Activists of Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, 2018. Image: PPI/Zuma Press/PA Images.Pakistan is set to go to the polls on July 25th. Trusting the general elections will go ahead, they will mark an important step towards strengthening the country’s democratic process. But there is still much more to be done: democracy is not confined to the ballot box. Despite the progress made in the past decade, Pakistan continues to be bewitched by an array of partially real, partially imagined threats. The figures at very top of Pakistani society have spun a powerful narrative of a nation under constant attack, which dismisses any criticism or dissent as either ‘foreign influence’ or ‘anti-patriotic’ politics; a tactic that has been deployed in response to protests by the country’s ethnic minority communities. How Pakistan responds to these nascent movements is as much a test case for democracy as the forthcoming elections.
Pakistan is slowly moving away from a decade that was marked by a wave of terrorism. According to the South Asia Terrorism Portal, a website that monitors terrorism across the region, civilian deaths from terrorist attacks have fallen from 3000 in 2013 to 540 in 2017. Indiscriminate attacks have posed a constant challenge for the state, and civilians have paid the price of the country’s unconditional support for the United States-led “war on terror”. Only after a ruthless attack on a school in Peshawar in 2014 which killed 132 pupils has the government made a decisive turn towards a fully-fledged counterterrorism strategy, with the aim of eliminating once and for all the menace that has left severe open wounds across the country.
Pashtuns have been demonised as violent extremists, traffickers, and Taliban sympathisers
