India and Pakistan must both face this test. Their political systems have different histories and structures, but an increasingly familiar response connects them: material grievances are met with coercion, dissent is treated as disloyalty, and national greatness is offered as compensation for insecurity in ordinary life. Neither the size of India’s electorate nor Pakistan’s constitutional declarations can excuse this erosion of citizenship.
Asim Ali’s “India’s Young Protesters are Reclaiming the Republic”, published in The India Forum on October 30, 2026, offers an important account of resistance. He interprets recent youth mobilisation as a revival of popular sovereignty against an increasingly exclusionary political order, drawing a parallel with the upheavals of the 1970s. His most consequential question is whether youthful anger can become a wider alliance involving workers, farmers, disadvantaged castes, religious minorities and the urban poor. That question deserves to travel across the border.[1]
The essay’s strength lies in recovering the citizen from the vocabulary of administration. People are more than beneficiaries, consumers, voters or entries in a security database. They possess the right to participate in determining the conditions of their common life. Its optimism, however, needs testing. A protest can disrupt authority without redistributing power. A courageous crowd does not automatically become a democratic organisation. The distance between occupying a public space and changing the institutions that govern employment, education and political representation remains considerable.
India’s claim to democratic distinction must be examined through the treatment of those exercising democratic rights. In July, Human Rights Watch reported excessive force against largely peaceful student and youth protesters in Delhi. Its investigation also verified an incident of protesters attacking a police officer. Accountability must apply to individual violence wherever it occurs; it cannot justify treating an entire movement as an enemy. In October, Amnesty International and other rights organisations condemned arbitrary detentions, restrictions on assembly, attacks on journalists and internet shutdowns surrounding further protests. These are documented challenges to the democratic claim, not merely disagreements over political style.[2][3]
The word “fascism” should neither be thrown casually at every repressive government nor withheld until democratic life has been extinguished. Its analytical value lies in identifying tendencies: the elevation of a leader above institutions, the portrayal of minorities as permanent outsiders, the conversion of criticism into betrayal, and the use or toleration of intimidation to enforce political conformity. We should assess these mechanisms carefully rather than assume that every contemporary authoritarian project reproduces twentieth-century Europe.
In India, the danger arises when electoral majorities are treated as permission to subordinate equal citizenship to a religious definition of the nation. No election gives a government ownership of the country or turns minorities into guests. A republic requires institutions capable of restraining its winners. Where those restraints weaken, voting can coexist with profound inequality in who may speak, organise and belong.
Pakistan’s route is different. Its authoritarian history has been shaped by military intervention, the enduring influence of the security establishment, civilian dependence on unelected power and the manipulation of religious legitimacy. The distinction matters. A comparison that simply calls both countries fascist can conceal how domination actually operates—and what democratic resistance must overcome.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan’s assessment of 2025 documented shrinking civic space, weakened judicial independence and the use of legal mechanisms to suppress dissent. It identified the targeting of journalists, political workers, activists and lawyers through electronic-crime, sedition and anti-terrorism provisions, alongside intimidation and reports of enforced disappearances.
These practices make participation dangerous well beyond the individuals directly affected. A summons, arrest or disappearance communicates a warning to families, colleagues and entire communities.[4]
Pakistan’s predicament cannot accurately be described as an absence of protest. That would erase people already paying a formidable price for resistance. Baloch and Pashtun rights movements, opposition workers and other civic groups have faced repression documented by rights organisations. In Pakistan-administered Azad Jammu and Kashmir, organised mobilisation has also challenged authority. HRCP’s August fact-finding statement called for political dialogue, scrutiny of alleged excessive force and a review of anti-terrorism measures used against activists. Its findings included conflicting accounts of violence, making independent investigation essential.[5][6]
The sharper question is why these struggles have not become a durable nationwide coalition around democratic rights and economic justice. Pakistan has anger, courage and repeated mobilisation. What remains inadequate is the organisational connection between a regional rights campaign, a salaried household’s declining purchasing power, a worker’s insecurity and a student’s blocked future.
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Repression helps explain that separation, but so does political selectivity. A party may defend protest when excluded from office and discover the virtues of restrictive orders once it controls the administration. Citizens are encouraged to condemn coercion against their own camp while excusing it against opponents. Under these conditions, constitutional rights become partisan conveniences. An establishment that faces divided objections can isolate its critics one group at a time.
Pakistan’s recurring failure has been the willingness of civilian parties to accept coercion when it is directed at their rivals. The immediate advantage is tempting. The lasting consequence is an apparatus of repression that survives changes of government and becomes available against its previous beneficiaries. Each party’s turn in opposition then produces a renewed discovery of rights it neglected in office.
Economic distress deepens the problem. Pakistan Bureau of Statistics recorded national consumer-price inflation of 10.26 percent in September 2026 compared with September 2025. The World Bank’s October poverty brief reported that the national poverty rate rose from 22 percent in 2018–19 to 29 percent in 2024–25. These figures measure different periods and phenomena, but together they expose the gulf between official reassurance and household vulnerability.[7][8]
Even a subsequent decline in the inflation rate would not restore the purchasing power already lost. Slower price increases do not mean that food, transport, rent or electricity have returned to earlier levels. Families experience the accumulated cost of successive shocks, depleted savings and postponed medical treatment. A household that has withdrawn a child from education does not recover that lost opportunity because the next monthly inflation release looks better.
However, hardship does not mechanically produce rebellion. It can also exhaust the capacity to resist. A daily-wage worker must consider the income lost by attending a demonstration. An insecure employee must weigh dismissal. Parents must calculate the consequences of a child’s arrest. Organisation lowers these individual risks by providing solidarity, legal support, credible leadership and continuity. Where those institutions are weak or obstructed, private suffering can grow without becoming collective political power.
This is why democratic reconstruction requires more than calls for people to “come out”. Such appeals can become an evasion by those who face fewer consequences. Student representation, independent trade unions, functioning local government, professional associations and accessible legal remedies create the everyday capacity for citizenship. HRCP has itself called for stronger trade unions, restoration of student unions and attention to living wages and public services. These are essential foundations for sustained participation.[9]
There is a warning here for the celebration of youth in India as well. Youth is not inherently emancipatory. Young people can defend pluralism, but they can also be mobilised through religious hatred, misogyny and authoritarian nationalism.
The democratic character of a movement depends on its commitments and conduct. Does it defend the rights of people outside its immediate constituency? Can women influence its decisions? Does it permit disagreement within its own ranks? Will it oppose repression when its political allies exercise power?
Employment demands become transformative when connected to these questions. Otherwise, protest may secure a concession for one group while leaving the machinery of exclusion intact. A recruitment dispute can expose a wider failure of government, but an inclusive movement must also recognise the worker without a degree, the woman performing unpaid labour and the minority citizen whose insecurity cannot be reduced to unemployment.
For Pakistan, the missing national conversation is equally clear. Who bears adjustment through taxation, utility charges and deteriorating services? Who retains protection, influence and access to public resources? Why is sacrifice presented as unavoidable for households while accountability remains negotiable for the powerful? Economic policy becomes an authoritarian instrument when those required to bear its costs are denied effective opportunities to challenge its design.
India’s protesters deserve attention because they insist that citizenship includes the right to question power. Pakistan’s protesters deserve recognition for making the same claim under different conditions. Neither struggle should become material for the other country’s nationalist self-congratulation. Condemning repression across the border while rationalising it at home is an abandonment of principle.
Pakistanis should also resist repression of any kind and persecution of anyone for his faith or ideas to build a society in which speaking honestly does not endanger a household’s livelihood or security.
Remembering and supporting such dissidents, I. A Rehman sahib’s own memoir is titled ‘A life of dissident’, throughout his life till death had been demanding practical commitments: protection of peaceful dissent, independent journalism, fair trials, credible elections and effective civilian accountability. These freedoms must extend to people whose politics we dislike. Otherwise, our defence of democracy amounts to a demand that our own side be allowed to govern without restraint.
The most relevant question in today’s Pakistan is whether those who respect political disagreements would also raise their voices for tolerance by State of right of speech and expression for all, including peaceful political agitators and non-conformists criticizing the rotten system of oppression, tax extraction, and agitating against the protection of economic privileges and immunities for a few.
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Would the State provide a public platform? Would they listen to their accounts of exploitation, inequality, hunger and state coercion in collecting taxes and repression for expressing political disagreements?
As a nation, we owe more than applause for all courageous, peaceful dissidents alive including Husain Naqi, Zuha Siddiqui, Naziha Syed Ali, Farzana Ali, Jamshed Baghwan, Malik Siraj Akbar and Kiyya Baloch—just to mention a few—and not only the dead ones: Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Habib Jalib, Ahmad Faraz, Fahmida Riaz, Asma Jahangir, I. A. Mughal, Rahimullah, Rahimullah Yousafzai et el, and of course numerous jailed political workers and intellectuals convicted for their ideas—unsung heroes of Pakistan.
The republic is not reclaimed by replacing one unaccountable ruler with another. It is reclaimed when rights survive changes of government, when economic policy answers to those living with its consequences, and when the dissenter enjoys the same protection as the loyalist. A state frightened by these demands reveals the distance it has travelled from democratic government. Citizens asking for bread, dignity and a voice are not endangering the republic. They are asking it to become real.
Endnotes
- 1. Asim Ali, “India’s Young Protesters are Reclaiming the Republic”, The India Forum, 30 October 2026.
- 2. Human Rights Watch, “India: Excessive Force Used Against Student Protesters”, 23 July 2026.
- 3. Amnesty International, CIVICUS, Front Line Defenders and South Asians for Human Rights, “India: End the crackdown on peaceful protests and release arbitrarily detained protesters”, October 2026.
- 4. Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, “Freedom of expression, rule of law under stress: HRCP launches 2025 report”, 4 May 2026.
- 5. CIVICUS Monitor, “Pakistan: Activists targeted, Baloch human rights defenders convicted and repression of protest movement and reporting on Azad Jammu and Kashmir”, September 2026.
- 6. Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, “HRCP mission calls for urgent, inclusive political dialogue in AJK”, 29 August 2026.
- 7. Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, Consumer Price Index press release, September 2026, yearly analysis.
- 8. World Bank, Pakistan Poverty and Equity Brief, October 2026, 8 October 2026. Poverty figures refer to the national poverty line.
- 9. Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, “HRCP general body calls for consensus on civilian autonomy, climate justice and land rights”.