By 1971, Pakistan had committed the most fatal error a state can make: it mistook force for legitimacy.

The country had held an election. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League had won it overwhelmingly—167 of East Pakistan’s 169 National Assembly seats and, with that mandate, the democratic right to lead Pakistan. But General Yahya Khan’s regime, backed by a West Pakistani political and military establishment unwilling to accept the people’s verdict, refused to transfer power.

The assembly was postponed. The mandate was denied. The electorate was told that its vote mattered—until it produced an answer the rulers did not like.

Then came Operation Searchlight: repression instead of representation; military force instead of political dialogue; and national disaster instead of national unity. Pakistan did not lose East Pakistan because democracy was permitted to work. It lost East Pakistan because democracy was first dishonored and then crushed.

Pakistan in 2026 is not Pakistan in 1971. Imran Khan is not Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. PTI is not the Awami League. There is no geographically severed eastern wing, no separatist mandate, and no honest reader should exploit history through false equivalence.

But there is a familiar and perilous instinct at work: when the people deliver an inconvenient verdict, alter the rules, punish the winners and manufacture a political reality acceptable to unelected power.

The assault on the public’s right to choose did not begin on 8 February 2024. It began with the removal of an elected prime minister in April 2022.

For years, Imran Khan’s critics dismissed his claim that foreign pressure accompanied his ouster as political theater. Then journalists Ryan Grim, and Murtaza Hussain reporting for Dropsite news and earlier in the Intercept , published the classified Pakistani diplomatic cable—known as the cypher—sent by Ambassador Asad Majeed Khan after his 7 March 2022 meeting with Donald Lu, then the U.S. assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs.

The cable recorded Lu saying that if the no-confidence vote against Khan succeeded, “all will be forgiven in Washington”; otherwise, Pakistan would face a “tough going ahead.”

The cypher is an official diplomatic record, not a slogan. It establishes that a senior American official linked Washington’s posture toward Pakistan to the removal of an elected prime minister.

Yet Imran Khan has identified whom he believes exploited that opening. In an interview with Mehdi Hasan , he said he was certain former army chief Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa had orchestrated his ordeal. In an interview with Voice of America, Khan accused Bajwa of conspiring with political opponents to remove his government.

Then came 8 February 2024. Imran Khan’s candidates —deprived of the Bat electoral symbol and forced to contest as independents—emerged as the largest bloc in the National Assembly.

The New York Times called it a “shocking opposition victory” that threw Pakistan into chaos and humiliated the country’s military generals. That description captured a basic political truth: after imprisonment, censorship, exclusion and relentless legal pressure, millions of Pakistanis still found a way to reject political engineering.

The Commonwealth Observer Group’s eventual report found that PTI’s ability to compete was “consistently limited” and that voters’ fundamental political rights had been restricted. A leaked version of its report, reported by The Telegraph, alleged fraud, voter manipulation, pressure on candidates, restrictions on political freedom and reversals of early PTI-aligned leads.

The Commonwealth’s delay in publication gave a contested order time to harden into official reality.

At the center of this crisis is Imran Khan—not merely as a prisoner, but as a test of whether Pakistani law is law or political instruction. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found his detention arbitrary and called for his immediate release and reparations. On 12 December 2025, Alice Jill Edwards, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, urged Pakistan to end his solitary confinement and ensure humane treatment. Her formal communication recorded allegations of prolonged isolation, a cramped cell without natural light or ventilation, poor sanitation, temperature extremes, insect infestation, and limited access to family, lawyers and adequate medical care. She warned that prolonged solitary confinement is prohibited internationally and may constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

On 18 August 2026, Pakistan’s Supreme Court directed the authorities to move Khan from Adiala Jail to Shifa International Hospital within 48 hours, establish a medical board including specialists and his personal physician, provide his complete medical records, facilitate family contact, and allow him to remain under hospital care until the next hearing. The authorities instead took him briefly to the state-run Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences and returned him to prison without transferring him to Shifa. His lawyer and family described this as defiance of the Supreme Court order; the government cited “security objections” to Shifa.

If the executive can substitute its preference for a direct Supreme Court instruction in the medical treatment of a political prisoner, then the issue is no longer simply Imran Khan’s health. It is whether judicial orders bind the state at all.

The treatment of Khan’s family sends the same dark signal. In September, his sisters Aleema Khan, Noreen Niazi and Dr. Uzma Khan were brutally taken into custody under the colonial era law of “ Punjab Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance” ahead of a planned PTI march.

Authorities imposed 30-day detention orders on public-order grounds; their relatives have unable to see or speak with them. Amnesty International called the detentions arbitrary and a “flagrant violation of human rights,” arguing that the use of preventive detention against relatives and peaceful political figures had no legitimate place in a democratic society. They were not, formally, “disappeared”—but detaining the sisters of a jailed opposition leader, cutting off their contact and holding them without ordinary criminal charges remains a severe assault on due process and the right to peaceful dissent.

The alarm is now international. On 3 December 2025, 44 members of Congress wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, citing alleged political imprisonment, transnational repression against U.S. residents and citizens critical of Pakistan’s military, and broader human-rights concerns. They urged U.S. action, including consideration of targeted visa restrictions and asset freezes against officials credibly responsible, and called for the release of Imran Khan and other political prisoners.

CM KP , Sohail Afridi’s negotiating draft asks for no revolution. It asks for a constitutional truce: dialogue between government and opposition; political, judicial and press freedom; family, lawyer and medical access for prisoners; timely legal proceedings; humane treatment; and federal-provincial cooperation against terrorism. These are not concessions to Imran Khan. They are the minimum operating conditions of constitutional government.

General Asim Munir may command immense coercive power, but coercion cannot manufacture consent. Pakistan will not recover stability by isolating its most popular political leader, defying court-ordered medical safeguards, detaining his relatives through preventive orders, or treating millions of voters as enemies of the state.

The movement to free Imran Khan must remain peaceful, constitutional and disciplined. Its strength is its demand for a single standard of law: for the prisoner and the jailer, the voter and the general, the opposition and the state.

History judged those who denied the people’s verdict in 1970.

The question for Pakistan now is whether it will honor the verdict of 2024—or keep walking the road on which nations lose not only democracy, but their future.