Missing rights.

Byline: Huma Yusuf

DIRE. That's the word the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan uses to describe the state of human rights in our country. Its annual report, released last week, makes for a distressing read, particularly in the midst of a pandemic. One wonders, given how widespread rights violations are, when this brutalised body politic will reach its breaking point.

The PTI government has cited concerns of riots fuelled by starvation as a reason to impose light-touch lockdowns. But the HRCP's report reminds us that the state's fear of its citizenry is rooted in a deeper knowledge of systemic fissures in our country; fissures produced by the disgraceful treatment of an underclass - including women, children, dissenters, religious minorities, labour, prisoners, and more - often by state institutions themselves.

The report identifies state efforts to stifle dissent as a key trend of 2019. The clampdown on media freedoms was complemented by the continuing strategy of enforced disappearances. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa led the way, with 2,472 missing persons cases registered as of December, including human rights activist Idris Khattak. Not surprisingly, initiatives to criminalise disappearances are stalled. The thing is, you only silence critics when you have something to hide. And the HRCP's report - documenting everything from miscarriage of justice to child abuse to poor enfranchisement - gives a sense of what this might be.

The sad and shocking scale of rights abuses again raises the question of how efficacious the state's censorship strategy can be. When the public narrative significantly diverges from lived experience, the only outcome is more frustration among the people, who realise that on top of being poorly served, they're also being lied to and manipulated.

State efforts to stifle dissent was a key trend of 2019.

Pakistan has the somewhat unique problem that the concept of human rights has been deemed toxic among the middle classes because it is too often associated with curbs on media and religious freedoms. Decades of authoritarian state policy have entrenched a suspicion of democracy and secularism, and there is perversely a fair amount of support for policies targeting those labelled unpatriotic or blasphemous.

But human rights are also about positive access to food, healthcare, safety, and education. In the Covid-19 context, we must rehabilitate this understanding to build more public support for the rights agenda. The HRCP report...