Dr Bilawal Kamran
Pakistan’s political class has a recurring habit. It gestures toward dialogue, speaks the language of reconciliation, and then watches the moment pass without anything actually changing. This week offered another example of that habit, and the question worth asking is whether this time will be different, or whether the country is simply rehearsing a script it has performed too many times before.
On Monday, Rana Sanaullah, the prime minister’s aide on political affairs, extended what sounded like a genuine olive branch. He invited opposition lawmakers to return to the parliamentary committees they had walked out of, framing the move as a potential restart of the reconciliation process. He invoked the Charter of Democracy, that document from a different political era when rivals sat down and agreed that destroying each other was destroying the country. He said the government wanted to strengthen democracy. He said it wanted to avoid confrontation and deadlock. He said, plainly and without apparent qualification, that the ruling party was ready to sit with the opposition for the betterment of Pakistan.
Taken on its own terms, this was a significant statement. Governments in Pakistan do not typically use the language of partnership with those they regard as political opponents. Sanaullah’s words, if they reflected genuine intent rather than tactical positioning, represented exactly the kind of opening that political crises require before they can begin to resolve themselves.
But the problem is that Pakistan has been here before. Proposals for dialogue between the country’s major political stakeholders have been floated repeatedly across this entire cycle of instability. They have been floated in press conferences, in television interviews, in parliamentary speeches, and in back-channel conversations that never quite reach the front channels. And repeatedly, they have found no takers. The invitation goes out. Nobody walks through the door. The instability continues.
What makes this moment marginally different is that the opposition, too, is sending signals that suggest at least a partial willingness to engage. Raja Nasir Abbas, the opposition leader in the Senate, offered something that required real political discipline to say. He assured the government that the opposition would not conspire to bring down the current administration on the instruction of any outside actor, even if the opposition considered the legitimacy of the present setup to be genuinely questionable. That is not a small concession. It is an acknowledgment that political disagreement, however deep, does not justify destabilisation.
But Abbas did not offer this without conditions, and the conditions he named matter. He expressed serious concern about parliament being physically surrounded last week to confine lawmakers who were staging a protest on its premises. He called it an insult to parliament, and he was right to call it that. A legislature that cannot be used freely as a space for political expression is not functioning as a legislature. It is functioning as a venue for managed performances, and everyone in Pakistan’s political class knows the difference.
He also raised the question of Imran Khan’s health in Rawalpindi’s Adiala jail. This is not a peripheral issue. It sits at the centre of the entire political impasse. The opposition’s position, as Abbas articulated it, is straightforward: the PTI founder should be allowed medical treatment in the presence of his own physicians, to the satisfaction of his family. This is not a demand for his release. It is not a demand for the abandonment of whatever legal processes are underway. It is a demand that a human being in state custody be treated with the basic standard of care that any prisoner, regardless of their political identity, is entitled to receive. Abbas was correct to identify it as a point that should not be allowed to escalate into a larger crisis, because it can and it will if it remains unaddressed.
So the architecture of a potential dialogue exists. Both sides are speaking in tones that are less hostile than what Pakistan has become accustomed to. Both sides appear to understand, at least at this moment, that the current trajectory serves no one’s long-term interests. And yet the gap between speaking about dialogue and actually conducting it remains as wide as it has ever been.
The reason for that gap is trust, or rather the complete absence of it. Neither side is confident that the other’s gestures are sincere rather than tactical. Neither side is willing to be the one that takes the first step and finds itself stranded in the middle. The fear is not irrational. Pakistani political history contains enough examples of extended hands that were extended only to be withdrawn, of negotiations that were begun only to be weaponized, to justify a degree of caution on both sides.
But caution has become paralysis, and paralysis is costing the country.
There is another obstacle that deserves to be named directly. The social media environment surrounding Pakistan’s politics has become genuinely toxic in ways that make leadership harder, not easier. Every attempt by an opposition figure to pursue a political problem through political means is immediately reframed online as betrayal or surrender. Every government gesture toward accommodation is immediately characterized as weakness or conspiracy. The people doing this reframing are largely those who have no accountability for the consequences of the deadlock they are helping to perpetuate. They comment from the outside. The country lives with the results on the inside.
The government has contributed to this environment by treating routine political expression as though it were a security threat. When ordinary dissent is criminalized, when protest becomes a prosecutable offense, when parliamentary premises are surrounded to prevent lawmakers from doing what lawmakers are supposed to do, the space for the respectful disagreement that genuine democracy requires simply disappears. You cannot invite people to dialogue in the morning and treat their political activities as subversion in the afternoon.
Both sides know what is needed. The political will to provide it has not yet appeared. Pakistan has been patient with its political class for a long time. That patience is not inexhaustible, and the country’s problems are not waiting for the dialogue to begin.
