Shanzay Minhal
Every revolution sells itself as the end of an old cruelty and the birth of a fairer order. Almost none of them keep that promise without first extracting a price in blood. From the guillotines of Paris to anti-colonial struggles that ended in new juntas wearing the old chains, the pattern repeats with disturbing consistency. Revolutions are rarely the clean rupture their slogans promise. They are messy, violent and almost always paid for by people who never got to choose whether the price was worth it.
This is why slogans like “seenay pe goli kha lein gay” (we will take the bullet to our chest) deserve far more scrutiny than the applause they usually receive at rallies. Such chants romanticize martyrdom as the currency of change.
History’s own ledger on revolutions is more sobering than the mythology built around them. The Russian Revolution promised to abolish the aristocracy’s grip on power and produced Stalinism. In case after case, the old absolutism was broken, but what filled the vacuum was often a new centralized authority, just as unaccountable, dressed in revolutionary language.
But they also succeeded more than history gives them credit for: divine-right monarchy as a governing principle is largely dead, constitutional frameworks did emerge from these ruptures and the modern centralized nation-state, for all its faults, is partly their inheritance. But that success came bundled with prolonged instability, conservative restorations and, in many cases, decades of authoritarian consolidation before accountable government took root. Pakistan cannot afford to romanticize this cycle, because Pakistan does not have the institutional depth or the economic cushioning that allows a state to absorb a sudden collapse and rebuild quickly. What a revolutionary mindset offers here is not a fast track to democracy but political instability, contested legitimacy, a widening vacuum at the centre and, going by regional precedent, a strong likelihood that whoever fills it governs more harshly than what came before.
Abrupt, chaotic transfers of power do not sort themselves out neatly; they tend to produce the conditions for civil-war-like fragmentation, particularly in a state already carrying ethnic, provincial and sectarian fault lines. The chants for revolutionary upheaval occasionally heard around Azad Kashmir’s constitutional grievances are a case in point: legitimate frustration with governance deficits is being channelled into rupture rather than reform, at exactly the moment the region’s relationship with the federation needs careful, negotiated handling.
None of this is an argument against dissent. The right to protest, organise and demand accountability, whether from students on campuses or the people of Azad Kashmir raising grievances, is not what this piece cautions against. Voicing grievance is the lifeblood of any functioning polity. The distinction is not between silence and speech, but between dissent channelled toward reform and dissent romanticized into rupture.
Pakistan’s own recent trajectory illustrates why this caution is not theoretical. Analysts now describe the country’s governance model as a “hybrid system” that is consolidating rather than loosening. That is not a system crying out for a revolutionary jolt; it is a system that a revolutionary jolt would very likely shatter into competing centres of coercive power rather than reform. This is not to say there are any forcefully active or powerful demands of initiating a revolution in the country. The detrimental slogans and the external influences behind them, however, need to be studied. It must also be remembered that Syed Ali Gillani and massive crowd’s chants, “we are Pakistanis, Pakistan is ours”, tell a very different story from what a banned outfit in Azad Kashmir is advocating for.
The regional case studies make the same point from different angles. Bangladesh’s 2024 uprising removed an entrenched autocrat but was followed by an unconstitutional interim arrangement, post-resignation violence, minority attacks and eighteen months of interregnum before an election finally restored a mandate. Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya sits apart from the other three: sustained peaceful pressure forced a resignation, not a violent seizure of power and it only produced durable change once channelled into an election two years later, closer to the reform this piece argues for. Kenya’s Gen Z uprising won a symbolic concession on a finance bill, then watched the state respond with abductions, co-opted opposition and the same taxes returning under new names. Venezuela’s revolutionary promise of the early 2000s hardened, over two decades, into precisely the kind of entrenched, unaccountable rule it was meant to end. In each case the grievances were real and often justified.
The lesson is that the revolutionary route to redressing them is slow, bloody and frequently hijacked by whoever is best positioned to seize the vacuum, rarely the people who marched. Pakistan’s geographic positioning as well as internal and external factors do not allow for sudden chaos. The country needs stability now, more than ever and governance reforms should be the ultimate route without political mayhem.
—The writer is columnist contributor.
