TRUST is the new buzzword in global politics. Western democracies in particular are preoccupied with rebuilding trust between the state and citizens in an effort to repair a post-World War II social contract that has eroded with growing income inequality, heightened corruption, and cost-of-living crises. Big ideas floating around Western governments are linked to preservation of the social contract: data privacy, universal basic incomes, state support for the green transition. Pakistanis watching this trend should ask: how do you restore what you never had?

The social contract is a useful construct for thinking about the relationship between the state and its citizens. The term is used for the formal or informal rules governing how the state and citizens behave and interact with each other, and what obligations they have to each other.

Sadly, the social contract in Pakistan seems non-existent. Citizens are taking to the streets to decry political persecution, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings by the state, media censorship, and price hikes.

More notable is the number of issues that has not provoked a public outcry. Here’s just a sampling: a public order law that essentially bans peaceful public protest; the installation of a ‘web management system’ that will likely make a mockery of data privacy; proposed constitutional amendments to fix the chief justice’s term, skewing executive-judiciary dynamics and threatening judicial independence; abuse of antiterrorism laws, including the recent decision to allow for preventive detention of suspected terrorists in Balochistan without any charges or court orders; proposals for domestic ‘internment centres’; the findings of an audit of military institutions that highlights how the rules apply selectively. You get the picture.

Sadly, the social contract in Pakistan seems non-existent.

There are of course a growing number of groups ready to call out the mounting violations of the social contract, from PTI supporters to the Baloch Yakjehti Committee, the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement to Aurat March and digital rights groups. These groups’ failure to coalesce into a broader civil society movement against state transgressions is often attributed to ethno-linguistic differences. But it may be more helpful to consider this through a social contract lens.

Markus Loewe et al in their work on the Middle East point out that social contracts are asymmetric and hierarchical, writing “some citizens and societal groups are more influential than others and have more say in the nature and content of the social contracts”. This plurality of social contracts explains why Pakistan will not go the way of Bangladesh, with a unified uprising. The expectations of the state from each group vary: one feels its social contract has been violated because it is excluded from elite state patronage, another feels betrayed because its loved ones are being arbitrarily abducted.

It is a damning critique of our country that there are such inequities in the social contracts negotiated, and that the baseline assumptions of most social contracts (transparency, inclusion, accountability) do not apply. State representatives’ growing willingness to shamelessly negotiate divergent social contracts for a privileged few was on display recently with electricity subsidies for some but not others.

Recognising the plurality of social contracts also explains why, despite worsening conditions, more Pakistanis are not panicking. For many citizens, there never was a social contract. Their negotiated expectations extended to their families, tribes, feudal lords. The state never had anything to do with it, and so the state’s failings and exc­e­sses now remain irrelevant.

The other challenge in Pakistan is that the citizens’ counterparty in the social contract remains nebulous. In other contexts (Western democracies or explicitly authoritarian states), it’s clear to all who they have negotiated their social contracts with, and where accountability lies. The perversity of our hybrid system is that the social contract cannot be enforced because the real counterparty remains veiled.

So where do we go from here? For many Pakistanis, the social contract on offer is unacceptable, and they are simply choosing to opt out (formal estimates suggest that 1.6 million Pakistanis have emigrated over the past two years; the informal number is likely higher). But it could get worse.

When a nation’s citizenry cannot agree on the base terms of a social contract among themselves, and the state is not willing to participate in contracts with all its citizens, then fragmentation is inevitable. We must halt this terrifying trajectory. The state must renegotiate its social contract with Pakistani citizens, and they, in turn, must collectively seek an equal and inclusive contract among them.

The writer is a political and integrity risk analyst.

X: @humayusuf

Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2024