In Bahawalpur yesterday, Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz compared the events of 9 May to the Indo-Pakistan war — suggesting that the former, a day of civil unrest, was somehow more damaging than an armed conflict that claimed countless lives. This is not merely a poor analogy. It is an act of political distortion that trivialises war and flattens the scale of human suffering it entails.
The events of 9 May should be scrutinised. But to equate them with a war whose civilian casualties remain unacknowledged by the state is to erase a history that has yet to be properly mourned. To now invoke it for rhetorical convenience is to further strip it of dignity. A democracy does not deepen its legitimacy by inflating threats to itself; it does so by telling the truth about its past and accepting dissent without resorting to myth-making.
States are weakened not by protest but by the inability to distinguish between political challenge and existential threat. When those in power conflate dissent with war, they reveal more about their anxieties than about the threat itself. Language matters. History matters more.