Contents

I want a Pakistan in which belonging is secure enough to accommodate disagreement, and citizenship gives people a real claim on the state.

In Pakistan's provincial surveys, fewer than one in five women who said they had been physically attacked reported that the police were told. Court records show how allegations can remain unresolved when accused people abscond, and how verdicts can remain contested for years.

Ahmadis made up 0.07 per cent of the population recorded by religion in the 2023 census, but 26 per cent of the people the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) recorded as accused of blasphemy between 2020 and 2025, including 141 of 362 in 2025. Most recorded accusations came from Punjab and Sindh; district totals cannot show whether accusations are followed by minority communities shrinking.

Across South Asia, citizens continue to protest even as democratic institutions weaken. Some movements have forced leaders from office; others have won concessions or sustained opposition under repression.

In April 1952, Pakistan’s first Constituent Assembly voted 41 to 12 to postpone a decision on recognising Bengali as a state language. Ten of the 12 who opposed delay also voted for both representation across communities and protections for non-Muslim personal laws. For them, recognising more than one language was part of recognising more than one kind of Pakistani.

Women’s turnout trailed men’s by about nine percentage points in 2024, close to the gap in 2018. It was nearly eighteen in Pashto-majority seats and eleven or more in the selected urban seats of most cities examined. A similar national average concealed different movements across the country.

Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan polled 2.9mn votes in 2024 and won no National Assembly seat. In 69 seats, it polled more votes than separated the winner from the runner-up. That count shows where the party’s voters could have mattered, not where they did.

How a computer sorts text into categories, why one label per text is often the wrong design, and what it takes to turn a classifier’s labels into a count worth publishing.

Two districts in Sindh: their reported forced conversions and abductions, minority populations, and figures on poverty, education, marriage, crime and the courts.