh could be next. That should alarm the PPP more than anyone. A junior partner's turn comes when it stops being useful. Pakistan does not lack political passion. It lacks the institutions and the organised power to make that passion last. The military must be confined to its constitutional role. Elections must decide who governs. Courts, parliament, the Election Commission and the civil service must act without coercion. The smaller provinces must receive the resources they were promised and be governed by the people they elect. These safeguards will hold only if organised citizens defend them through independent unions, restored student politics, strong civic bodies, honest history and the freedom to question religious and political authority.
In 1971, the refusal to accept a democratic majority tore Pakistan apart. Today it risks a quieter disintegration: a republic that keeps its flag, constitution, parliament and elections while losing popular sovereignty, first in its smaller provinces and then everywhere. Every previous reversal left a door open, because a coup could be undone. This one has been locked from the inside, with the Constitution as the key. The military cannot be held accountable by politicians who still hope to benefit from its intervention. Elite capture cannot be dismantled by parties that live on patronage. A federation cannot survive when two provinces decide what the other two may have. The interior minister has told the country that the establishment buys politicians' tickets. The question is not which politician flew. It is who paid, for whom, and on whose authority. Until Pakistanis demand that answer from every party and every politician, elections will change the occupants of office, but not who really governs the state.