Nearly eight decades after shedding colonial rule, Pakistan remains trapped in an agonizing paradox: its people are still fighting for genuine liberation, now constrained by the very state institutions built to govern them. The visionary, democratic ideals of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and its founding architects have withered, systematically eclipsed by a deeply entrenched military establishment that orchestrates power from behind a fragile civilian facade. From the historical marginalisation of Jinnah’s legacy to the present-day erosion of judicial independence and civil liberties, the democratic framework lies thoroughly compromised. As regional unrest swells, economic vulnerabilities mount, and political leaders perform grovelling displays of servility to military elites, the state staggers under an existential crisis. Devoid of a coherent roadmap for national progress, Pakistan’s independence endures as a tragic, unfulfilled promise, leaving its citizens locked in a perpetual struggle for true democratic freedom.
Pakistan recently celebrated its 79th Independence Day. It is time to reflect on what Pakistan has achieved since it was partitioned from India in 1947. Today, Pakistan appears to be standing at the same crossroads where it was in 1947—in fact, in a much worse condition. While a civilian government is officially in charge, the military establishment has taken real control behind the scenes and is effectively running the country. Pakistan’s people, although they achieved a separate country, are still not truly free. When Pakistan was created, the political and intellectual vision associated with its leading figures—including Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Allama Iqbal, Liaquat Ali Khan, Chaudhry Rahmat Ali, and A.K. Fazlul Huq—was very different.
In the current post-2008 phase of what is being touted as ‘democratic politics’, Pakistan is run by a hybrid regime where the elected government and the military share power apparently without much dissonance between them. However, looking at the locus of real power, this system of accommodation notwithstanding, it is a de facto military regime. The country's democratic framework is thoroughly compromised, characterised by persistent election tampering and keeping the elected prime ministers under a tight leash. The military has had the last laugh in such a system, as no elected prime minister has been allowed to complete a full five-year term.
From Security State to Military-Led State
There is little space for the rule of law, civil rights, a genuinely free media, accountability, or transparency. Instead, propaganda has become a defining feature of what is increasingly a military-led state rather than merely a security state. A security state is primarily organised around national security and the perceived need to protect the state from internal and external threats; a military-led state goes further, with the military establishment exercising direct or decisive influence over politics, governance, the economy, and other state institutions. Pakistan increasingly fits the latter description. The military establishment is going to further entrench itself in the power architecture through the upcoming 28th and 29th Constitutional Amendments, systematically stripping the judiciary of whatever little power and independence it still has, with Field Marshal Asim Munir likely to become President of Pakistan!
There have been repeated military takeovers throughout Pakistan’s history, and, shockingly, some of these interventions have been welcomed by sections of the public, with people even distributing sweets to celebrate the military’s assumption of power. The truth is that Pakistani society itself—with the regressive role of sections of the Muslim clergy, vested interests, deeply rooted feudal values, military dominance, and an underdeveloped political culture—has contributed to this continuing crisis.
In fact, disrespect for democracy has been there since the very beginning of the conceptualisation of the state of Pakistan. League leaders were very apprehensive of the electoral process that is the bedrock of the democratic system because British India was dominated by numerically preponderant Hindus. Iqbal gravitated towards a electoral system where different voters had different weight depending on their education and perhaps upbringing and was critical of Western-style democracy. In one of his famous verses, he wrote: “Jamhooriyat ik tarz-e-hukumat hai ki jis mein bandon ko gina karte hain, taula nahi karte”—“Democracy is a form of government in which people are counted, not weighed”—suggesting that democracy merely counts people rather than assessing their individual worth. Jinnah, looking at his tendency to concentrate power in his position as governor general following the birth of Pakistan, believed in democracy but gravitated towards executive presidency kind of a system rather than a parliamentary one. Following him most leaders have tried to assume maximum power even through parliamentary means and fallen out with the military, leading either to their downfall or military takeover. It is only since Shehbaz Sharif’s assumption of office that one has seen a willing leader who does not mind being overridden by the military leadership and taking the evolution of the hybrid system since 2008, to bizarre length, turning it almost into a de facto military dictatorship.
Betrayal of Jinnah’s Vision
This contradiction is also reflected in the way Pakistan has treated Jinnah and those closest to him. The tragic manner in which Jinnah was treated at the end of his life—left stranded in a broken-down military ambulance on a desolate Karachi roadside on 11 September 1948, while Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan and his political successors politically isolated him—exposed the structural flaws of the nascent state. He was left for over an hour in suffocating heat next to refugee camps, with his sister Fatima Jinnah forced to swat away flies as he coughed blood, entirely unassisted by any backup convoy.
The subsequent state-sponsored targeting of his sister, Fatima Jinnah, further exposed the deep hypocrisy of the establishment. On the third anniversary of Jinnah's death in 1951, her microphone was intentionally disconnected by Radio Pakistan when she refused to remove passages critical of the government from her speech. When she emerged from retirement to contest the 1965 presidential election against military dictator Field Marshal Ayub Khan, state-backed entities smeared her as an "Indian and American spy" and a traitor to Nazaria-e-Pakistan (the Ideology of Pakistan). Her biography of her brother, My Brother, was aggressively banned and censored by the Quaid-i-Azam Academy, taking 32 years to finally see its publication in 1987 with critical pages missing. Her subsequent loss to Ayub Khan was engineered through a restricted, systematically rigged electoral system of 80,000 hand-picked electors, despite massive public support across East and West Pakistan.
The tragic erasure of Rattanbai, the love Jinnah’s life and his wife, remains one of the political establishment's most haunting betrayals. A woman of unbound spirit and quiet defiance, she lived with an uncompromising grace that the orthodoxy simply could not forgive. She had slipped away in a solitary hotel room on her twenty-ninth birthday—consumed by an agonizing illness and a suspected overdose— and Pakistani rulers chose to deny she ever existed! To preserve a sanitised, rigid narrative of the past, bureaucrats excised her name from national textbooks, erasing her companionship with Jinnah and dissolving her very presence from the nation's memory. Today, the woman who stood alongside the architect of independence sleeps in an unmarked, forgotten grave, abandoned to the quiet decay of time—a delicate life muted to serve “the vision of Pakistan” its founder, Jinnah had contemplated, which has been left to linger only as a sad, unacknowledged shadow in the country's history.
The marginalisation of Jinnah’s family and the distortion of his legacy were not merely relics of Pakistan’s early years; they foreshadowed a much broader crisis in which the state’s failure to live up to the ideals of its founders would increasingly manifest itself in political, institutional, economic, and security challenges.
Today, Pakistan faces even greater challenges and what increasingly resembles an existential crisis. From Balochistan, where the Baloch Liberation Army has intensified its insurgency through coordinated attacks targeting security installations, government facilities, infrastructure, and other strategic targets, and where the state has increasingly struggled to exercise effective control over large areas, to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which continues to face serious violence, particularly from the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), as well as growing political unrest in PoK and persistent instability in Sindh, instability is spreading across the country. These security challenges are compounded by persistent economic vulnerabilities and Pakistan’s continued dependence on IMF assistance. The country is currently operating under a 37-month IMF Extended Fund Facility approved in 2024, with stringent fiscal and structural reform requirements attached to the programme. With terrorism, economic fragility, and institutional tensions reinforcing one another, Pakistan appears to have reached a point of no return, facing a deeply uncertain future.
Yet the military establishment itself is responsible for much of the existing crisis. The establishment repeatedly argues that the existing system has failed, but who has actually controlled that system? The blame is often shifted onto civilian leadership, even though civilian governments have remained politically constrained and largely powerless. The military has exerted influence across the state and political economy, including through a massive multi-billion-dollar business empire. There is little clear structural differentiation between the military’s role and the functions of civilian institutions, with state institutions frequently operating beyond their primary mandates and the military becoming deeply involved in political, economic, administrative, and other spheres. Even if Pakistan makes administrative changes or creates additional provinces, as is now being discussed, little is likely to change unless genuine political power is transferred to civilian institutions. The fundamental problem is that civilian governments have to operate within a military-dominated framework, leaving them little political space to make independent decisions. Pakistan certainly needs reforms, but the military establishment has little incentive to permit reforms that could undermine its entrenched position. It has deeply embedded itself in society, the economy, politics, and other sectors while protecting its institutional and commercial interests. Therefore, the prospects for meaningful change remain limited.
Military Overshadows the Nation
This year’s 79th Independence Day celebrations appeared to reflect this reality. At the main event in Islamabad, Field Marshal Asim Munir, President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Defence Minister Khawaja Asif, and Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz, all of them from Punjab, were among the prominent figures present. There are four provinces in Pakistan, yet the leaders of the other provinces, apart from Punjab, were not invited. The event was visibly hijacked by the military.
More importantly, when Asif Ali Zardari, President of Pakistan, addressed the event, he was only buttering and flattering Field Marshal Asim Munir, publicly indulging in “ego-massaging” the army chief. Similarly, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was also flattering Asim Munir, and it seemed that the president and the prime minister were competing with each other as to who would win the contest of cosying up to the army chief. The political leadership had nothing to offer in terms of vision or roadmap for the country. Unable to bring peace at home, the leadership is seeking to make peace abroad and be a global peacemaker, forcing the media to offer exaggerated space and coverage to it.
This is as shameful as it gets, because the President of Pakistan occupies the country’s highest constitutional office. To see the holder of such a noble and revered institution stoop so low in publicly flattering a military chief is not merely embarrassing; it is a striking illustration of how far Pakistan’s civilian political leadership has been subordinated to the military establishment. It also exposes the opportunism of the civilian leadership, which appears more concerned with remaining in the military’s good books to secure its political survival rather than upholding the dignity and independence of the constitutional office it occupies. Similarly, Shehbaz Sharif risks being remembered in Pakistan’s political history as the first prime minister perhaps who is going to establish a record of completing his five year in office by surrendering his authority completely to the army chief, if not the army. He has taken hybridity to its logical conclusion— a de facto military-controlled state apparatus turning democracy to a joke.
In the speeches the leaders made, there was no emphasis on Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, or Iqbal, whose ideas are frequently invoked as intellectual foundations of the Pakistani state. The reported prominence given to photographs and visuals of Field Marshal Asim Munir, rather than those of Jinnah or other founding figures, was particularly symbolic. It suggests that the military has effectively hijacked the state of Pakistan and that there is little space for leaders people elect to act on their behalf, for taking care of their needs. In a military dominated system, the army chief and his cronies know best what is in the best interests of the state and its people!
Now contrast this with India. When Prime Minister Modi was addressing the country from the ramparts of the Red Fort, he talked about the future and laid out a roadmap for “Viksit Bharat” by 2047. He spoke about what should be done, and discussed the targets—including the “Saptadhara” framework for semiconductor plants, manufacturing, and AI skilling—and how we could achieve them.
In Pakistan, the day’s event was dominated by speakers eulogising the military leadership. There was no clear vision or credible roadmap for economic development, institutional reform, social stability, or national progress. The political leadership appeared more concerned with its survival, which depended more on ensuring blessings of the military establishment than seeking goodwill of the people by working sincerely for their betterment. Afterall, since 2018 at least, the military has found a way to manipulate the elections in favour of the leader or party that it considers more obedient and servile.
Independence Still A Far Cry
Given the depressed economic situation, rampant corruption, elite-capture of the state apparatus, rising prices, inflation, and increasing taxation day by day—which have placed an ever-growing burden on the common people—along with the deteriorating internal security situation and the continued imprisonment of popular leader Imran Khan, people were seen largely indifferent to the 14 August celebrations. The people are now aware that it is the ruling hybrid elites who are enjoying their lives, while they are leading their lives in misery and squalor.
The deeper tragedy of Pakistan is the collapse of its founding promise. Created in 1947 to embody a transformative social and political vision, the state has instead become defined by military dominance. Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the nation's founders have not simply been sidelined; their democratic ideals have been eclipsed by the institutional interests of the military establishment.
This reality forces a painful question: What became of the Pakistan its founders had envisioned?
Until civilian institutions are genuinely empowered, the military retreats from the political and economic spheres, democratic processes take root, and citizens secure true political freedom, Pakistan’s independence will remain an unfulfilled promise. The ultimate irony is stark: Pakistan won its freedom from British rule in 1947, yet nearly eight decades later, its citizens remain locked in a struggle for liberation from the very institutions built to govern them.
Dr. Imran Khurshid is an Associate Research Fellow at Centre for Peace Studies, New Delhi, India. The views are his own.
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