He was already in his 40s when I was born, so the only mirror through which I looked at the guy was that of reverence and awe. He was the jolliest of men, with a heart as pure and fragile as a child’s. On many occasions, I saw him laugh, and on many an occasion, even shed tears. My mother and he had an age gap of almost 20 years, yet theirs was a marriage of love, utmost respect and unparalleled companionship. We lived in a rural setting for five years, at least my formative years, where I got to see the multiple dimensions that the old man lived his life in: a father, a husband, a large-scale farmer, a man of great social importance and consequence in local politics. One of the liveliest memories I have is watching my old man play the judge in matters of relative seriousness between two quarrelling parties that brought their issue and raised it with him on account of him being an impartial and honest man. More often than not, both parties went home satisfied with the resolution. I saw his fascination with farming grow with time, experimenting with different kinds of seeds and farming methods. He would separate a small heap of cotton or wheat on every harvest for me and my brother, and the tiny revenue from that heap would go into our pockets. This was his weird way of pushing a sense of ownership of village life in us, brothers who spent the entire day watching Indian satellite television and growing up with a largely urban bubble mindset, even in the midst of the cornfields of South Punjab. He was not particularly a religious man, but one of the most important moments of my life, a memory which would later come to haunt me, is me pretending to sleep in his lap while he said a prayer over me and asked forgiveness for himself. The only time he showed physical anger to me was when I hit my brother with a toy pistol. He stood up from his chair, snatched the plastic pistol and broke it into two parts. This was quite the statement, and much needed too. He would often visit the graveyard, where most of the ancestral family, including himself, are buried. He would stand beside the graves of his beloved mother and father, water them and throw flowers on them, constantly reminding my brother and me to pray for the dead, and pointing out his desired place of burial.

He was one of the first and few people in the extended family, and truly also in the rural society of Lodhran, to get a higher education. He was into poetry, classical music, photography, and, to some extent, movies. He acted in obscure PTV dramas in supporting roles. He moderated Saraiki/Punjabi/Urdu poetry-reading sessions (Mushaira). He hung out with PTV producers, actors, poets, politicians and writers. He even wrote a Safarnama on his travels in Turkey and Britain. I never really matched up to his level of feudal sophistication (if I’m forgiven for using this term) to have a conversation with him about the higher things and ideals in life, and neither did I ever completely gauge the man’s ability to mask the different layers of his day-to-day life. The Akbar Ali Khan I knew was a man who had largely given up on his urban, sophisticated lifestyle; it all seemed beyond him. Even though he moved in social circles of Punjabi/Saraiki poets of Multan and Bahawalpur, PTV actors and producers, and niche personalities with niche audiences, he never really sought out a role inside that paradigm. He was satisfied with his rural lifestyle.

What prompted this attitude of mind, and what occurred between his infancy and his 40th year, I do not know. He is a mystery which I unravel bit by bit every day. A bit from the memories he left, a bit from the collection of his books and photos, a bit from his friends and relatives who, whenever they meet me, shower him with praise and remember him with utmost respect, a bit from my own personal experience, as the story of the father is embedded in the son. The more I learn about myself, the more I understand about my father. The more I deal with my own flaws, the more I’m able to forgive him for his. The more limitations I come across, the more I accept his. The more passion and zeal for life in moments of ecstasy I experience, the more I accommodate his jolly and sweet nature.

What I did not realise at that age was the gravity of how ill he was. He had the Holy Trinity of diseases present in a desi household: diabetes, coronary heart disease and blood pressure issues. He had a bag of medicines which he used to carry with him all the time. The last meeting which I remember of ever seeing him alive occurred in Multan. The family had shifted to the city for educational reasons; he would visit us every weekend. He came into my and my brother’s room, something which he was never inclined to do, and sat down on the chair, watching us play our games on Xbox. How could we know that this was the last meeting, the last opportunity to playfully grapple with the old man? We remained busy with our game. He went away to the village after kissing us. What happened on the day of his death is a combination of trauma, anger, denial, anxiety, disorder, disbelief and existential fear. But this is not how I want to remember my old man. I want to remember him sitting on his charpai, humming to himself an old Indian song, surrounded by love and laughter.

He was to me an overarching, all-powerful and almighty figure, as most fathers are to their sons until the merciless maturity of adulthood hits. I thank God Almighty for not letting the idol of fatherhood fall before my very eyes, but instead allowing me, with the gradual detachment of adulthood, to renounce the divinity I had once ascribed to fatherhood and see my father not as an infallible figure, but as a man: flawed, limited, loving, complex, and ultimately human. This has been a great mercy from the Lord of all worlds.

There is an entire generation of Muslim youth who, had it not been for Iqbal’s poetry and philosophy, might have drifted away from the idea of a distinct Muslim political community and been absorbed into the broader ideological currents that shaped India in the early twentieth century. Iqbal came to be the bridge between inherited tradition and modern political consciousness, instilling civilisational confidence in a community that had been reduced to second-class citizenship amid a cesspool of competing political identities. It is only natural, then, that a nation which came into being almost out of thin air, through coming to terms with colonialism, and which sought to create a future whose bridge to the past was, at best, difficult to articulate, would incorporate and patronise the image of such a towering personality, providing intellectual and moral relief to the aspirations of nearly 75 million Pakistanis, who constituted the greater part of the Muslim population of the subcontinent.

Iqbal, however, was nowhere to be seen in person during the Pakistan Movement. If one were to take a time machine and go to the 1940s, in the streets of Punjab or Bengal, searching for a Kashmiri man with a thick, full chevron moustache, probably with a fez on his head, his right eye half-closed due to blindness, campaigning for a new nation for Muslims in North-West India, one wouldn’t find him. Forgive my dry humour, but this was probably because Iqbal was dead. He died in 1938, long before the Muslim League, in all its grandeur, passed the Lahore Resolution and transformed the demand for Muslim political safeguards into a formal call for independent states.

By the time the Pakistan Movement reached its decisive phase, Iqbal was no longer there to witness it. He never addressed the great rallies of the 1940s, never campaigned in the elections of 1945–46, and never saw Pakistan come into existence. His role, therefore, was not that of a political organiser or mass mobiliser, but of an intellectual who helped shape the language and imagination through which Muslim politics would later be understood, so we are told.

The greatest example of what has been misconstrued as a demand for Pakistan by Iqbal, which greatly helped in perpetuating the myth that Iqbal was the first person to hint at partition, is his landmark Allahabad Address of 1930, in which he said, supporting the resolution of the Muslim Conference:

I would like to see the Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province, Sindh and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single State. Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North-Western Indian Muslim State appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India.

This passage was misused by many intellectuals, politicians and rhetoricians of the Pakistan Movement. A proper study of Iqbal’s speech at Allahabad itself is enough to debunk this myth. Going back five sentences before the oft-quoted two, this is what he says:

The principal of European democracy cannot be applied to India without recognizing the fact of communal grouping. The Muslims’ demand for the creation of Muslim India within India is, therefore, perfectly justified. The resolution of the All-Parties Muslim Conference at Delhi is to my mind wholly inspired by this noble ideal of a harmonious whole which, instead of stifling the respective individualities of its component whole, affords them chances of fully working out the possibilities that may be latent in them. And I have no doubt that this House will emphatically endorse the Muslim demand embodied in the resolution. Personally, I would go further than the demands embodied in it. I would like to see the Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province…

The much-abused passage on the amalgamation of Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province, Sindh, and Balochistan was advanced within the framework of an Indian federation, not outside it. Iqbal was endorsing the Muslim Conference’s constitutional demands while proposing a consolidated Muslim-majority province to resolve the communal deadlock, strengthen provincial autonomy, and secure Muslim political confidence within a united India. Throughout the address, his vocabulary is one of federation, residuary powers, constitutional safeguards, and harmonious coexistence, not partition, sovereignty, or separation.

This is precisely why the Allahabad Address has so often been read backwards through the prism of 1947. Iqbal’s “state” was employed loosely, almost interchangeably with “province,” and his constitutional imagination remained tethered to a weak Indian federation in which autonomous provinces voluntarily delegated limited powers to the Centre. His concern was not the creation of an independent Muslim homeland, but the reorganisation of India into a structure that could accommodate its irreconcilable communal realities without destroying its political unity.

Perhaps the strongest evidence lies in Iqbal’s own silence. He lived for more than seven years after Allahabad, participated in two Round Table Conferences, wrote extensively on Muslim politics, and yet never publicly demanded partition nor composed a poetic vision of an independent Pakistan. Had the Allahabad Address truly been the blueprint for a sovereign Muslim state, one would expect him to have elaborated upon it. Instead, posterity transformed a constitutional proposal into a prophetic manifesto, reading into Iqbal’s words a future that he himself never explicitly articulated.

We have detailed accounts of his private life and the informal discourses that took place in Javid Manzil, his house, and we find no supplementary material as to the follow-up of the Allahabad “scheme”. Nazir Niazi, who was a great admirer of Iqbal and one of his closest confidants in his last years, wrote an account, Iqbal Kay Huzoor – Nashishtain aur Guftaguen (In the Presence of Iqbal – Sittings and Conversations), which are basically his notes on the last four months of Iqbal’s life, his medical condition, the people from all walks of life who came to meet him, his daily routine and his discussions on various subjects—political, religious, social, literary and cultural. Mind you, in these days Iqbal was having a public feud with the chief of Deoband seminary, Maulana Husain Ahmed Madni, on the nature/definition of nationalism and its implications for the Indian Muslim community, and was deeply involved in Muslim League affairs, meanwhile being in correspondence with Jinnah. In Niazi’s accounts, we find Iqbal’s conversations on Muslim regeneration, the political crisis in India and abroad, Muslim unity, nationalism, the ideological foundations of the Saudi state, and even the prospect of a separate homeland for the Muslims of Sinkiang. One finds a conspicuous absence of any sustained advocacy for the partition of India. For a man retrospectively cast as the architect of Pakistan, the silence is striking.

In fact, the only recorded occasion on which Iqbal himself uttered the word “Pakistan” came almost in passing. Reflecting on the growing unity fostered by the Muslim League, he remarked that if the Muslims could somehow secure “a piece of land,” it would be all the better. When Niazi interjected, “Pakistan?”, Iqbal simply replied, “Pakistan! Or call it what you may.” Furthermore, in the accounts, Iqbal gave an in-depth analysis of the Muslim situation. He spoke about Islamic movements, the policies of European powers, Muslim unity and Muslim renaissance, the position of Muslims in India, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and his movement, the ulema and the Deoband seminary, Hindu nationalism and the Congress, the threat to the Muslims’ future, and how to face it. An account of this discussion is given in sixteen pages, but partition is nowhere mentioned, even in passing. Iqbal ended the discussion by saying:

“At present there is only one way…the Muslims should strengthen Jinnah’s hands (and) join the League…Our united front is the only answer to the hostile activities of the British and Hindus. How can we get our demands accepted without it?…These demands are related to the protection of our national existence…The united front can be established only under the leadership of the League, and the League will succeed only through Jinnah. No Musalman, except Jinnah is now qualified to lead the Muslims.”

Iqbal’s critique of territorial nationalism, according to Nazir, was uncompromising. He regarded nationalism, in its European sense, and the separation of religion from politics as fundamentally incompatible with Islam’s conception of a universal Muslim community. He was equally dismissive of the Congress vision of a composite Indian nationality, believing that it would ultimately reduce Muslims from a political nation to little more than a religious minority. Yet, for all his criticism, Iqbal stopped short of arguing that the only remedy lay in carving out an independent Muslim state. Instead, he repeatedly returned to the same refrain: Muslim unity.

Even in one of his final political statements in the Daily Inquilab, made barely six weeks before his death, Iqbal did not depart from the constitutional framework he had outlined years earlier at Allahabad. His prescriptions remained strikingly familiar: a federation beginning with British India, constitutional recognition of Muslim majorities in Punjab, Sindh, and Bengal, separate electorates, and guarantees for Muslim law, language, and culture. Political reconciliation, he argued, could only emerge through a united Muslim front insisting upon its distinct national identity, not through partition, but through constitutional bargaining within India.

In Iqbal Kay Akhri Do Saal, Ashiq Husain Batalvi, Joint Secretary of the Punjab Provincial Muslim League under Iqbal and one of his closest political associates in the struggle against Sir Sikander Hayat Khan’s Unionists, nowhere records Iqbal publicly advocating the partition of India. Batalvi nevertheless maintained that Iqbal had envisioned a separate Muslim state at Allahabad and had embraced Pakistan before his death, but his entire case rests not on any public speech or declaration by Iqbal, relying instead upon Iqbal’s private correspondence with Muhammad Ali Jinnah in 1937.

The historical record, however, points elsewhere. Responding to a pro-Congress educational missionary, Edward Thompson’s accusation in The Times in October 1931 that the Allahabad Address amounted to “Pan-Islamic plotting,” Iqbal categorically denied that he had proposed an independent Muslim state:

“I do not put forward a demand for a Muslim State, outside the British Empire, but only a guess at a possible outcome in the dim future of the mighty forces now shaping the destiny of the Indian subcontinent. No Indian Muslim with any pretence to sanity contemplates a Muslim State or series of States in North-West India outside the British Commonwealth of Nations as a plan of practical politics. Although I would oppose the creation of another cockpit of communal strife in the Central Punjab, as suggested by some enthusiasts, I am all for a redistribution of India into provinces with effective majorities of one community or another on lines advocated both by the Nehru and Simon Reports. Indeed, the suggestion regarding Muslim provinces merely carries forward this idea. A series of contented and well-organized Muslim provinces on the North-West Frontier of India would be the bulwark of India and of the British Empire against the hungry generations of the Asiatic highlands.”

Iqbal removed whatever ambiguity remained three years later. Writing privately to Maulana Raghib Ahsan on 6 March 1934, he objected to the persistent conflation of his constitutional proposal with the Pakistan scheme in terms that admit little room for reinterpretation:

“Please also note that the author of this review confuses my scheme with ‘Pakistan’. I propose to create a Muslim province within the Indian federation; the ‘Pakistan’ scheme proposes a separate federation of Muslim provinces in the North-West of India outside the Indian federation and directly related to England. Do not fail to point it out in your introductory comments and draw the attention of the editor of the Star of India also to this point.”

The publication of Iqbal’s letters to Muhammad Ali Jinnah in 1937 further complicated the debate, for it is upon these letters that much of the claim that Iqbal fathered Pakistan now rests. In his letter of 28 May 1937, Iqbal argued that the Muslim League could only secure its future by addressing Muslim poverty through the implementation and development of Islamic law.

He writes to Jinnah:

“Happily, there is a solution in the enforcement of the Law of Islam and its development in the light of modern ideas. After a long and careful study of Islamic Law I have come to the conclusion that if this system of Law is properly understood and applied, at least the right to subsistence is secured to everybody. But the enforcement and development of the Shariat of Islam is impossible in this country without a free Muslim state or states. This has been my honest conviction for many years and I still believe this to be the only way to solve the problems of bread and butter for Muslims as well as to secure a peaceful India. If such a thing is impossible in India the only other alternative is a civil war which as a matter of fact has been going on for some time in the shape of Hindu-Muslim riots…But as I have said above, in order to make it possible for Muslim India to solve the problems it is necessary to redistribute the country and to provide one or more Muslim states with absolute majorities. Don’t you think that the time for such a demand has already arrived? Perhaps that is the best reply you can give to the atheistic socialism of Jawaharlal Nehru.”

At first glance, these words appear to mark a decisive departure from Allahabad. Yet, three weeks later, in another letter dated 21 June 1937, Iqbal once again rooted his argument in constitutional reorganisation rather than an explicit call for partition, writing:

“The only thing that the communal award grants to Muslims is the recognition of their political existence in India. But such a recognition granted to a people whom this constitution does not and cannot help in solving their problem of poverty can be of no value to them. The Congress President has denied the political existence of Muslims in no unmistakable terms. The other Hindu political body, i.e. the Mahasabha, whom I regard as the real representative of the masses of the Hindus, has declared more than once that a united Hindu-Muslim nation is impossible in India. In these circumstances it is obvious that the only way to a peaceful India is a redistribution of the country on the lines of racial, religious and linguistic affinities. Many British statesmen also realise this, and the Hindu-Muslim riots which are rapidly coming in the wake of this constitution are sure to further open their eyes to the real situation in the country. I remember Lord Lothian told me before I left England that my scheme was the only possible solution to the troubles of India, but it would take twenty-five years to come.”

The 1937 correspondence undoubtedly marks an evolution in Iqbal’s constitutional thinking. Referring once again to “my scheme,” he made clear that he had become more convinced than ever that India required a radical redistribution along the lines he had proposed at Allahabad. In his letter of 21 June 1937, however, he went a step further:

“To my mind the new constitution with the idea of a single Indian federation is completely hopeless. A separate federation of Muslim provinces, reformed on the lines I have suggested above, is the only course which can secure a peaceful India and save Muslims from the domination of non-Muslims. Why should not the Muslims of North-West India and Bengal be considered as nations entitled to self-determination just as other nations in India and outside India are? Personally I think that the Muslims of North-West India and Bengal ought at present to ignore Muslim minority provinces.”

This is, without question, the strongest piece of evidence cited by those who trace the origins of Pakistan to Iqbal. Yet it sits uneasily beside his repeated public insistence on constitutional reorganisation within India, his explicit disavowals of the Pakistan scheme, and even his statements in March 1938, only weeks before his death, where he still envisaged a united India. The apparent contradiction has long been resolved by simply reading the later letters backwards into the Allahabad Address, transforming a constitutional evolution into a fully formed blueprint for partition.

What is beyond dispute, however, is Iqbal’s immense stature irrespective of the Pakistan debate. He was the intellectual architect of the twentieth-century Muslim renaissance in India, inspiring a generation of Muslim youth to rediscover confidence in Islam and their civilisational inheritance. Maulana Mohammad Ali Johar himself admitted that he had learnt the spirit of Islam from Iqbal rather than from any traditional scholar, and countless others drew similar inspiration from his poetry and philosophy. His legacy hardly requires embellishment through historical myth.

The letters themselves also reveal something else: Iqbal’s profound anxiety over the future of Indian Muslims and his extraordinary faith in Muhammad Ali Jinnah. By 1936, despite failing health and an instinctive dislike for political intrigue, Iqbal accepted the presidency of the Punjab Provincial Muslim League out of a sense of duty. He regarded Jinnah as the only statesman capable of guiding Muslim India through an increasingly perilous political landscape. Unlike provincial League leaders, who wrote to Jinnah about organisation and local affairs, Iqbal wrote about ideas. His letters were not constitutional blueprints but conversations, suggestions offered to a leader whose political judgment he trusted above all others. Alongside the proposal for a separate federation, he floated numerous other ideas, from a Muslim legislators’ convention and a North-West Muslim Conference to temporarily ignoring the Muslim minority provinces. They were reflections, not final doctrines.

Perhaps this explains the ambiguity that has generated so much historical controversy. Iqbal was thinking aloud. He was a philosopher and poet far more than a constitutional draftsman, and he used terms such as state, province, and federation with little concern for the legal precision later generations demanded of them. His letters to Jinnah were private exchanges, not public manifestos. They expose an evolving mind wrestling with an unprecedented political crisis rather than a man laying down a settled blueprint for Pakistan.

It is probably safe to say, in retrospect and in light of his political evolution throughout the 1930s, that had he lived until the passing of the Lahore Resolution, he would most likely have supported and backed it. By then, the Muslim League had largely come together, and a vast proportion of the Muslim population in India had become convinced that striving for a homeland was the only viable option to safeguard themselves against the nightmare scenario of Hindu majoritarian ambitions.

Having said that, it is also of great importance that myths be separated from reality. The humanisation of Iqbal is of paramount importance if the Muslim religio-political movement is to move forward in a positive post-colonial direction. Iqbal’s greatness does not lie in whether he uttered the word “Pakistan” first, nor in whether he can be retrospectively moulded into the sole architect of partition. His enduring legacy lies in his intellectual courage, his relentless call for self-renewal, and his attempt to reconcile faith with modernity in an age of profound civilisational crisis. To appreciate Iqbal as he was, rather than as later generations wished him to be, is not to diminish his stature but to elevate it. Historical truth has little to fear from great men; indeed, it is often the surest foundation upon which their greatness rests.

One problem emerges immediately. The phrase “the Americans” creates an impression of unity that rarely exists in practice. Foreign policy establishments are fragmented worlds. Diplomats, military planners, intelligence officials, journalists, congressional staffers, think tank analysts, and presidents themselves often disagree profoundly with one another. Even during the Cold War, American policy toward Pakistan oscillated constantly between strategic necessity and moral discomfort. Washington supported Ayub Khan during one period, embraced Zia ul Haq during another, sanctioned Pakistan over nuclear issues in the 1990s, then restored close cooperation after September 11. Different administrations viewed the same country through entirely different anxieties.

Still, there are patterns.

Since the 1950s, Pakistan’s relationship with the United States has rested less upon affection than utility. During the early Cold War, Pakistan entered SEATO and CENTO because American strategists feared Soviet expansion across Eurasia. During the anti Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, Pakistan became indispensable as a conduit for weapons, money, and intelligence coordination. After September 11, it once again became strategically necessary, this time as a logistical and military partner in the War on Terror. Throughout these periods, Washington generally preferred engaging with institutions rather than emotionally charged civilian politics. Armies endure. Intelligence structures endure. Bureaucracies endure. Prime ministers often do not.

Imran Khan complicated this arrangement in ways that were not immediately obvious when he first entered office.

At first glance, he hardly resembled the traditional anti Western dissenter. His biography belonged comfortably within elite transnational culture. Aitchison, Elite urban Lahore, Oxford, county cricket, London philanthropy, upper class social circles. For much of his life, he was actually admired in the West as the ideal postcolonial success story, polished enough to appear familiar yet exotic enough to remain interesting. Older British profiles often portrayed him as the charming postcolonial cosmopolitan who could move between Lahore and Kensington with equal ease. Even his critics admitted that he possessed an unusual fluency in Western idioms for a Pakistani politician. It is important to remember this because later portrayals of Khan as some lifelong ideological enemy of the West distort the historical picture.

If anything, the irony lies elsewhere. Men who emerge entirely outside imperial culture are often easier for great powers to categorise. Khan was more complicated because he came from within a world long shaped by Anglo Pakistani elite continuity and then gradually developed a language of wounded sovereignty against that same world. He was hardly the first politician to use anti American sentiment, but he employed it differently. Earlier politicians treated anti Americanism as theatre for local consumption while maintaining strategic obedience privately. Khan increasingly appeared to believe his own rhetoric. That distinction matters immensely.

Perhaps the roots of this shift lie in the emotional aftermath of the War on Terror inside Pakistan itself. By the late 2010s, fatigue had settled over the country in ways difficult to quantify statistically. There were of course measurable things. Bomb blasts. Military operations in Swat and Waziristan. Internal displacement. Drone strikes. Sectarian massacres. Economic losses. But beneath these existed another phenomenon, harder to document academically yet visible socially. Many Pakistanis had begun feeling that their country no longer inhabited its own historical time. Events seemed perpetually dictated by someone else’s security doctrines.

Khan understood this sentiment earlier than most mainstream politicians. His criticism of drone warfare resonated not because it was intellectually unique, but because it translated abstract questions of sovereignty into emotional vocabulary. One noticed in his speeches recurring references to dignity, humiliation, dependency, self respect. Such language carries particular force in postcolonial societies. Frantz Fanon wrote once that colonial domination leaves behind not merely economic wounds but damaged psychological landscapes. Pakistan was not a colony of the United States, obviously, but long military dependence and strategic subordination had nevertheless created deep anxieties regarding autonomy.

Yet it would be simplistic to portray Khan as a consistent anti imperial thinker. His own political career contained contradictions everywhere. He criticised American wars while relying heavily on overseas Pakistanis shaped by Western economies. He condemned elite corruption while emerging from elite society himself. He spoke of Islamic welfare while simultaneously courting international financial institutions. One could argue that these contradictions reflected Pakistan itself rather than personal hypocrisy. Still, they mattered.

The deterioration in relations with Washington probably accelerated after the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Here again, historical context is necessary. American distrust of Pakistan over Afghanistan existed long before Khan became prime minister. During the Obama administration, tensions intensified dramatically after the Raymond Davis affair, the Abbottabad raid, and repeated allegations regarding the Haqqani network. Admiral Mike Mullen’s famous description of the network as a “veritable arm” of Pakistani intelligence came years before Khan’s government.

Yet the Taliban victory in August 2021 altered atmospherics in a deeper way. Empires rarely process defeat gracefully. The American withdrawal from Kabul produced images too symbolic to contain quietly. Helicopters above embassies. Crowds at airports. Twenty years of intervention collapsing with astonishing speed. Within the United States, arguments immediately emerged regarding responsibility. Intelligence failures were debated. Biden faced criticism domestically. Pakistan naturally entered these conversations because of its long relationship with the Afghan Taliban.

It was during this atmosphere that Khan’s remark about Afghans “breaking the chains of slavery” caused outrage abroad. The sentence itself was perhaps less important than the emotional worlds surrounding it. Many Pakistanis interpreted the comment through memories of occupation, drone warfare, and foreign intervention. Many American observers heard something entirely different. They heard contempt toward sacrifices made during two decades of war and indifference toward Afghan fears under Taliban rule. The same sentence acquired incompatible meanings depending on historical memory. The Americans had spent two decades constructing a moral vocabulary around Afghanistan: democracy, women’s rights, counterterrorism, state building. Khan punctured that vocabulary in a single sentence by framing the conflict through the language of occupation and liberation. One could almost hear the anger this produced among policy elites who still wanted history to remember their intervention as fundamentally noble despite its catastrophic outcome.

Yet Afghanistan alone does not explain the deterioration. The real fracture emerged from uncertainty. Khan was becoming difficult to read.

Great powers are obsessed with predictability. They can negotiate with dictators, monarchs, revolutionaries, Islamists, even adversaries, provided those actors remain structurally intelligible. Khan’s politics increasingly escaped neat classification. He mixed Islamic symbolism with neoliberal economics, Sufi imagery with populist aggression, welfare state rhetoric with elite moralism. At times he sounded like Erdogan, at times like Bin Salman, at times like Ali Khamanei.

Then came the Moscow visit in February 2022.

It is possible that Pakistani discourse now exaggerates the actual strategic significance of that visit. Pakistan was never realistically capable of some grand geopolitical pivot toward Russia. Trade remained limited. Military dependence on Western systems continued. Yet history occasionally becomes sensitive to symbolism in strange ways. Khan arriving in Moscow on the very day Russian troops entered Ukraine created imagery impossible to separate from the invasion itself. Whether the timing was unfortunate coincidence or diplomatic misjudgment mattered less than perception afterward.

Still, one should be cautious here. Modern great powers rarely operate through theatrical instructions of the kind popular imagination prefers. Foreign influence today often functions diffusely. Signals are communicated. Preferences become understood. Domestic actors anticipate reactions before formal pressure even appears. This does not mean local agency disappears. Pakistan’s own internal conflicts mattered enormously in Khan’s downfall.

By late 2021, his relationship with the military establishment had visibly deteriorated, particularly over appointments within the intelligence apparatus. This is crucial because American policymakers historically valued coherence within Pakistan’s civil military structure above ideological affinity with individual leaders. A prime minister increasingly isolated from the establishment naturally became a less predictable partner regardless of personal beliefs.

Khan’s governing style also contributed to the tensions surrounding him. He often governed with the rhetoric of permanent opposition. Critics were not merely opponents but embodiments of moral decay. Accountability rhetoric acquired an almost theological intensity at times. Many supporters admired this. Others, including some initially sympathetic observers, grew uneasy. Sections of the business community feared instability. Journalists complained of pressure. Opposition parties viewed his anti corruption campaign as selective justice.

Yet reducing his fall to administrative failure alone misses something important about why his removal later generated such profound emotional reaction across parts of Pakistani society.

Khan became, for many supporters, less a politician than a vessel for unresolved national anxieties. Pakistan’s modern history contains a recurring tension between dependency and fantasies of sovereignty. The state relies upon foreign loans, military partnerships, IMF arrangements, and geopolitical patronage while simultaneously cultivating narratives of exceptionalism and independence. These impulses coexist uneasily inside the national imagination. Khan articulated the sovereignty impulse more emotionally than his predecessors had managed in recent years.

Whether he possessed the institutional discipline necessary to convert that emotion into sustainable statecraft remains uncertain. Perhaps he overestimated the power of charisma within international politics. Perhaps he misunderstood how constrained medium sized indebted states actually are within contemporary global systems. Perhaps his supporters themselves projected impossible hopes onto him. All these things may contain partial truth.

There is an older pattern here that extends beyond Pakistan. Mossadegh in Iran encountered versions of it during the early 1950s, though under circumstances far harsher than Khan’s. Nasser experienced related tensions after Suez. Even figures like Bhutto discovered that postcolonial assertions of autonomy often collide with realities of economic and strategic dependence. Comparisons should not be forced too far. History punishes lazy analogies. Yet one notices recurring dilemmas among leaders who attempt to transform wounded national psychology into foreign policy language.

In the end, the tragedy surrounding Imran Khan may lie less in conspiracy than misrecognition. Khan seems to have believed that democratic legitimacy and popular affection could create strategic room for manoeuvre within the international system. American policymakers, meanwhile, continued approaching Pakistan primarily through the logic of institutional stability and security management. Each side interpreted the other through a different vocabulary.

And somewhere beneath all this lies a quieter sadness regarding postcolonial states themselves. Sovereignty today is an incomplete condition almost everywhere, though it becomes especially fragile in indebted security states positioned between larger powers. Leaders rise promising dignity because populations genuinely hunger for it. Yet global structures rarely permit dignity in uncomplicated forms. By the time reality intrudes, political language has already become emotionally irreversible.

Perhaps that is why the argument over Imran Khan continues with such intensity. People are not only debating one man. They are debating whether countries like Pakistan can ever speak in their own voice without eventually discovering the invisible limits surrounding them.

As for Khan himself, predicting his future has become unusually difficult because he no longer exists merely as a conventional political actor. Prison has altered his symbolic weight. South Asian politics has often transformed incarcerated leaders into vessels of memory rather than administrators of policy. Yet myth carries dangers of its own. A leader elevated too completely into symbolism sometimes loses the practical flexibility necessary for governance. Khan’s future may therefore depend on whether he can eventually descend from the emotional pedestal constructed around him and return to the slower, less romantic work of politics itself. If he returns only as a figure of vengeance, Pakistan’s crisis may deepen further. If he returns having understood something about the limits of charisma, the fragility of institutions, and the tragic seductions of populist certainty, then perhaps he could still become a transitional figure in Pakistan’s democratic evolution rather than merely another martyr added to its long and exhausted political graveyard.

This arrangement has acquired its own rhythm. It produces stability of a certain kind, though rarely legitimacy in a deeper sense. It allows for governance, but not for a settled understanding of who governs. The citizen, observing this order, learns to read between formal lines. Power is not always where it appears to be, and accountability does not always follow power.

Such a condition is not unique to Pakistan, but its persistence here raises a more foundational question. What exactly is the basis upon which authority is exercised and obeyed? The answer cannot be limited to institutional design. It requires an inquiry into the underlying social contract, if one exists, or the absence of it if it does not.

The language of the social contract entered political thought through early modern Europe, where thinkers sought to explain the transition from disorder to organized political life. Thomas Hobbes imagined a state of nature marked by insecurity, where life was precarious enough that individuals would rationally submit to a sovereign power in exchange for protection. Authority, in his account, is justified by its capacity to prevent chaos. The sovereign stands above the law because the alternative is disintegration.

This vision carries a certain stark clarity. It is not concerned with moral perfection. It seeks order.

John Locke, writing in a different context, softened this severity. For him, individuals possess natural rights that precede the state. Political authority is legitimate only insofar as it protects these rights. If it fails to do so, it may be resisted. Consent, rather than fear, becomes the basis of obligation.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau took the argument in another direction. He proposed that true freedom lies not in escaping authority but in participating in it. The general will, as he conceived it, transforms obedience into a form of self-rule. The individual, in submitting to the collective, obeys a will that is also his own.

These formulations differ in their assumptions and conclusions, yet they share a common ambition. They seek to ground political authority in a rational account of human association. The state is not merely inherited. It is justified.

When these ideas travel beyond their original context, they do not remain unchanged. In postcolonial societies, they encounter histories that do not align neatly with European trajectories. Pakistan is a case in point. Its emergence in 1947 was not the culmination of an internal social contract in the Lockean or Rousseauian sense. It was the result of a political movement within a colonial framework, shaped by negotiations, contingencies, and the violent rupture of Partition.

The state that came into being inherited institutions that were designed for imperial governance. The legal system bore the imprint of British common law. Administrative structures reflected colonial priorities. The question of legitimacy was deferred, partly because the urgency of survival overshadowed it.

Over time, attempts were made to articulate a constitutional order. The Objectives Resolution introduced a distinctive element by asserting that sovereignty belongs to Allah, to be exercised by the people within prescribed limits. This formulation does not sit comfortably within the European theories mentioned earlier. It neither places sovereignty entirely in a human sovereign nor dissolves it into a purely popular will.

It introduces a third dimension.

This dimension cannot be understood without turning to the Islamic intellectual tradition, where the question of authority has long been explored in terms that differ from early modern Europe. Islamic jurisprudence does not begin with a hypothetical state of nature. It begins with revelation, with a conception of law that is believed to have a divine origin. Human reasoning operates within this framework, interpreting, applying, and sometimes extending it.

The ruler, in this tradition, is not the source of law. He is subject to it.

This distinction carries significant implications. Authority is not justified solely by its capacity to maintain order, as in Hobbes, nor solely by its protection of individual rights, as in Locke. It is justified by its conformity to a moral and legal order that precedes it. The concept of amanah frames power as a trust. It is given, not owned. Its exercise is evaluated in ethical terms.

Historical practices such as bay‘ah reflect this understanding. Allegiance is not unconditional. It is contingent upon the ruler’s adherence to justice. Jurists debated the limits of obedience, recognizing that authority could deviate from its normative foundations. Their concern was not only with stability but with the moral quality of governance.

This does not mean that Islamic history offers a model of perfect political order. It does not. But it does provide a vocabulary in which authority is neither absolute nor merely procedural. It is accountable to a higher standard.

Pakistan’s postcolonial bargain can be read as an attempt, however incomplete, to integrate this vocabulary into a modern state structure. Muhammad Ali Jinnah did not leave behind a detailed theory of Islamic governance, yet his emphasis on constitutionalism suggests that he did not envision a state where religious principles would operate outside institutional constraints.

The difficulty has been one of translation.

Modern constitutionalism relies on clearly defined institutions, codified laws, and procedures that can be uniformly applied. Islamic jurisprudence, by contrast, developed as a more diffuse tradition, with multiple schools of thought and a strong emphasis on interpretive reasoning. Integrating these two requires more than symbolic gestures. It requires a sustained intellectual effort.

In Pakistan, this effort has been uneven. Islamic provisions have been incorporated into the constitution. Institutions such as the Federal Shariat Court have been established. Yet the broader legal system continues to operate largely within a common law framework. The result is a layered structure in which different conceptions of authority coexist without full integration.

The hybrid political system mirrors this legal hybridity. Just as law oscillates between inherited forms and Islamic aspirations, political authority oscillates between formal constitutional structures and informal centers of power. Each layer has its own logic. Together, they produce a system that functions, but without a settled foundation.

The absence of such a foundation becomes visible in moments of crisis. When political conflicts intensify, appeals are made to different sources of legitimacy. Some invoke the constitution. Others appeal to necessity. Still others draw upon religious language. These appeals do not converge. They compete.

A more coherent social contract would not eliminate these differences, but it would situate them within a shared framework.

Such a framework, if it is to be meaningful in Pakistan, cannot be imported wholesale from European theory. It must engage seriously with Islamic jurisprudence while recognizing the realities of a modern state.

One possible point of departure lies in rethinking sovereignty. Instead of treating it as an absolute attribute of a single institution, it can be understood as a layered concept. At the highest level, sovereignty belongs to Allah, which introduces a moral horizon that limits human authority. At the operational level, authority is exercised by institutions that derive their legitimacy from the people. The relationship between these levels must be articulated in a way that is both principled and practical.

This articulation would require a more developed jurisprudence than currently exists.

The legislative process, for instance, would need to engage with Islamic principles not as static constraints but as sources of guidance. This would involve scholars trained in both modern law and Islamic jurisprudence, capable of navigating the complexities of both traditions. It would also require a willingness to accept plurality within Islamic interpretation, rather than seeking a single authoritative voice.

The judiciary would play a crucial role in mediating this relationship. Its task would not be limited to enforcing procedural rules. It would involve interpreting the constitution in light of both its Islamic commitments and its institutional structures. This demands a level of intellectual depth that goes beyond technical competence.

The executive, as the site of governance, would need to internalize the idea of amanah in a practical sense. Accountability mechanisms must be strengthened, not only to prevent corruption but to reinforce the idea that power is exercised on behalf of the community and within moral limits.

None of this can succeed without a shift in political culture. A social contract is sustained not only by institutions but by shared expectations. Citizens must believe that the state operates within a framework that is both just and intelligible. This belief cannot be manufactured. It emerges from consistent practice.

The hybrid system, as it currently functions, undermines this possibility. It introduces uncertainty into the location of authority. It weakens the link between power and accountability. It allows for short-term stability at the cost of long-term coherence.

To move beyond it, Pakistan would need to confront a difficult question. Can it develop a form of governance in which Islamic principles are not merely invoked but institutionally embedded, and in which constitutional structures are not merely formal but substantively respected?

This is not a question that admits an easy answer.

It requires a willingness to move beyond familiar patterns. The reliance on informal power structures, while often justified in terms of necessity, ultimately prevents the development of stable institutions. At the same time, a purely procedural constitutionalism that ignores the society’s Islamic orientation risks appearing disconnected from its moral foundations.

A synthesis is needed, but not in the sense of a superficial blending. It must be a genuine integration, where each element informs the other.

Such a project would take time. It would involve debates that are likely to be contentious. It would require intellectual resources that are not always readily available. Yet the alternative is a continuation of the current condition, where the state operates without a fully articulated basis of legitimacy.

In Islamic thought, there is an awareness that human efforts at governance will always be imperfect. Justice, in its fullest sense, remains an aspiration. Yet this does not absolve societies from striving toward it. The concept of ijtihad captures this striving. It is an ongoing process of interpretation, an acknowledgment that new circumstances require fresh reasoning.

Pakistan’s situation calls for such reasoning.

The postcolonial bargain that brought it into existence was shaped by historical contingencies. It carried within it an Islamic aspiration and a constitutional framework, but it did not fully reconcile them. The decades that followed added layers of complexity without resolving the underlying tension.

A new social contract would not erase this history. It would reinterpret it.

It would recognize that the invocation of Islam is not a substitute for governance, and that constitutionalism is not a purely technical arrangement. It would seek to align the moral language of the state with its institutional practices.

The path toward such an alignment is uncertain. It may involve setbacks. It may be resisted by those who benefit from the current ambiguity. Yet without it, the hybrid system is likely to persist, offering a form of stability that remains perpetually incomplete.

In the end, the question is not whether Pakistan can adopt a model that has worked elsewhere. It is whether it can articulate its own basis of political obligation, one that draws upon its history, its intellectual traditions, and its present realities.

That articulation, if it occurs, would not merely resolve institutional tensions but would alter the way authority is understood and experienced. It would transform obedience from a matter of necessity into a form of participation within a shared moral order.

Such a transformation cannot be imposed. It must be worked out, gradually, through thought and practice.

The need for it, however, is no longer in doubt.

Look at Egypt, where the language of the republic coexisted with the discipline of the barracks. Consider Turkey, where the military placed itself as custodian of a national project that was itself unsettled. Even in Iran, where revolution sought to resolve the question decisively, a dual structure emerged, one part electoral, one part doctrinal.

These were not accidents for the feeble-minded to ponder. They were responses to a shared dilemma. How does a state remain intact when its social contract is still under negotiation? How does it claim democratic legitimacy while fearing democratic unpredictability?

Pakistan’s answer was not unique. It was simply more sustained, more refined, and perhaps more honest in its dishonesty.

There are political systems that declare themselves with clarity. Monarchies crown themselves, democracies count themselves, dictatorships impose themselves. And then there are those regimes that prefer ambiguity as method, indirection as structure, and deniability as doctrine. What you have in Pakistan today belongs to this latter category: a system that neither fully reveals nor fully conceals itself. It governs not from the throne, nor entirely from behind the curtain, but through a fine suspension in the air. I call it Praxio-Khakshahi—the rule of dust.

“Khakhshahi” carries within it a double metaphor. Khak is dust, the most ordinary and the most pervasive of substances. It settles everywhere, claims nothing, and yet covers everything. It is humble in form but tyrannical in reach. In the Pakistani context, it also carries a quieter insinuation: the color of khaki, the uniform that has come to represent not just an institution but a mode of power. Praxio, from praxis, signals that this is not merely a theory of governance but an active, lived arrangement, performed daily through decisions, silences, alignments, and exclusions.

To understand Praxio-Khakshahi, one must resist the temptation to reduce it to the crude label of a “hybrid regime.” That term, borrowed from political science, suggests a halfway house between democracy and authoritarianism. It implies imbalance, perhaps even instability. But Praxio-Khakshahi is not an incomplete system; it is a refined one. Its genius lies precisely in its ability to sustain contradiction without collapse.

At independence, Pakistan inherited a state without a settled political class. The Muslim League had mobilised effectively, but it had not governed at scale. The early deaths of central figures created a vacuum that bureaucracy and military organisation were better equipped to fill. The colonial state, with its preference for order over participation, did not dissolve, but simply changed its language and cloak.

The first decade was marked by instability that felt existential. Governments rose and fell quickly. Provincial tensions surfaced. The question of what Pakistan was meant to be remained unsettled. In such an environment, institutions that could claim discipline and continuity acquired disproportionate weight.

The intervention of Ayub Khan in 1958 did not emerge from nowhere. It formalised a tendency that had already been forming. The argument was simple and persuasive to many at the time. Politics had become disorderly. The state required direction. Military rule presented itself not as an ambition, but as a correction.

That pattern repeated, with variations, in later decades. General Zia-ul-Haq in 1977 and General Pervez Musharraf in 1999. Each moment justified itself through the language of necessity, affecting the social contract and the legal pillars of the country very deeply. Each period of overt control was followed by a return to civilian form. But the return was never a reset or a path to progress. It carried forward lessons for the deep state in Rawalpindi.

The most important of those lessons was not about how to seize power. It was about how to shape it without seizing it.

Direct rule came with costs. It concentrated blame. It attracted scrutiny. It required the state to own outcomes in a way that was difficult to manage. By the early twenty first century, a quieter insight had taken hold. Influence could be more effective than authority if it was exercised without full visibility.

This is the transition point.

Praxio Khakshahi emerges from this refinement. It retains the outward grammar of democracy while internalising the mechanisms of guidance. It loosens control of the day to day business of the state to political actors, while retaining control over the larger interests of the state, namely foreign, domestic, economic, and military policy. Elections continue, but their field is curated. Governments function, but within understood limits. Institutions speak, but often in tones that reflect an awareness of larger currents.

From the perspective often described as the deep state, this arrangement has clear advantages.

It diffuses responsibility. When outcomes are unpopular, they can be attributed to the visible actors. When they are successful, the system as a whole claims stability. It reduces the risk of abrupt rupture. Instead of confronting politics head on, it manages its parameters. It allows for continuity across electoral cycles, preserving long term priorities that might otherwise be disrupted.

There is also a strategic dimension. Pakistan’s security environment has rarely been forgiving. Conflicts, regional rivalries, internal militancy. In such a context, the idea of leaving core questions entirely to electoral fluctuation has often been viewed with suspicion. Praxio Khakshahi offers a way to reconcile participation with control.

But the system is not merely imposed on the populace. It is also absorbed widely. It has become so synonymous and crucial to the existence of Pakistan as a nation that the prospect of its dissolution carries a dreadful vision of the breakup of the entire country in the backdrop.

Political actors, belonging to both sides of the political aisle, learn its logic quickly. Survival depends on reading signals that are not formally announced. Media institutions adjust their boundaries. The public develops a sensitivity to what is said and what is avoided. They do not need micromanagement, as centuries of colonialism have dulled any revolutionary fervour within them. Over time, this produces a shared understanding that rarely needs to be articulated.

One could argue that it represents a certain maturity. A recognition that power need not always be theatrical to be effective. That influence, if exercised carefully, can achieve more than overt dominance. In this reading, Pakistan has moved beyond cycles of disruption into a more stable equilibrium.

One could also argue the opposite. That the system has learned to avoid its own contradictions rather than resolve them. That by keeping power partially hidden, it prevents the kind of accountability that might force institutional clarity. That it sustains itself by limiting the very political development it claims to protect.

Both readings exist, often within the same conversation.

What is difficult to deny is that Praxio Khakshahi represents a historical synthesis. It draws from colonial administrative habits, from early post-independence instability, from repeated experiments with direct rule, and from the eventual realisation that visibility is a liability.

For the historically uninformed, this model of governance did not arrive fully formed. It was assembled, adjusted, tested, and retained because it worked well enough. That phrase matters. Well enough to maintain continuity. Well enough to manage crises. Well enough to avoid collapse.

Whether well enough is sufficient for the future remains an open question.