Global Southasia (formerly Sapan News) is republishing this piece, with permission, as a public service initiative in the interest of making such views more accessible and to promote cross-border understanding. See the Press Statement: Access is not a threat: A call to lift reciprocal news bans in India and Pakistan. The article below first appeared in The News Pakistan, titled Why Dissent Matters. Please credit the original publication and Global Southasia when sharing or republishing.
Article below republished from The News, Pakistan
Why dissent matters
Pakistan’s struggle with dissent raises a fundamental democratic question: Can the state tolerate criticism without treating it as a threat?
By Dr. Naazir Mahmood
For much of my professional life — as a teacher, writer and someone associated with human-rights work — I have watched Pakistan wrestle with the uneasy relationship between authority and dissent. Governments change, constitutions are amended and slogans come and go, but one question persists: how much criticism can the state tolerate before it begins to treat criticism itself as a threat?
The case of lawyers Imaan Zainab Mazari-Hazir and Hadi Ali Chattha brings that question into sharp focus. A democracy is not tested by how comfortably it accommodates applause. It is tested by how it handles irritation. Praise costs a government nothing; criticism does. That is why the treatment of Mazari and Chattha matters beyond the fate of two lawyers. Their case tests whether Pakistan can distinguish between speech that offends power and conduct that genuinely threatens public safety.
Earlier this year, an Islamabad sessions court convicted the couple under three provisions of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act. They received concurrent sentences, the longest being ten years, along with heavy fines. The prosecution argued that posts and reposts promoted narratives associated with proscribed organisations, undermined state institutions and made unsupported allegations against the armed forces. The government defended the verdict on the ground that criticism must not become support for terrorism.
That argument deserves to be heard. Freedom of expression is not a licence to incite violence, assist terrorist organisations or knowingly spread dangerous falsehoods. No activist, lawyer or journalist is above ordinary criminal law. But that is precisely why the law must draw its lines with exceptional care. The graver the accusation, the higher the evidential and procedural threshold should be. Otherwise a law meant to protect society can become a means of protecting authority from embarrassment.
There are serious reasons to question whether that threshold was met. During the trial, a court-appointed defence lawyer said he had been approached only the previous afternoon, had not received the case file in time and had been supplied with questions he was expected to ask during cross-examination. He refused. UN experts later raised concerns about repeated prosecutions, arrests and alleged fair-trial violations involving the couple. Cross-examination, access to counsel and adequate preparation are not decorative accessories to justice. They are part of the machinery that makes a conviction credible. A state confident in its evidence should welcome a strong defence, because a verdict that survives scrutiny commands more respect than one surrounded by questions about haste.
The substantive charges raise a larger issue. International human-rights experts have expressed concern that criminal proceedings against the two lawyers may be connected to their professional work and protected expression. The authorities dispute such characterisations, and courts must decide the legal merits. But independent rights bodies’ recurring concerns cannot simply be dismissed.
Chattha was implicated partly for reposting material. If sharing contentious commentary can contribute to a cyberterrorism prosecution, many citizens will conclude that silence is safer than scrutiny. That would be damaging in any country, but especially in one confronting terrorism, separatist violence, ethnic grievances and persistent allegations of enforced disappearance. Dissent is not merely a favour governments grant to troublesome citizens. It is a feedback mechanism. It tells rulers what official reports may conceal, what bureaucracies prefer not to hear and what frightened communities might otherwise keep to themselves.
I have spent decades in universities, journalism and development work, and one lesson has become increasingly clear to me: institutions rarely improve when everyone around them learns to say yes. A classroom in which students are afraid to question the teacher becomes intellectually sterile. A university where junior scholars dare not disagree with senior professors stagnates. A state is no different. It requires contradiction if it is to correct itself.
Governments can rebut activists, investigate their claims, demand evidence and prosecute genuine incitement. What democratic systems must guard against is collapsing the distinction between criticism of the state and hostility to the state. When peaceful criticism is treated mainly as a security problem, the category of ‘enemy’ can expand until it includes lawyers, journalists, students and campaigners. It should not be confused with stability. A system that hears only good news eventually starts believing it.
Lawyers occupy a particularly important place in this equation. Their duty often requires them to stand beside unpopular people and make arguments governments dislike. If advocates begin wondering whether taking a missing-persons case or questioning an investigation might expose them to security charges, citizens lose one of the most important lawful channels for challenging the state.
On September 17, the Supreme Court suspended the two lawyer’s Peca sentences and ordered their release on bail pending the Islamabad High Court’s final decision. Yet liberty proved elusive: they were arrested again in connection with a separate case, and an anti-terrorism court sent them to judicial remand.
Whatever the merits of that separate prosecution, the sequence raises an unavoidable institutional question: what does judicial relief mean if detention can continue immediately through another proceeding? A functioning democracy need not agree with Imaan Mazari. Nor need it admire Hadi Chattha. Their claims can be challenged, their language criticised and unlawful conduct prosecuted if proved. The safest speech is speech everybody approves of. Rights become meaningful precisely when someone says something that the powerful would rather not hear.
There must, naturally, be limits. Direct incitement to violence, operational assistance to terrorist organisations and deliberately fabricated allegations causing legally defined harm can be punished under clear laws and fair procedures. But phrases such as ‘anti-state’ should never substitute for those tests. Institutions earn legitimacy by being open to examination, including harsh and occasionally unfair examination.
There is a simpler way. Answer criticism with evidence, bad arguments with better arguments and genuinely unlawful conduct with law applied transparently and proportionately. The case in question has raised serious questions among Pakistani lawyers, rights organisations and UN experts about whether those standards were observed. Those questions deserve answers through appeals heard promptly and proceedings whose fairness commands confidence rather than demands it.
I have seen enough of Pakistan’s political history to know that silencing uncomfortable voices rarely makes uncomfortable questions disappear. They return. In classrooms, I have always preferred the student who challenges an argument to the one who merely nods; societies, too, advance through questioning rather than submission. For me, that is what makes this case larger than two individuals or one piece of legislation. It concerns the kind of republic we want to leave to the next generation: one confident enough to hear criticism, or one frightened enough to criminalise it.
A democracy does not become weaker merely because somebody calls the state unjust. It becomes more vulnerable when citizens begin to believe that saying so is itself a crime.
Dr. Naazir Mahmood is dean of the faculty of liberal arts at a private university in Karachi. He posts on X as @NaazirMahmood. Email: mnazir1964@yahoo.co.uk
This article was first published in The News Pakistan and is reproduced here with permission.
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