A country of our own

Pakistan’s constitution promises its citizens equal protection before the law and a say in how they are governed. This issue asks, with data, who that promise reaches. Two questions run through it. When you are harmed, does the state protect you? And when the state acts, do you have a voice in what it does? The answers differ by who you are: a woman, a member of a religious or ethnic minority, someone from the country’s political peripheries, a citizen who protests.

This is an experimental issue of Adaad. I am grateful to the experts who contributed their knowledge and support. Working with incomplete records also means asking whose experience reaches the official record, whose voice carries, and whose absence we have mistaken for silence.

We begin with violence against women. The killings of Hina Javed, Sana Yousaf and Sidra Bibi in Islamabad and Rawalpindi over the past eighteen months are a devastating reminder of how precarious women’s safety remains. The roots of violence against women run through entrenched misogyny, practices that make a woman’s life answerable to a family’s “honour”, and interpretations of religion that prescribe her obedience. These forces meet a changing society. Education, work and digital life open possibilities for women, while creating new arenas in which their independence is contested.

Our Big Read, No case for women, asks how effectively the state protects women. Across four provincial surveys, fewer than one in five women who had experienced a physical attack said the police were told. In a separate record, only around a quarter of gender-based violence court decisions in 2023 were recorded as convictions or acquittals after completion of trial. These figures raise questions about whether women can report violence and secure justice. The constitution’s promise of equal protection means little without police and courts that respond when women need them.

Spoken for asks how far women can participate on equal terms at the ballot box. The national gap between women’s and men’s turnout barely changed between 2018 and 2024, but it varies sharply across constituencies grouped by mother tongue. In 2024 it was about eighteen percentage points in Pashto-majority seats, compared with six in Sindhi-majority seats. These are differences between constituencies, whose causes need further investigation. When women face barriers to voting, others acquire greater power to define their interests and speak in their names.

The blasphemy laws raise another question about whom the state protects. Junaid Hafeez was arrested in 2013 and sentenced to death in 2019. Thirteen years on, his appeal is still before the Lahore High Court. His lawyer, Rashid Rehman, was murdered in 2014 after receiving threats for defending him. Such intimidation reaches beyond an accused person to those who might speak in their defence. Religious minorities face particular vulnerability: Ahmadis accounted for almost two in five people accused in the Centre for Social Justice’s 2025 record. Our feature, Accused out of proportion, examines these accusations alongside changes in religious communities’ recorded populations, asking what the evidence can tell us about security and belonging.

The district profiles describe Ghotki and Umerkot through their reported forced conversions and abductions, minority populations and district indicators. The Centre for Social Justice recorded 21 cases in Ghotki and 18 in Umerkot across 2021, 2023 and 2024; from 2023, these totals include abduction without conversion. Ghotki is also home to Bharchundi Sharif, a shrine that features in accounts investigated by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Its pir denied allegations of coercion in 2019. Behind the disputes over conversion and marriage lies a person whose age, wishes and safety the state must establish and protect. Who ensures that she can speak freely, and that her rights determine what happens next?

These questions reach into Pakistan’s founding arguments. A majority language and a minority cause returns to the Constituent Assembly to examine an argument that has run through the country’s politics ever since. The minority members who resisted delaying Bengali’s recognition also pressed for broader representation and safeguards against arbitrary power. They helped imagine Pakistan even as they were required to establish their right to shape it. Their defeated proposals belong to our inheritance too. The country we have reflects choices made in those early years, alongside possibilities that others fought to keep open.

Mobilised but not democratised examines South Asia’s persistent public mobilisation alongside its weakening democratic institutions. The protests in India over the revision of electoral rolls and the PTI march towards Islamabad give that question immediate force. People continue to organise, march and risk confrontation with the state. Whether a movement widens democratic freedoms depends partly on what it is marching for.

Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan’s defence of the blasphemy laws has profound implications for whose beliefs and speech are protected. Human Rights Watch’s account of a Lahore police report describes an organised group working with Federal Investigation Agency officers to entrap people online and extort them. Reporting cited by HRW links members of that group to TLP. Its rise also raises questions about state patronage: the Supreme Court’s Faizabad judgment noted cash handouts to protesters from men in uniform. Civil society has contested TLP’s politics, including through the Sindh Rawadari March, which faced a TLP counter-protest and police violence in 2024. The October 2025 crackdown brought another ban. It did not settle the arguments through which the party gained its influence.

Punching above its vote shows another source of that influence. TLP won 2.9mn votes in 2024 without winning a National Assembly seat. In 69 constituencies, its vote exceeded the margin between the winner and runner-up. That is no proof that it decided those contests, but it gives larger parties a reason to consider its voters when choosing candidates and policy platforms. A movement can shape political choices far beyond the seats it holds.

Human rights lawyers Imaan Mazari-Hazir and Hadi Ali Chattha had represented people accused of blasphemy and sought an investigation into the “blasphemy business” gang and its alleged links with state officials. In January, a court in Islamabad sentenced them to prison terms totalling 17 years each under the cybercrime law, for social media posts. They have appealed. On 17 September, the Supreme Court suspended their sentences and granted bail, but they were rearrested hours later in a separate protest-related case. They remain in prison at the time of publication. Their incarceration shows how precarious the freedom to challenge the state remains.

Eqbal Ahmad put the democratic requirement plainly: “without intervention of the public into power, without balances, without checks, there is no democracy.” The test is whether citizens can hold institutions to account, and whether movements defend everyone’s right to organise, protest and disagree, including their opponents.

We publish this issue amid a crackdown in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. On 11 October, the president declared an emergency and imposed governor’s rule, transferring the elected provincial government’s powers to the governor. The federal government cited deteriorating security and the fight against terrorism. In the days that followed, police arrested PTI workers and used baton charges and tear gas to disperse protesters. At least five protesters were injured in Bara on 13 October; police said they had arrested 50 people. Whatever the security case, people’s right to be represented should not depend on whom they vote for.

I want a Pakistan in which belonging is secure enough to accommodate disagreement, and citizenship gives people a real claim on the state. The strength of such a country comes from its people standing together by choice, not from their being made to stand in line.

In Subh-e-Azadi, Faiz wrote of a freedom whose promise remained unfulfilled. His closing lines still speak to the country we are trying to make:

abhi girani-e-shab mein kami nahin aai
najat-e-dida-o-dil ki ghari nahin aai
chale chalo ki wo manzil abhi nahin aai

The weight of night has not yet lifted.
The hour of deliverance for the eyes and heart has not yet come.
Let us go on, for we have not yet reached that destination.