S. Haider Mehdi
On July 22, 2025, a session court judge in Sargodha (Punjab province), Naeem Akhtar sentenced 39 political workers of Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI), the party founded by former Prime Minister Imran Khan, to 10 years of hard labor. The charges were framed under Pakistan’s notorious anti-terrorism laws, long criticized for their exploitative deployment against political dissenters.
The verdict, widely perceived as a farcical and predetermined show trial, represents yet another milestone in the systematic dismantling of Pakistan’s democratic project at the hands of its powerful military establishment, led by Army Chief General Asim Munir.
The judgment is not an isolated event. It is part of an unbroken chain of actions, illegal, unconstitutional, and increasingly desperate, designed to extinguish the political challenge posed by Imran Khan and his overwhelming popular support. What began as a power tussle following Khan’s ouster in April 2022 has mutated into a full-blown military dictatorship masquerading as a civilian government.
Today, Khan remains incarcerated, and Pakistan stands on the brink. It either succumbs to a hybrid totalitarianism engineered by its military intelligence complex or it initiates a historic civilian awakening. Khan’s call for countrywide protests culminating on August 5, 2025, marking two years of his unlawful detention, may well define Pakistan’s political trajectory for decades to come.
Genesis of the military crackdown
Following Imran Khan’s arrest on May 9, 2023, under highly dubious charges and circumstances, a wave of orchestrated violence was unleashed across the country. Widely understood by analysts and insiders as a false flag operation, this violence became the pretext for an unprecedented crackdown. Thousands of PTI supporters were rounded up, tortured, and silenced. Independent journalists were muzzled. Civil rights evaporated overnight. But the military miscalculated the resilience of PTI’s support base.
Asim Munir, believing Khan’s popularity would dissipate under the weight of repression, pushed forward with a plan to orchestrate a rigged election. The hope was to engineer a pliant civilian facade, fronted by thoroughly discredited political parties like the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). However, reality proved stubborn.
February 8, 2024 Elections, A Historic Mandate Stolen
After much delay and constitutional violations, including ignoring the 90-day election mandate following the National Assembly’s dissolution in August 2023, elections were finally held on February 8, 2024. But well before a single vote was cast, the playing field had already been destroyed.
In January 2024, the Supreme Court, under then Chief Justice Qazi Faez Isa, disqualified PTI from using its iconic cricket bat symbol, a symbol intimately tied to Khan’s personal identity and legacy. In a country where over 40 percent of the electorate is functionally illiterate, the removal of an election symbol amounts to political disenfranchisement. Worse, PTI candidates were forbidden from contesting under their party’s name, an interpretation enforced by the Election Commission at the military’s behest.
Nevertheless, PTI-backed independents, many aligning under the Sunni Ittehad Council banner, triumphed. Exit polls, media tallies, and Form 45 vote counts indicated a two thirds majority for PTI at the federal level and in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, with pluralities in Sindh and Balochistan. It was a landslide.
That victory, however, was never allowed to materialize.
Electoral Engineering in Plain Sight
As mainstream and social media broadcast PTI’s sweeping wins, the military went into overdrive. Original tallies were changed at local returning offices, Form 47s bearing inflated vote counts for losing candidates replaced the official Form 45s submitted from polling stations. In some cases, vote counts were inflated tenfold overnight. A candidate who had received 8,000 votes on Form 45 suddenly had 80,000 in the final count.
This brazen theft was documented in real time. Videos of tampered forms, disappearing presiding officers, and pressure tactics on election staff flooded the internet. International observers were horrified, yet the regime remained shameless. For General Asim Munir and his collaborators, this was no longer about legitimacy, it was about survival.
By the time the dust settled, PTI’s actual 190 seat majority had been slashed to barely 90. The PML-N, which had secured only 17 seats by independent counts, was awarded enough seats to cobble together a coalition with the PPP, led by the notorious Asif Ali Zardari, whose reputation as “Mr. 10 Percent” dates back to the 1988 Benazir Bhutto government.
Constitutional Mutations and Judicial Capture
Having stolen the electoral mandate, the military moved to solidify its grip. Parliament, illegitimate in origin and servile in behavior, passed sweeping amendments to the Constitution. These included extending the army chief’s tenure from three to five years, introducing provisions for future extensions, and enabling the executive to directly appoint judges to the superior judiciary. A parallel Supreme Court bench, handpicked by the regime, now acts as a rubber stamp for military dictates.
Most egregiously, the military manipulated the allocation of reserved seats, meant to be distributed on the basis of proportional representation. In a shocking judgment, the Supreme Court awarded these seats to government allied parties, completely ignoring the independent status of PTI candidates and their shared ideological mandate. This act alone gifted the regime a two thirds majority, one it had clearly not won at the ballot box.
The Betrayal of KP and the Senate
Even KP, a PTI stronghold, was not immune. Chief Minister Ali Amin Gandapur, long seen as a stalwart of the party, is now widely believed to have been co-opted by the army. Reports suggest that inducements, financial and political, were offered in exchange for breaking ranks. In return, the regime promised continued power in KP and reassurances that Khan would never be released.
The aim, to ensure Senate control. With reserved seat manipulation and strategic betrayals, Asim Munir seeks to dominate both houses of Parliament and rubber stamp a constitutional order tailored to military permanence.
A Call to Conscience, Imran Khan’s Protest Movement
Imran Khan has now called for a countrywide protest campaign to climax on August 5, 2025, the grim second anniversary of his unlawful detention. His call is not merely a plea for personal justice, but a rallying cry to rescue Pakistan from descending irreversibly into military totalitarianism.
Khan’s resilience under solitary confinement, multiple sham convictions, and character assassination have only amplified his stature. His movement, far from dissipating, is now broader, deeper, and more ideologically rooted. For millions of Pakistanis, he represents not just a political leader but a symbol of national dignity, constitutionalism, and civilian supremacy.
This protest is not about personalities. It is about the foundational question of who rules Pakistan, its people through elected representatives, or an unelected junta operating from behind the curtain.
Pakistan at a Crossroads
What happens on and after August 5 will be decisive. If the protests are large, sustained, and peaceful, they could mark the beginning of a civic awakening. If met with the usual brutality, they may yet catalyze international attention and eventual elite defections. The regime is brittle, it survives not on legitimacy, but on fear. And fear, historically, has a short shelf life when the masses mobilize.
For now, Pakistan stands as a textbook case of a state hijacked from within. Its Constitution violated. Its courts neutered. Its parliament puppeteered. Its people betrayed.
Yet, hope is not extinguished.
It lies in the courage of the people, the resilience of a grassroots movement, and the will of a leader who, despite every conceivable effort to erase him, remains at the center of national consciousness.
On August 5, 2025, the world will watch. And history will judge.
A charismatic politician charming crowds throughout Pakistan. A rising crescendo of political speeches and rallies setting the nation afire,...
Politics is a dirty game but in Pakistan, politicians are in a class of their own. With no ideological commitment, they are in politics to m...
Despite his ouster from power, former prime minister Imran Khan continues to attract very large numbers of people to his rallies that suppor...
Pakistanis will go to the polls on February 8 but the largest political party—Pakistan Tehreek-e Insaf led by Imran Khan—faces immense h...
