And thou state hast no empathy for those who do harm it in the name of truth, for art thou a state in cold blood?
The Greek tragedy of The Oresteia begins and unravels with righteousness. Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter for victory. Clytemnestra murders him for justice. Orestes commits matricide for duty.
Each act is defended as a moral necessity. Each actor believes themselves compelled by truth. And yet the stage runs red. The catastrophe is the certainty of wickedness – the unshakeable belief that one’s cause sanctifies one’s violence. The cycle ends only when vengeance is wrested from private conviction and handed to public institutions. The Furies yield to a court and passion yields to law. The state, in other words, is born to decide – not to feel. That distinction matters.
A citizen acts from belief, while the state acts from mandate. A citizen may speak from conscience, but the state must always respond from calculation. When individuals direct speech against the state – not merely criticising policy, but alleging criminality, treachery or collapse – they frame themselves as truth-tellers. They insist they are exposing, warning, awakening. And sometimes, they are. But most times, they are not.
In Pakistan, recent arrests over (alleged) incendiary social media chatter have been reduced to a convenient slogan: ‘arrested for tweeting’. It is a powerful phrase because it suggests fragility – a state so thin-skinned that 280 characters can trigger incarceration. Yet the law does not operate on character counts, nor on the state’s feelings. It operates on consequence for action.
The real question is not whether a tweet was posted in good faith or whether it was in fact for the state actors to determine the degree of its incendiary nature. It is whether sustained digital conduct may often cross from dissent into destabilisation. There is a difference between criticising a government decision and repeatedly invoking narratives that erode institutional legitimacy. There is a difference between demanding accountability and provoking public hostility against the state’s foundational structures. A democracy must tolerate the first, however, never indulge the second.
A narrative repeated often enough acquires the texture of fact – ‘Napoleon was short’ or ‘Cleopatra was known for her beauty’ are examples of two contested historical opinions that have become accepted as facts. Speech, in the digital age, is not static. It multiplies. It trends. When such narratives accuse institutions of deliberate malevolence, fabricate or exaggerate wrongdoing, or encourage public distrust in core state organs, they do not remain mere opinions; they become instruments.
And this is where JFC Fuller becomes relevant. Fuller argued that the objective of modern warfare was not the annihilation of armies but the disintegration of will. Break morale, fracture confidence, distort belief – and the adversary collapses without kinetic engagement. The decisive blow is psychological.
What we now describe as fifth-generation warfare is merely the technological evolution of that insight. Conflict is waged through narrative. Through information. Through perception management. It is non-kinetic, non-linear and often indistinguishable from ordinary discourse.
We tend to imagine such warfare as foreign – hostile actors manipulating domestic fault lines. But psychological destabilisation does not require foreign passports. The mechanism is internal erosion. If public trust in institutions is systematically weakened through sustained narrative assault, the outcome resembles the objectives Fuller described: paralysis, division, fragmentation.
None of this means that recent arrests and subsequent convictions were born out of wilful internal erosion. And none of this means that criticism equals warfare. That would be a dangerous and lazy conflation. The health of a republic depends on dissent. Courts are strengthened by scrutiny. Governments are refined by opposition.
But when the state issues rebuttals, presents irrefutable evidence or offers clarification, and the campaign persists unchanged; when warnings are given and disregarded; when the tone shifts from reform to agitation – the character of the act must be reassessed. At some point, the question ceases to be about freedom of speech and becomes one of public order.
The individuals involved may genuinely believe they are defending the truth. In Oresteia, sincerity did not prevent destruction. Certainty did not purify violence. The tragedy lay precisely in the inability of each actor to see that righteousness, unrestrained, can corrode the very order that makes justice possible.
In public discourse, the rule is simple: caveat emptor. A citizen’s civic duty calls for verification before amplification. And such a daunting (read: simple) task may be achieved by merely apprising oneself of the negation that lies right under the author’s claims. When an alleged missing person is claimed by the banned outfit itself as KIA, it takes no great intellectual exertion to connect the dots.
In another paper, a prominent author described these arrests as evidence of a state “at war” with internal dissent. That framing misunderstands the nature of the state itself. A state cannot be at war with dissent; dissent is part of its constitutional ecosystem. War implies passion, hostility, emotion. The state, properly conceived, does not feel – it responds. And response, when expressed through law, often appears cold. It arrests. It prosecutes. It incarcerates. It does not trade barbs online; it invokes statute. To some, that looks like an authoritarian reflex. To others, it is institutional self-preservation.
The line between repression and protection is precariously thin, and it must be guarded with vigilance. A state that brands all criticism as subversion invites tyranny. But a state that ignores sustained psychological destabilisation under the banner of ‘just speech’ risks something subtler and perhaps more dangerous: internal fracture without visible invasion. And in a region where foreign interests have historically sought influence within domestic fault lines, internal amplification – even if unintentional – can compound destabilisation.
For years, public discourse has been animated by a desire to check state power – to resist the so-called uniformed oligarchy and to insist that citizens be governed solely through democratic institutions. Yet when those very institutions act – through courts, statutes and procedure – to protect the state’s continuity, the narrative curiously shifts: the same institutions are suddenly dismissed as puppets of the uniform.
It would be disingenuous to deny that the so-called deep state has, at various points, operated with impunity. Its activities have often generated bewilderment, and the collateral damage has not been insignificant. Indeed, such conduct has at times succeeded only in breeding anti-state sentiment while professing to defend state sovereignty.
That history forms part of the public memory. But history cannot become a permanent presumption. When the state places evidence on record regarding its activities, when the proclivities of its actors are subjected to institutional containment rather than unchecked impunity, when process replaces opacity, a continued and unchanged narrative that feeds anti-state sentiment regardless of context crosses into a different territory. It is precisely there that the state must draw its most difficult line: between repression and protection.
Every time someone types ‘Balochistan’ into the search bar, what confronts them is not merely geography but narrative. Images, allegations, accusations, testimonies – some verified, some distorted, the majority weaponised. The state cannot curate every timeline, nor can it police the sentiments of millions of citizens. It cannot legislate affection. But it does carry a responsibility far deeper than content moderation: it must ensure that its conduct on the ground does not furnish the raw material for anti-state sentiment in the first place.
Silencing dissent is the language of political force; it demands subjugation. But governance is not about rewriting perception – it is about shaping reality. Acting with short-sightedness in such an instance is far more detrimental than mere withdrawal. If the imagery of the state in public imagination trends towards hostility, the first inquiry must not be ‘who tweeted this?’ but ‘what conditions allowed this to resonate?’ Institutional credibility is not secured through erasure but through accountability.
Yet accountability does not nullify responsibility in speech. Where legitimate grievance exists, reform must answer it. When a slap on the wrist is ignored, sterner measures must follow. Where exaggeration or distortion persists despite clarification and evidence, the calculus changes. The state must then distinguish between critique rooted in lived reality and narrative constructed for destabilisation, even if innocent. That distinction is delicate, but imperative.
A state that hesitates to defend its legitimacy will one day lose the right to govern. In the end, the question is not whether the state feels but whether it endures.
The writers are lawyers.
