The ebb and tide of dharna politics in Pakistan

As another march towards Islamabad is being whispered into existence, with the familiar ring of finality and fury, it is time to take stock of what the last fifteen years have actually been in media.

They have been mostly written in shipping containers, in laser lights sweeping over Jinnah Avenue, and in the permanent occupation of a small, cursed intersection called D-Chowk. What we witnessed in this period was not protest in its classical sense. It was the birth, nurturing, and then monstrous mutation of the dharna into a parallel form of government. It began not with a slogan, but with a box. January 2013, Tahir-ul-Qadri, perched inside a bulletproof container , Pakistan’s own Trojan horse of deliverance, instructing the multitudes below to shed fear and sacrifice everything, including life itself. The imagery was unforgettable and deeply sinister, total insulation for the orator, total exposure for the audience. Yet it endured because it was spectacle.

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Four days that paralyzed Islamabad taught the country a new political lexicon. Parliament was declared counterfeit, the street was declared authentic. Qadri did not call it politics; he called it a “revolution” for the state. The sit-in ended with a handwritten declaration and a quiet dispersal, but its lesson was permanent. One could suspend the capital without winning a single seat. What followed was a tornado, orchestrated like a symphony and executed like professional wrestling. The PTI-PAT dharna of 2014, led by self-styled “political cousins,” stretching for 126 days, remains the longest and most transformative for the parliamentary politics , judiciary and media. Its constitutional objective, to invalidate the 2013 mandate on grounds of rigging and force a prime minister’s resignation, failed. What succeeded was far more enduring. It delegitimized the idea that legitimacy flows only through the ballot box and established that it could be performed for the cameras.

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If PTI made the dharna political, Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan took it beyond politics into theology. The Faizabad interventions of 2017, 2018 and 2021 did not ask for recounts. They demanded abnegation. Its blockades were shorter, incendiary, and immensely effective at halting daily life. Each time, the state negotiated an agreement at Faizabad, and each time, the state conceded that the capacity to paralyze could dictate policy. As an observer noted then, in Pakistan, the street now has a veto that the Senate may not. The exquisite irony arrived between 2019 and 2022. The parties that had denounced dharnas as anarchy when in government embraced them as sacred democracy when in opposition.

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Maulana Fazlur Rehman’s Azadi March of October 2019 moved like a caravan of grievances from Karachi to Islamabad. On its stage sat the leadership of the PPP and PML-N, united not by ideology but by the sheer utility of the sit-in. If 2014 had political cousins, this was a democratic alliance. It did not topple Imran Khan, but it created a climate of extraordinary political leniency, a climate in which, many in Islamabad believe, Nawaz Sharif’s departure on medical grounds was quietly facilitated. Then came the long marches of 2022 in reverse. Bilawal Bhutto Zardari’s march from Karachi to Islamabad and Maryam Nawaz’s mobilizations on GT Road replicated the 2014 logic. Their purpose, as Bilawal stated, was to demonstrate that the people stand with the opposition. The march was the message. That message soon merged with parliamentary arithmetic in the vote of no-confidence.

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Now a futile debate can be enthused over who gathered how many people and for how many days. But that debate is misleading at its core. No matter how large the crowd, how charged the emotion, a choreographed event is not a revolution. It is merely a maneuver. The 2024 attempt to re-enter D-Chowk was foretold in its failure. By then, the state had mastered the very grammar it once tolerated. Containers were now met with containers. Roads once left open for revolutionary theatre were welded shut with freight. The tactic once romanticized as people power was now codified as a public order problem that needed to be fixed.

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This brings us to the present . PTI’s call for a final, decisive dharna and the Interior Minister’s vow to finish this brand of politics “once and for all.” The language is seductive, but is it effective? Because even if the revolution is distant or illusory, the demand for change and the negation of the present system emerge from the lap of harsh reality.

Here lies the central fallacy of dharna politics which must be confronted with superior clarity. Even if one lakh people gather, they can, through disruption, achieve a specific goal. Even if five lakh assemble, they can force a resignation, a reversal, or a release. Yet the question remains: is this the right way, is this constitutional? As Winston Churchill, often quoted in our assemblies, reminded us, democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried. The street can alert democracy, but it cannot replace it.

This is where the conversation about new provinces and new administrative units becomes pertinent. Pakistan’s dharna obsession is partly a consequence of hyper-centralization. When all power, all attention and all deliverance are seen to flow from one chowk in Islamabad, then every grievance in Turbat, in Larkana, in Hazara and in South Punjab must travel to that chowk to be heard. The flaw in the controlled revolution, much like the theory of controlled chaos, is that it is duplicitous by design and therefore not organic. It seeks the ferocity of a genuine uprising with the safety of a negotiated script. It wants the crowd on the road but the result decided in closed chambers.

The logical conclusion of dharna politics is coming full circle. It is simply not needed anymore as an instrument of regime change and yet the unpopularity of any incumbent regime could always make it irresistibly popular again. You cannot extinguish it by sealing D-Chowk with steel. You can only render it obsolete by making the actual Parliament more potent, more participatory and more just than the container. Pakistan needs evolution, not revolution.

Programme Manzil Pakistan will be show in Eight PM with Fe’reeha Idrees tonight on Waqt News.

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