New Delhi, Dec 4 (NationPress) With every new legal strategy that fortifies the military's authority disguised under the facade of civilian governance, Pakistan is perilously edging towards an Orwellian security state.

Dissent is increasingly being criminalized, surveillance has become commonplace, and the media environment now functions as a tightly controlled realm where the establishment dictates and restricts the national narrative.

The most recent Freedom on the Net 2025 and Freedom in the World 2025 reports from the Washington-based Freedom House encapsulate this troubling and steady contraction of Pakistan’s civic space.

For Pakistan, these assessments resemble less a standard review and more an indictment of a nation that is systematically, intentionally, and now visibly descending into a military-managed authoritarian regime. The dismal scores reflect a political landscape increasingly governed not by elected officials, nor by constitutional frameworks, but by the military establishment under Asim Munir, which has grown more assertive, invasive, and unaccountable than at any time in recent history.

Freedom House's conclusions are alarming. Pakistan is rated only “partly free” overall, achieving a mere 32 out of 100 on the Global Freedom Index.

On internet freedoms, it performs even worse, classified as “not free” with a score of 27. However, the most concerning trends become apparent when these figures are viewed not in isolation but as part of a long-term downward trajectory.

A decade ago, Pakistan was rated in the low 40s regarding overall freedom. Although the country was not a model of democracy then, it still indicated pockets of pluralism and institutional dynamics. Today, however, the decline has accelerated, with increased state control over the social and political lives of the populace.

The causes of this decline are neither obscure nor theoretical. Freedom House directly links the erosion of rights to the expanding influence of Pakistan’s military establishment. This institution has always been the most formidable force in the country. However, under the current Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir, its power has consolidated in ways that are more sweeping and unapologetic than any civilian government in recent memory.

The various indices that evaluate the distortion of Pakistan’s fundamental democratic processes—including elections, political competition, judicial independence, press freedom, and the right to dissent—are evidenced by its dismal scores of 12/40 in political rights and 20/60 in civil liberties.

In theory, Pakistan continues to conduct regular elections within a multiparty framework. In practice, as the report highlights, the military “exerts substantial influence over government formation and policies, intimidates the media, and operates with impunity regarding indiscriminate or extralegal force.”

The elected government of Shehbaz Sharif increasingly resembles a civilian mask layered over an entrenched praetorian order.

This situation is not novel. Pakistan has a history of military coups and hybrid regimes. However, what distinguishes the current phase as particularly precarious is the extent to which the military’s dominance has become institutionalized.

The series of constitutional amendments passed through the National Assembly in 2024 (26th Amendment) and 2025 (27th Amendment) have restructured the state's architecture to favor the military.

While the 26th Constitutional Amendment of 2024 extended the tenures of service chiefs from three to five years, the 27th Amendment marks an even more significant transformation. It abolished the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, which, on paper, was open to senior officers from three services, and established a new position—the Chief of Defence Forces—to be held concurrently by the Army Chief. This modification effectively grants the Pakistan Army and the Army Chief’s office unquestioned dominance.

In any democracy, such structural alterations would be subject to debate, judicial review, and political analysis. However, in Pakistan, these laws were enacted with such haste that they mirrored both the military’s tightening grip and the political class’s diminished capacity, or, to put it bluntly, their acquiescence.

Freedom House’s assessment of political rights captures a reality that Pakistanis have long recognized: the judiciary, once celebrated for moments of assertiveness, has largely yielded to military control. The courts have been transformed into, at best, inconsistent arbiters of constitutionalism and, at worst, tools for legitimizing the establishment's preferences.

As the report states, the military has become “more powerful than any other state institution, including the judiciary and the elected government.” Under Asim Munir, this imbalance has become almost structural through constitutional manipulation (26th & 27th amendments), which has fundamentally altered the framework of judicial governance and stripped the Supreme Court of discretionary powers while creating a parallel Federal Constitutional Court (FCC).

Consequently, where the judiciary once served as a potential counterbalance, it has been aligned with the military’s political agenda by design.

The decline in civil liberties is most apparent in the diminishing space for free speech. Pakistan’s media, long under siege, has descended into a state of near-total management, with the military exerting near-complete control over narrative framing in the country. These practices, once sporadic, have now become systemic.

Perhaps the most damning aspect of the Freedom House evaluation is the Freedom on the Net report, which ranks Pakistan as “not free.” Pakistan scores 6/25 on obstacles to access, 13/35 on content restrictions, and 8/40 on violations of user rights. These are not merely technical figures; they reflect a country undergoing a drastic digital transformation—but in a direction opposite to modern democracies.

The report notes that the Pakistani government has implemented “more stringent digital censorship measures to uphold the military establishment’s grip on power and its influence over the country’s elections and civilian governments.”

This includes the expansion of legal and technological measures to police speech, such as sweeping cybercrime laws, arbitrary takedown orders, surveillance systems, and a nationwide website-blocking mechanism that acts as a digital kill-switch for dissenting narratives. As a result, digital spaces are being systematically restricted.

To fully understand Pakistan’s rapid decline in global freedom rankings, one must grasp the political rationale behind Army Chief Asim Munir’s doctrine. Unlike his predecessors, who overtly seized power—such as Ayyub Khan, Ziaul Haq, and Pervez Musharraf—the current Army Chief has adopted a model of constitutionalized authoritarianism.

Here, the objective is to hollow out electoral democracy from within while maintaining its guise for international audiences. His strategy relies not on martial law but on legal engineering of control.

What emerges is not a transient anomaly, but the framework of a durable authoritarian state. The tragedy for Pakistan is that its fragmented and self-serving political class has facilitated this transition by trading institutional autonomy for short-term survival.

These reports underscore that Pakistan is not on the cusp of authoritarianism, but rather an Orwellian state where democracy exists merely as a performance, while power remains firmly and permanently in military hands.