THOSE of us who have seen this cycle before know it has already become ridiculous when the former horsemen of the hybrid parade start quoting Martin Neimoller and how ‘they’ eventually came for everyone.

All the reasoning and rationale which informs safe public commentary goes out of the window in these times, because nothing makes sense anymore. Why would a Twitter user with 200 followers disappear for the day?

Why would you pick up a social rights activist, other than for the show? A senior lawyer of a prominent law firm who met a client you didn’t like? As if the world was being told this is how desperately angry we are; and how little we care about what the world or anyone thinks of us.

Toddlers sometimes act out by hitting their parents. I had first tried to postulate that the way the powerful have behaved since the events of May was akin to an angry toddler landing a particularly hard punch in a sensitive spot, and the father reacting by hitting her back. But that isn’t the right example.

A father’s relationship with his child is a legitimate, immediate and hierarchical one. The father would be abusing that relationship, but there would at least be an underlying relationship for them to abuse.

Instead, it is more like a child punching a guard outside their residence building and the guard reacting by kidnapping them, and holding them until he decides on the punishment. (In this example, the toddler may also have burnt to the ground the best portion of the family apartment only to later discover that this belonged to the guard too.)

And on and on this macabre show will continue, until it cannot anymore because no one has any clothing left to give.

Horrified by this kidnapping, but afraid of the gun which he himself bought and gave to the guard, the father turns to the other guards who are employed by the building residents’ association; in part through his own contributions to the building maintenance fund.

They convene and, in the end, pass a declaration supporting the first guard’s actions. They tell the father to watch out before they come to take his wife next. They tell him it is all according to the laws of the building, which they have decided to interpret for him; that all the guards are beloved by the residents; and that everyone supports the current actions against his toddler’s miscreant nature. They say the guards have all the evidence they need to play judge and jury. ‘I teach your child these lessons to honour the guards that sacrificed their lives defending people like you in the past’; the original guard insists.

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Then you turn up at the residents’ association. Except, all they want to do is to remind you of your past coddling of the set of guards who came before this team and how you probably deserve it.

We are told we all love the guard for what he does to us, and to beware and not get in his way. We are told to watch out for his investigation into the planners behind the toddler’s punch. At the end of the month, we are also told to pay his wages. Sometimes he brings us the cheque to sign; otherwise he just goes to the bank with his gun and gets the clerk to take the money out of our account. We have been in overdraft for decades.

Once again, Pakistan has waged the only war it has repeatedly won: the ones started against our own Constitution and countrymen.

During war, the law falls silent. This isn’t supposed to be a dictum to follow: it is a tragic acceptance that when we are at our worst as a society, we ignore the rules that bring us to our best as a society. It is a tragic lament of how, when we are at our worst, we forget what makes us human.

It should also not be the state of the Supreme Court and its chief — where the lack of action beyond soundbites and cowering reactions to other soundbites are in themselves an act of surrender. The senior most judge in the country asks us to ‘learn to deal with it rather than complaining’ when faced with disappearing lawyers. Hard to believe that a mere seven weeks ago, people were looking towards his court with the hope that it would bring down the wall.

Adding to the farce is that this legal silence proceeds from a declaration of war against your own citizenry. We’re all very scared. You win. We all love you very much. Do you want proof? Hold an election.

A quick note for all the civilian abettors who lose themselves in the excitement caused by the coercive arm of the state as it flexes against its own citizens. Each thread of dignity and due process torn today will be replaced with material from your own clothing tomorrow. And on and on this macabre show will continue, until it cannot anymore because no one has any clothing left to give.

And there we will all stand, denuded and prostrate, before the naked might of our own state. Until we realise that none of this was to scale, and the strength of a state is determined not by its ability to display strength and achieve compromises inward, but outward. A swift realisation that, after all, we have existed in a geographical viper’s pit.

That the tune to which the state was flexing was not the national anthem, but the snake charmer’s melody playing all around us. And as the melody stops and the snakes come out of their stupor, we will realise that all we have really succeeded at is to render ourselves defenceless.

The writer is a lawyer.
Twitter: @jaferii

Published in Dawn, July 8th, 2023