Barrister Naveed Ahmed Qazi
The Punjab government’s decision to publicly name 89 banned and unregistered organisations, and to formally warn citizens against contributing funds to them, deserves acknowledgment as a constructive administrative step. The timing carries its own logic. Ramazan is the season when charitable impulses reach their annual peak, when millions of Pakistanis open their wallets with genuine religious conviction, trusting that their donations will reach those in need. Reminding the public at precisely this moment that financing proscribed outfits constitutes a criminal offence under the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1997 is both practically sensible and morally responsible. Providing helplines for citizens to report suspicious fundraising activity adds a layer of civic engagement that, on the surface at least, signals the government is approaching the matter with some degree of administrative seriousness.
But administrative seriousness and meaningful results are not the same thing, and Pakistan’s long history with proscription lists demands that we examine this latest move with clear eyes rather than reflexive approval.
The uncomfortable reality is that Pakistan has been producing lists of banned groups for a very long time. The exercise has become something of a ritual. A security incident occurs, or international pressure mounts, or a domestic political calculation demands visible action, and a fresh inventory of proscribed organisations is published with appropriate official gravity. Media coverage follows. Public statements are issued. And then, in most cases, the story fades. The outfits remain. Their leaders continue operating. Their funding continues flowing. Their infrastructure continues functioning. What changes is the name on the letterhead, or the banner above the donation booth, or the title of the charitable trust through which contributions are quietly channelled.
Many of the organisations appearing in the Punjab government’s current notification are not newcomers to such lists. Several have featured on government inventories of proscribed groups for the better part of two decades. The consistency of their appearance on these lists is itself an indictment of how the state has handled them. Surviving a formal ban once might be attributed to administrative failure or resource constraints. Surviving successive bans across multiple governments, multiple security environments, and multiple counterterrorism frameworks suggests something more systemic: that the state has consistently treated proscription as a destination rather than a starting point.
These organisations have mastered the art of institutional resilience. When one name becomes too politically toxic to use publicly, a new name is registered. When a central organisation draws too much scrutiny, it splinters into smaller units that each operate below the threshold of concentrated attention. When direct fundraising becomes difficult, welfare wings and ostensibly charitable trusts absorb donations from well-meaning citizens who have no idea they are funding an organisation whose parent entity the state has formally designated as a threat. The leadership stays the same. The ideology stays the same. The operational networks stay the same. Only the packaging changes, and the state keeps cataloguing the old packaging long after the contents have already moved elsewhere.
This exposes the fundamental limitation of warning the public rather than prosecuting the perpetrators. When the government instructs citizens not to donate to banned groups, it is essentially assigning to ordinary people a responsibility that belongs to the state. The average Pakistani making a charitable contribution during Ramazan cannot be expected to cross-reference donation requests against lists of proscribed organisations, map the network of aliases a particular group may be operating under, or identify which welfare trust is a front for which banned entity. That intelligence work, that investigative capacity, and that enforcement authority rests entirely with the state. Shifting the moral and legal burden downward to individual donors is not accountability. It is abdication dressed up as public awareness.
The credibility dimension of this problem is equally serious and deserves direct confrontation. When a banned organisation holds a public rally in a major city, the images travel instantly across social media. When a proscribed group collects donations at a busy market during Ramazan with no visible consequence, ordinary citizens draw the only logical conclusion available to them: that the ban is formal but not real, that proscription is a symbolic gesture the state makes to satisfy certain audiences without any genuine intention of enforcement. This perception is deeply corrosive. It tells the public that the government’s counterterrorism commitments are performative rather than substantive. It tells the banned organisations themselves that they can absorb the political cost of appearing on a list without suffering any operational disruption. And it undermines every future enforcement initiative, because the state’s credibility has already been spent.
Pakistan’s encounter with terrorism has not been abstract or statistical. It has been catastrophic and intimate. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed. Security personnel have laid down their lives in numbers that represent a national tragedy of the highest order. Markets, mosques, schools, and military installations have been attacked. Entire communities have been displaced by violence rooted in the same extremist ecosystems that these proscribed organisations either belong to or enable. Against the weight of that history, publishing a list of 89 groups is not progress. It is preparation. The question is whether what follows constitutes genuine enforcement or another cycle of symbolic action.
Real enforcement looks specific and it looks uncomfortable. It means prosecuting the financiers who fund banned organisations, not merely identifying them in intelligence files. It means freezing bank accounts with the full power of financial investigative tools and sustaining those freezes through legal processes that resist political interference. It means preventing listed organisations from using social media platforms to recruit, radicalise, and collect funds under rebranded identities. It means dismantling the physical infrastructure, the offices, the printing presses, the safe houses, the communication networks that allow these groups to persist regardless of what they are called on any given week. It means pursuing asset seizures aggressively and prosecuting rebranding as the evasion of a legal order, not as a fresh start requiring a fresh investigation.
Without this resolve, without sustained enforcement that operates independently of political convenience, today’s list of 89 banned groups will follow the well-worn trajectory of its predecessors. It will be documented, announced, and forgotten. The groups will survive, adapt, and reappear. And the state will eventually produce another list, under another government, citing many of the same names, and wonder why nobody takes the exercise seriously anymore.
The list is not the achievement. What comes after it is.
