Paying tribute to Miskeen Jahan Khan Khoso, a lege…

“Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”— Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, The Russell–Einstein Manifesto, 1955 War hysteria sweeping the world shows nothing more than absolute insanity on the part of all belligerent parties. Humanity can explore distant planets, communicate across continents within seconds and build machines capable of imitating human intelligence, yet it still appears incapable of resolving disputes without bombing cities, starving populations and producing generations of traumatised children. There are people struggling with poverty, food shortages, unemployment, high inflation, disease and homelessness. Then there are their so-called leaders—some elected, some imposed, some in uniform and others protected by manufactured democratic legitimacy—who remain obsessed with gunfire, drones, missiles, nuclear warheads and weapons of mass destruction. This is not leadership. It is organised madness presented as patriotism. Look at Gaza. Nearly 1.9 million of its 2.1 million inhabitants remain displaced, many of them repeatedly, while restrictions and operational constraints continue to obstruct humanitarian relief. Families are pushed from one devastated neighbourhood to another, carrying whatever they can salvage. For them, “strategic operations” mean ruined homes, unsafe water, inadequate food, fractured hospitals and children learning the geography of survival before they learn the alphabet. Look at Ukraine. During the first six months of 2026, the United Nations verified 1,396 civilian deaths and 7,978 injuries—a 37 per cent increase over the corresponding period of 2025. June recorded the highest monthly civilian casualty total since April 2022. Yet the war continues to be discussed through maps, territorial percentages and weapon packages, as though the dead were merely inconvenient entries in a military balance sheet. Look at Sudan, where a contest for power has become a war against the population itself. About 19.5 million people face acute hunger, five million are at emergency levels and an estimated 825,000 children under five are expected to suffer acute malnutrition during 2026. Several areas remain at risk of famine while humanitarian agencies struggle for access and resources. The world can finance bullets that arrive on time, but food and medicine are eternally delayed. Now look at the ever-expanding Middle Eastern conflict. What began as confrontation involving Israel, the United States and Iran has steadily drawn other states into its orbit. The latest joint military strikes by the United States and Saudi Arabia against Iran-aligned armed groups operating in Iraq demonstrate how quickly regional conflicts acquire new participants and new frontlines. Iraq, itself struggling to preserve its sovereignty and internal stability, has once again become a battleground for rival powers. Every new military operation is justified as retaliation or deterrence, yet each one merely widens the geography of destruction and pushes peace still further beyond reach. The consequences are not confined to the combatants. Energy infrastructure, shipping routes and humanitarian supply corridors remain vulnerable, while the risks of slower global growth, renewed inflation and economic instability continue to rise. Once again, decisions taken in heavily guarded capitals are paid for by ordinary families thousands of kilometres away. That is the cruel arithmetic of modern warfare. The latest strikes in Iraq also expose another dangerous reality. Countries that once claimed merely to support one side diplomatically are now becoming direct military participants. Every additional state entering the conflict reduces the space for negotiation while increasing the possibility of miscalculation. History repeatedly demonstrates that wars rarely remain confined within the boundaries imagined by those who initiate them. They expand geographically, economically and morally, dragging into their vortex nations and populations that neither sought nor desired confrontation. A missile is fired in the Middle East and transport and electricity can become more expensive in Pakistan. A shipping route is blocked and food prices rise in poor importing countries. Oil installations are attacked and workers whose wages were already inadequate are advised to “adjust” their household budgets. The poor neither declare wars nor negotiate ceasefires. They merely finance wars through taxes, inflation and deprivation—and then provide their bodies. The scale of this moral collapse is evident from global priorities. Military expenditure reached a record US$2.887 trillion in 2025, marking the eleventh consecutive annual increase. In the same world, approximately 645 million people faced hunger during 2025 and around 2.7 billion could not afford a healthy diet. There is no global shortage of money. There is a shortage of conscience, political courage and human decency. Governments insist that military expenditure ensures security. Security for whom? What security does a mother possess when she cannot feed her children? What security is enjoyed by an unemployed graduate, a patient unable to afford medicine or a farmer crushed by fuel and fertiliser prices? Of what use are supersonic aircraft to citizens living without clean water, functioning schools or basic healthcare? Even more frightening is the renewed worship of nuclear weapons. At the beginning of 2026, the world possessed an estimated 12,187 nuclear warheads. About 9,745 were held in military stockpiles for possible use, while between 2,100 and 2,200 deployed warheads remained on high operational alert. Leaders speak of deterrence, escalation ladders and tactical nuclear options as though they were discussing pieces on a chessboard rather than devices capable of extinguishing cities and contaminating generations. The language of war has also been deliberately sanitised. Bombing becomes an “operation”; dead civilians become “collateral damage”; starvation becomes “food insecurity”; demolished homes become “infrastructure losses”; and children torn apart by explosives become “unintended consequences.” Such expressions do not explain reality. They hide it. They allow those ordering violence to sleep peacefully while others search for their loved ones through rubble. Responsibility in every conflict is not necessarily equal. International law distinguishes aggression from self-defence, occupation from resistance and military targets from civilians. But no invocation of history, religion, national security or territorial ambition can justify treating innocent human suffering as politically useful or morally irrelevant. Every party that deliberately attacks civilians, blocks essential relief, uses starvation as leverage or prolongs war for domestic political survival must be held accountable. Citizens must also confront their own complicity. War hysteria cannot survive without

In August 2022, satellite images showed the Indus River in Pakistan swelling to more than ten times its normal width, submerging a third of the country. Less than two years later, in early 2024, the same river system was running far below its seasonal average in its upper reaches, triggering emergency irrigation cuts in Punjab. Flood and drought extremes that once defined different eras are now defining the same decade. For the nearly 40 percent of humanity that lives in river basins shared by two or more countries, this volatility is turning a development issue into a security issue.   Water has always been political, but climate change is making it less predictable and less abundant at the moments when it is most needed. Three basins the Indus, the Nile, and the Mekong illustrate how historical treaties, new infrastructure, and a warming climate are converging to test whether water can be managed as a shared resource or will become a source of sustained confrontation.   The Indus: A Treaty Under Strain   The Indus Waters Treaty, signed in 1960 and brokered by the World Bank, is often cited as one of the most durable water-sharing agreements in the world. It survived two wars and multiple crises between India and Pakistan. Under its terms, the three eastern rivers Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej were allocated to India, and the three western rivers Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab to Pakistan, with limited rights for India to develop run-of-the-river hydropower upstream.   The treaty was designed for a different hydrological and political reality. It divides water volumes based on historical flows, with no explicit mechanism for climate adaptation. It also established a complex dispute resolution process involving a Neutral Expert and a Court of Arbitration.   Tensions have centered on India’s hydropower projects in Jammu and Kashmir, such as Kishenganga and Ratle. Pakistan argues that the design of these projects particularly pondage capacity and spillway gates violates treaty restrictions and could give India control over the timing of flows that are critical for Pakistani agriculture, which supports more than 80 percent of the country’s irrigated agriculture and employs a large portion of its workforce. India argues that the projects are within treaty allowances, are necessary for its own energy security and development, and that it has never interfered with Pakistan’s share.   Both governments have sought recourse through the treaty’s mechanisms simultaneously in recent years, leading to parallel proceedings that have raised questions about the treaty’s procedural resilience. Experts note that the underlying driver is not just engineering, but scarcity: glacier retreat in the Hindu Kush-Himalaya, altered monsoon patterns, and rising demand from growing populations on both sides are reducing the margin for error that allowed the treaty to function for six decades.   The Nile: Sovereignty Versus Survival   No river illustrates the clash between national development and downstream vulnerability more starkly than the Nile.   Ethiopia, where about 85 percent of the Nile’s water reaching Egypt originates from the Blue Nile, began construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, GERD, in 2011. With a capacity of over 5,000 megawatts, the dam is central to Ethiopia’s plan to expand electricity access still below 50 percent in rural areas at the start of construction and to become a regional power exporter. For Addis Ababa, the dam is a matter of sovereignty and economic transformation, financed domestically and built without external funding.   For Egypt, which depends on the Nile for approximately 90 percent of its freshwater, the dam is viewed as an existential risk. A reduction in flow during the multi-year filling period, or during future droughts if filling and operating rules are not agreed, could directly affect agriculture in the Nile Delta and drinking water for over 100 million people. Egypt has therefore insisted on a legally binding agreement on filling and long-term operation, including drought mitigation mechanisms.   Sudan sits between the two, potentially benefiting from regulated flows and cheap electricity, but also concerned about dam safety and its own water needs.   More than a decade of negotiations mediated by the African Union, the United States, and others have failed to produce a binding deal. Ethiopia has proceeded with filling the reservoir, arguing that this is a natural consequence of exercising its right to develop resources within its borders under the principle of equitable and reasonable utilization. Egypt has argued for the principle of no significant harm and historical rights. International water law, primarily the 1997 UN Watercourses Convention, contains both principles, but leaves their balancing to negotiation.   The dispute has remained diplomatic rather than military, despite inflammatory rhetoric at times, and has spurred renewed discussion about benefit-sharing for example, linking power trade to water security rather than zero-sum volume allocation.   The Mekong: Upstream Control   In Southeast Asia, the Mekong River supports the food security of more than 60 million people. Its annual flood pulse drives one of the world’s most productive inland fisheries in the Tonle Sap lake in Cambodia and sustains rice cultivation in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, which produces roughly half of Vietnam’s rice.   The construction of eleven large hydropower dams on the mainstream of the upper Mekong in China where the river is called Lancang and more than 100 tributary dams downstream, principally in Laos, has fundamentally altered that pulse. Data from the Mekong River Commission, an intergovernmental body of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, shows changes in seasonal water levels, sediment transport, and fisheries.   China, which is not a full member of the Commission but a dialogue partner, argues that its dams provide flood control and dry-season flow augmentation, and are essential for its clean energy transition. Data sharing has improved in recent years, with Beijing providing year-round water level and rainfall data.   Downstream countries offer a different perspective. Thailand and Cambodia have raised concerns about unpredictable releases affecting navigation and farming. Vietnam is particularly vulnerable: reduced sediment flow scientists estimate that dams have trapped more than half of the sediment

The legality of a constitutional settlement cannot compensate for the absence of time, preparation and protection required to implement it The collapse of the Cabinet Mission Plan did more than extinguish the last comprehensive attempt to preserve a united India. It transformed a constitutional dispute into an administrative and humanitarian emergency. Indian National Congress proceeded with the Constituent Assembly, the Muslim League withdrew its acceptance of the Plan, and political distrust increasingly gave way to confrontation. Communal violence spread across different parts of India, demonstrating that the approaching transfer of power could no longer be treated simply as an exercise in constitutional drafting. By the beginning of 1947, Britain had reached a decisive conclusion. Its rule in India could not continue indefinitely, while no constitution acceptable to all the principal political parties had emerged. On February 20, 1947, Prime Minister Clement Attlee announced that British authority would be transferred to Indian hands no later than June 1948. The statement also acknowledged that, in the absence of an agreed constitution, Britain would have to determine whether power should pass to a central authority, provincial governments or some other arrangement. The possibility of more than one successor authority had now entered official policy. Lord Louis Mountbatten arrived as the last Viceroy in March 1947 with a mandate to supervise this transfer. He inherited a political order already close to collapse. The Cabinet Mission framework had ceased to command common confidence, the interim government was paralysed by rivalry between Congress and the Muslim League, and communal violence had exposed the fragility of provincial administration. Mountbatten’s task was not to negotiate within a stable constitutional environment. It was to construct a settlement while the institutions through which it had to be implemented were rapidly disintegrating. The central question was whether the deadline of June 1948 provided sufficient time to undertake an orderly transfer or whether delay would deepen violence and political uncertainty. Mountbatten chose acceleration. On June 3, 1947, the British Government announced a plan under which British India could be divided and power transferred to two successor governments. Punjab and Bengal would decide whether they should themselves be partitioned; separate constituent assemblies could emerge; and referendums would determine the future of the North-West Frontier Province and the Sylhet district of Assam. The date for transfer was brought forward from June 1948 to August 1947. The acceleration was defended as a response to deteriorating conditions. British authority was weakening, communal violence was spreading and the principal political parties had accepted that Partition had become unavoidable. Mountbatten and his supporters believed that a definite and immediate date would end uncertainty and compel the parties to assume responsibility. The opposing view deserves equal attention. A constitutional transformation of such magnitude required the division of provinces, armed forces, civil services, financial assets, railways, irrigation systems, records and administrative institutions. It required the establishment of two governments and the settlement of territorial boundaries affecting millions of people. Compressing this process into a few weeks inevitably reduced the time available for administrative preparation, security arrangements and the protection of vulnerable communities. The question is therefore not simply whether British withdrawal had become inevitable. It plainly had. The more difficult question is whether the decision to advance the transfer by approximately ten months converted political urgency into administrative recklessness. The Indian Independence Act received Royal Assent on July 18, 1947. It provided that two independent Dominions—India and Pakistan—would be established from August 15, 1947. It partitioned Punjab and Bengal, empowered the respective constituent assemblies to legislate for the new Dominions and terminated British responsibility for governing India. Parliamentary sovereignty, exercised from London for generations, legislated itself out of the subcontinent in an extraordinarily compressed period. The legal instrument was concise. Partition was not. An Act of Parliament could establish two Dominions, confer legislative authority and terminate imperial jurisdiction. It could not divide villages, canals, railway lines, police forces, military units, families and centuries of shared social existence with comparable simplicity. Constitutional law could provide a date for independence, but it could not by itself produce the administrative capacity necessary to manage the consequences of territorial division. The most visible illustration of this haste was the work of the Punjab and Bengal Boundary Commissions. Sir Cyril Radcliffe was appointed to chair both bodies and was required to determine the boundaries separating Muslim-majority and non-Muslim-majority areas. The task involved densely populated territories in which religious communities, agricultural systems, transport networks and commercial centres were deeply interwoven. He was given only a matter of weeks to complete it. Punjab and Bengal could not be divided by applying census figures mechanically. District-level majorities concealed substantial minorities, while economic and geographic considerations frequently pointed in directions different from religious demography. Rivers, irrigation headworks, railways and markets crossed the proposed boundaries. Sikhs were particularly vulnerable in Punjab because their population, landholdings and sacred places were distributed across areas claimed by both successor states. The commissions were expected to resolve these questions while political authority was itself being divided. Their members were nominated from opposing political sides and were unable to agree on many decisive matters. The ultimate responsibility therefore rested with Radcliffe, who was required to draw boundaries under extraordinary pressure and with limited opportunity for local investigation. More troubling was the timing of publication. The boundary awards were made public on August 17, 1947, after independence ceremonies had already taken place. Large populations in Punjab and Bengal consequently entered independence without knowing with certainty on which side of the new international frontier they would fall. The delay may have been intended to prevent the boundary controversy from overshadowing the independence celebrations or provoking immediate disorder. Its effect was to deepen uncertainty at the precise moment when administrative clarity was most urgently required. Officials responsible for security, local government and transportation had little time to prepare for the territorial consequences. Ordinary people were left to respond to rumour, fear and rapidly changing political realities. No law expressly ordered a complete exchange of populations between India

The assault on the Khazina Banda police post in Hangu was not another entry in Pakistan’s grim terrorism ledger. Attackers first struck with explosive-laden quadcopters and then ambushed the post and its reinforcements. Al Jazeera’s initial report put the police death toll at 11, including Deputy Superintendent Diyar Khan, with 28 personnel injured; subsequent local reporting revised the fatalities to nine. Fifteen attackers were reportedly killed. No organisation immediately claimed responsibility. The disputed count does not alter the horror. Men defending the State confronted a privately financed force equipped with drones, explosives and heavy weapons. Hangu should destroy the fiction that terrorism, narcotics and illicit arms are separate problems assigned to separate departments. They form one war economy. Narcotics generate cash; illicit finance launders it; weapons protect routes; militants supply coercion; political and official patronage obstructs investigation. The system survives governments and military operations because Pakistan attacks gunmen without dismantling the business that replenishes them. This was the warning in Pakistan: From Hash to Heroin and, more systematically, in its sequel Pakistan: From Drug-trap to Debt-trap. The Afghan war did not merely push refugees across the border. It created an enduring logistics chain in which weapons travelled one way and opium, heroin and dirty money travelled the other. The jihad (holy war) against the erstwhile Soviet Union was presented as strategic necessity. Its unrecorded balance sheet included extremism, heroin, the Kalashnikov culture, protected smugglers, corrupted institutions and a drug elite wealthy enough to enter respectable business and influence politics. The term “narcoterrorism” is often used carelessly, as if every attack can be attributed to a particular consignment. That is not the proposition. The connection is systemic, not necessarily transactional in every case. Armed groups and criminal syndicates occupy the same spaces, use overlapping routes, brokers, hawala channels and protection arrangements, and profit from weak border governance. Money is fungible. Revenue from smuggling, extortion, narcotics or lawful-looking businesses can buy the same rifle, drone component or safe house. Pakistan helped manufacture this economy through choices made during the General Zia-ul-Haq era and then preserved it through denial. The State celebrated the fighters, tolerated the gun markets and allowed traffickers to convert illicit fortunes into property, commerce and political access. Periodic seizures created the appearance of enforcement, while financiers, facilitators, beneficial owners and patrons largely remained beyond reach. The poor courier was arrested; the network endured. A poppy field was destroyed; no viable crop or market was supplied to the farmer. An addict was criminalised; treatment remained scarce. The spectacle of control substituted for control. Afghanistan’s changed opium economy does not justify complacency. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated that cultivation fell by 20 percent in 2025 to 10,200 hectares and production dropped by 32 percent to 296 tonnes, far below pre-ban levels. This is important, but it is not the burial of the drug economy. Stocks, established trafficking routes and accumulated capital, survive a harvest decline. UNODC also warned that synthetic drugs, particularly methamphetamine, were becoming organised crime’s new business model because production is easier to conceal and less dependent on climate. The market adapts faster than bureaucracies. The same adaptation is visible in the air above Hangu. Reuters reported in July 2025 that militants had used commercially acquired quadcopters in at least eight attacks in Bannu and adjoining areas within two and a half months. The provincial police chief acknowledged that the police had no equipment to meet the threat and that militants were better equipped. One year later, weaponised quadcopters helped open a lethal assault on a police post. This was not an unforeseeable innovation. It was an institutional warning ignored until officers paid with their lives. The immediate response followed the familiar script: condemnation, funerals, retaliatory operations and claims that the mastermind had been killed. Removing operational commanders is necessary, but body counts do not measure the destruction of a war economy. If the financier remains solvent, the trafficker keeps his route, the arms supplier retains access, the hawala operator moves the proceeds and the protector remains influential, another commander will emerge. Tactical success without financial and institutional disruption merely changes the names of the dead. Islamabad is entitled to demand that Kabul prevent Afghan territory from being used for attacks. The Taliban government’s denials cannot answer evidence of militant mobility and sanctuary. Pakistan, however, cannot outsource security or erase its history by pointing across the Durand Line. Routes, facilitators, arms stocks, laundering channels and political shields also exist inside Pakistan. A foreign-policy accusation is not a domestic counterterrorism strategy. The starting point must be a permanent national narcoterrorism and illicit-arms fusion centre, not another ornamental committee. It should bring the provincial counterterrorism departments, police, Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF), Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), Customs, Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), Financial Monitoring Unit (FMU) and intelligence agencies onto a common operational platform. Every major terrorist investigation should generate a parallel financial, narcotics, communications and weapons inquiry. Investigators must follow beneficial ownership through real estate, trade misinvoicing, shell companies, cash couriers, hawala networks and virtual assets, freezing and confiscating criminal proceeds through courts and due process. Weapons require the same discipline. Pakistan needs a national register of recovered arms and ammunition, forensic and ballistic databases accessible to provincial police, mandatory tracing of serial numbers and ammunition lots, and public reporting of leakages from official stocks. Border terminals and maritime routes need risk-based scanning rather than theatrical checking. Most urgently, exposed police posts require layered counter-drone protection: detection, electronic countermeasures, hardened positions, trained response teams and protected communications. Sending under-equipped policemen against weaponised drones is not bravery by policy; it is abandonment by the State. Supply-side enforcement must be joined to rural development and public health. Farmers require credible alternative livelihoods, irrigation, credit, storage and assured markets; addicts require treatment, rehabilitation and reintegration. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, China and Central Asian states need verifiable cooperation on routes, precursor chemicals, laboratories, wanted financiers and arms flows under UN facilitation. Diplomatic declarations should be tested against shared data, inspections, arrests, convictions,

The most pitiable creature I know is not the beggar who asks for bread but the gentleman who must borrow a personality. He dresses in another man’s taste, speaks in another man’s phrases and mistakes imitation for refinement. He is everywhere respectable and nowhere original. Nations occasionally acquire the same unfortunate habit. Their politics become echoes, their ideals reflections, and their revolutions little more than borrowed costumes. There was a time when borrowing was the necessity of poverty. We borrowed machines because we had no factories, medicines because we had no laboratories, and books because we had no presses. Such borrowing was neither shameful nor unusual; indeed, civilisation itself advances through exchange. The Greeks borrowed from Egypt, the Arabs preserved and enlarged the inheritance of Greece, Europe rediscovered Aristotle through Muslim Spain, and Japan modernised by learning from the West without surrendering its soul. Borrowing knowledge is the beginning of wisdom. Borrowing identity is the beginning of decline. There is another form of borrowing that no customs official can intercept and no tariff can discourage. It enters silently through the imagination. A society begins by borrowing opinions, then aspirations, then indignation. Before long, it borrows its heroes, its villains, its vocabulary and, eventually, its revolutions. It ceases to ask, “What does our history require?” and instead asks, “Whose history should we imitate?” That, I fear, is the predicament into which much of Pakistan’s public discourse has drifted. During the past several weeks, social media has been flooded with admiration for the recent political resistance witnessed across the border in India. Video clips have travelled faster than thoughtful analysis. Slogans have crossed the Wagah frontier with greater ease than ideas. Among countless young Pakistanis one question has become almost fashionable, Why can’t Pakistan have a movement like this? The question is understandable. It is also profoundly revealing. Hidden within it is an assumption that our political future must resemble somebody else’s present; that history unfolds according to a universal script; that every nation matures by repeating the experience of another. It is an assumption born not of confidence but of intellectual dependency. The tragedy, therefore, is not that Pakistanis admire another people’s courage. Every decent society can appreciate courage wherever it appears. The tragedy is that many have become convinced that courage itself must now be imported. We seem increasingly unable to recognise our own political inheritance unless it first receives foreign approval. This habit is hardly confined to politics. It has become the defining condition of our intellectual life. We borrow theories from European universities before examining our own social realities. We borrow ideological fashions from America before asking whether they illuminate Pakistani society. We borrow debates from social media and mistake them for scholarship. We consume outrage manufactured elsewhere and wear it as though it were tailored for our own circumstances. We have become, in the deepest sense of the phrase, tenants in the house of our own imagination. The irony is painful. No civilisation lacking confidence in itself has ever become creative. Creation begins where imitation ends. Shakespeare borrowed stories but produced Hamlet. Iqbal studied Nietzsche and Bergson yet remained unmistakably Iqbal. Muhammad Ali Jinnah mastered the constitutional traditions of Britain but transformed them into a political movement rooted in the aspirations of Indian Muslims. Great minds borrow raw material; they do not borrow finished identities. The same principle governs nations. Civilisations borrow in order to create. Declining societies borrow in order to imitate. Perhaps nowhere is this confusion more visible than in our understanding of resistance. Resistance has become one of the most romantic words in modern political vocabulary. It evokes images of heroic crowds, defiant slogans, dramatic confrontations and triumphant victories. Social media, with its appetite for spectacle, has transformed resistance into a global performance. Every protest becomes a cinematic narrative; every confrontation seeks an audience; every slogan aspires to immortality through a hashtag. But history is not written in hashtags. Nor are nations transformed by theatrical moments alone. The anthropologist Leila Abu-Lughod offered an important warning nearly three decades ago in her influential essay The Romance of Resistance. She argued that scholars often romanticise resistance as though every act of opposition were inherently emancipatory. Such a view, she suggested, ignores the complex relationships of power, culture and history within which resistance acquires meaning. Acts of dissent cannot be detached from the societies that produce them. They are rooted in particular institutions, historical memories and cultural conditions. Her insight deserves careful attention today. To ask why Pakistan does not produce resistance identical to India’s is rather like asking why the Indus refuses to flow like the Ganges. Rivers obey their own geography. Nations obey their own history. Every meaningful political movement is shaped by its unique historical circumstances. The French Revolution emerged from fiscal collapse and aristocratic privilege. The American Revolution arose from disputes over representation and imperial authority. South Africa’s democratic transition was forged in the struggle against apartheid. None of these experiences can simply be photocopied for another society. History does not distribute identical examinations to different nations. Each country answers its own questions. Yet we continue searching for borrowed answers. Perhaps this is because borrowed revolutions are emotionally satisfying. They spare us the difficult labour of self-examination. It is always easier to admire another nation’s struggle than to confront the unfinished responsibilities of our own. Admiration demands nothing. Citizenship demands everything. That distinction has become blurred in contemporary Pakistan. Our public imagination has fallen in love with the romance of beginning anew. Every few years another movement captures our attention. We invest it with almost mythical expectations. We hope it will accomplish what institutions, constitutions and patient political reform have failed to achieve. We long for redemption through spectacle. But mature nations are not built upon permanent excitement. They are built upon permanent institutions. Hannah Arendt observed in On Revolution that the enduring achievement of successful revolutions lies not in the destruction of an old order but in the establishment of a

The Pakistan Muslim League (N)’s power show in Muzaffarabad during the Azad Jammu and Kashmir election campaign was far more than an ordinary political rally. To me, it marked the re-emergence of Nawaz Sharif as the central figure in Pakistan’s political landscape. The message from Muzaffarabad was unmistakable. Nawaz Sharif spoke of development rather than division, construction rather than confrontation, and public welfare rather than political vendettas. His interaction with the crowd was genuine and heartfelt. One symbolic moment that captured public attention was his light-hearted remark expressing a desire to become the Prime Minister of Azad Jammu and Kashmir. It reflected his affection for the region and the deep emotional bond he has always maintained with the people of Kashmir, whose support has remained consistent throughout his political career. Having covered Pakistani politics for nearly three decades and followed Nawaz Sharif closely since his arrival in London from exile in 2006, I have witnessed every major phase of his political journey. From Duke Street in London, where he addressed party workers during years of political exile, to the massive public gathering in Muzaffarabad, I saw the same determination and resilience that has defined his politics for decades. Few political leaders in South Asia have experienced the highs and lows that Nawaz Sharif has endured. His elected government was overthrown by General Pervez Musharraf in 1999. He was prosecuted, imprisoned and later forced into exile. Years later, he returned to Pakistan and regained political power, only to face another period of legal and political challenges following the Panama Papers case. In my view, elements within the state establishment and parts of the judiciary played significant roles during different phases of these political confrontations. Regardless of differing opinions on those events, what remains remarkable is that every major attempt to end his political career has ultimately been followed by his return to the centre of national politics. Many analysts predicted that the 2024 general elections would mark the end of Nawaz Sharif’s political dominance. I never shared that assessment. Throughout my television appearances and reporting, I consistently argued that he remained the principal decision-maker within the PML-N and that no major political decision was taken without his approval. One of the defining strengths of the Sharif family’s politics has been continuity of leadership. Shehbaz Sharif has repeatedly demonstrated exceptional political loyalty to his elder brother. On several occasions, he chose party unity over personal ambition. Following the difficult electoral environment of 2024, he assumed the office of Prime Minister at a time when Pakistan was facing severe economic and diplomatic challenges. In my assessment, his government helped restore economic confidence, improved macroeconomic stability and steered Pakistan away from a potentially deeper financial crisis. His administrative style has always been focused on governance and delivery rather than political rhetoric. Maryam Nawaz’s rise represents another important chapter in the party’s evolution. During the years when Nawaz Sharif faced political disqualification and exile, she emerged as one of the PML-N’s most visible campaigners. She endured political pressure, remained active throughout the party’s most difficult period and gradually established herself as a national political leader in her own right. As Chief Minister of Punjab, Maryam Nawaz has sought to build her political identity around governance, administrative reforms and public service delivery. Whether one agrees with her politics or not, she has brought energy and visibility to the office and has made rapid implementation of development initiatives a defining feature of her administration. Her speeches continue to energise party workers, while her governance record is increasingly becoming central to the PML-N’s political narrative. When I met Nawaz Sharif and Maryam Nawaz at Jati Umra earlier this year, I observed the same resolve that I had seen nearly two decades earlier during the London exile years. The determination to continue serving through politics appeared unchanged. The Muzaffarabad rally reinforced what I have believed for years: Nawaz Sharif has entered another active phase of his political career. His message is no longer about political survival—it is about political continuity, stability and development. Whether one supports him or opposes him, it is difficult to deny one reality. More than forty years after entering politics, Nawaz Sharif remains one of Pakistan’s most enduring and influential political figures. His resilience has become part of Pakistan’s political history, and Muzaffarabad demonstrated that his political story is far from over. The views expressed in this article are solely my personal observations and political analysis based on decades of reporting on Pakistan’s politics.