☽ ✦ ☽
Syed PIR Adil
Anwar ud Daulah
عدل انوار الدولة — Justice · Truth ·
Nation
Gujrat,
Punjab, Pakistan | May 2026
A WAKE-UP CALL TO THE YOUTH OF PAKISTAN
On Justice, Conscience, and the Fate of a Nation
✦
I. The Sleeping Giant Must Awaken
Young men and women of
Pakistan — you who carry in your veins the blood of those who sacrificed
everything so that this land could breathe free — the moment of reckoning is
upon you. History does not wait for the comfortable. It does not pause for
those who are distracted by their screens while their nation burns slowly,
quietly, and deliberately. The crisis facing Pakistan today is not merely
economic. It is a crisis of conscience, of courage, and of the soul of a civilization
that once led the world. You are the final generation with enough time to
reverse this descent. The question is: will you choose comfort over truth, or
will you rise?
This letter is written not to fan the flames of hatred, but to
illuminate a truth that power would prefer remain in the dark. It concerns a
man — a former cricketer who became Prime Minister — now sitting in a cell in
Adiala Jail, stripped of even the basic dignities accorded to ordinary
criminals. Whether you love him or despise him, whether you believe every
charge levelled against him or none, one truth remains unshakeable: justice
administered by corrupt hands is not justice. It is vengeance wearing a robe.
II. The Man in the Cell — Imran Khan
Imran Khan is not a saint. No leader is. He came to power on the
wings of a promise — Naya Pakistan — and like all leaders before him, he fell
short of that promise in many ways. The charges against him — from the
Toshakhana case to the Al-Qadir Trust matter — may carry grains of truth.
Pakistan's accountability laws exist for a reason. But accountability is only honorable
when it is applied with equal measure to all. When a man who allegedly looted
billions in foreign assets is permitted to return home, bestowed with every
comfort of governance and political rehabilitation, while another is sentenced
repeatedly, held in conditions described by the United Nations as inhumane —
that is not justice. That is selective persecution designed to neutralize a
political threat.
By December 2025, Imran Khan faced an extraordinary 186 legal
cases. His sentences have ranged from corruption to anti-terrorism charges —
some overturned on appeal, only to be replaced by new ones. His wife has been
imprisoned alongside him. His own son stood before the United Nations Human
Rights Council in March 2026, declaring that his father had been imprisoned for
nearly 1,000 days, held in a cell built for death row inmates, denied family
visits for months, and was now reportedly losing his eyesight — a condition
that went untreated for over three months. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture
formally warned of "inhumane and undignified detention conditions."
This is not the narrative of justice. This is the architecture of political
elimination.
It always seems
impossible until it is done. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid,
but he who conquers that fear.
— Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in a
prison cell before becoming President of South Africa
Nelson Mandela was charged with sabotage and conspiracy to
overthrow the state. His captors called him a terrorist. The world called him a
prophet. He spent 27 years behind bars — longer than Imran Khan has lived — and
emerged to lead his nation not with bitterness, but with an unbroken spirit.
The charges do not always define the man. The system that engineers those
charges defines itself.
III. Dirty Hands Cannot Deliver Clean Justice
There is a principle older than any constitution: you cannot
purify water with a soiled vessel. The men who have brought these charges against
Imran Khan — who have managed his prosecution, who have celebrated his
conviction — these are not men who emerged from a record of transparent public
service. The revolving door of Pakistan's political elite, that small and
incestuous circle of families who have alternated power for decades, enriching
themselves at the public's expense, now stands in judgment of others. This is
the fundamental obscenity of the situation — not that a man is on trial, but
that the trial is conducted by those who should themselves be in the dock.
Justice, as the great jurist William Blackstone wrote, must not
only be done but must be seen to be done. When a judiciary is described by
international observers as "increasingly managed," when party members
are barred from contesting elections without their electoral symbol, when
international bodies including the EU, UK, and United States formally raise
concerns about politically driven military trials — the façade of legal
legitimacy crumbles. Young Pakistanis must understand: the question is not
simply whether Imran Khan committed crimes. The question is whether the process
that convicted him is capable of determining that truth with integrity.
Injustice anywhere is
a threat to justice everywhere.
— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from
Birmingham Jail, 1963
When a government puts
its critics in jail and calls it justice, it is no longer a government — it is
a regime.
— Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Laureate &
political prisoner, Myanmar
IV. The Economy: A Nation Eating Its Future
While political theatre consumes the nation's attention, the
economic reality of Pakistan in 2026 is nothing short of catastrophic for the
ordinary citizen. Let us speak plainly with numbers — because numbers do not
lie, even when politicians do.
70–80%
Debt-to-GDP Ratio in 2026 — debt servicing consumes up to ⅔ of
government spending
$4 Billion
Monthly trade deficit in April 2026 — a 46-month high
155%
Rise in electricity prices since 2021 — bills now exceed rent
for millions
$32 Billion
Trade deficit in first
10 months of FY2026 — up 20% year-on-year
The government raised electricity prices by 26% in FY2023–24,
then a further 20% in July 2024, and yet again in 2025. Across Pakistan,
monthly electricity bills doubled within months — in Lahore, from PKR 10,000 to
PKR 22,000 between May and July alone. Families who once ran small fans in the
summer now sit in darkness because they cannot afford to turn them on. A man in
Gujranwala stabbed his own brother in a dispute over an electricity bill that
had exceeded PKR 30,000. This is what economic mismanagement looks like at the
human scale: brothers turning on brothers because the state has turned its back
on both.
And what drove these crippling tariff hikes? Deals signed with
Independent Power Producers — IPPs — under capacity payment agreements
obligating Pakistan to pay billions to power companies whether electricity is
generated or not. Capacity payments alone are projected at Rs 2.1 trillion for
FY2025 — comparable to the entire national defense budget — and these costs are
passed directly to you, the citizen, in your monthly bill. Meanwhile, exports
have declined for six consecutive months and imports continue to surge,
bleeding the country's foreign exchange reserves. Saudi Arabia stepped in with
a $3 billion loan in early 2026 simply to help Pakistan repay another loan to
the UAE. The nation is borrowing to repay borrowing.
In early 2025, residents of Gilgit-Balochistan — where billions
of Chinese CPEC investment dollars have flowed — received barely 30 to 60
minutes of electricity per day during a winter that dropped to -15°C. Hundreds
blocked the Karakoram Highway in desperation. This is the contradiction of
modern Pakistan: a country with enormous investments and enormous poverty,
where the elite sign agreements and the poor pay the consequences.
A nation's greatness
is measured by how it treats its weakest members.
— Mahatma Gandhi
V. The Pattern of Poor Governance
The failures of Pakistan's governance are not accidental. They
are the cumulative result of a system where accountability flows downward —
punishing the poor for unpaid bills while shielding the powerful from unpaid
debts to the nation. Consider: power purchase agreements signed over two to
four decades lock Pakistan into payments that will burden your children and
their children. No independent audit, no parliamentary debate, no public
transparency accompanied many of these deals. They were signed in rooms where
citizens were not invited, and the cost was handed to them without explanation.
Consider the flour crisis that preceded 2024 — when wheat was
exported at a time of domestic shortage, driving up prices for the poor even as
subsidies existed on paper. Consider a tax system so broken that less than 3%
of Pakistanis file income tax returns, yet the state extracts compliance from
the poor through utility bills — collecting withholding tax through electricity
statements from people too impoverished to otherwise participate in the formal
economy. The informal economy remains informal not because Pakistanis are
dishonest, but because the formal system offers them nothing in return for
their honesty.
Political instability has compounded every economic failure.
Pakistan has had four prime ministers in five years. No long-term
infrastructure project, no coherent industrial policy, no sustainable energy
strategy can take root in soil that is turned over so relentlessly by the hand
of establishment politics. Investors — foreign and domestic — cannot plan in a
country where the rules change with every government, and where successful
businessmen become targets the moment they are perceived to support the wrong
political camp.
VI. Voices From History — On Political Imprisonment
I detest racialism,
because I regard it as a barbaric thing, whether it comes from a black man or a
white man.
— Nelson Mandela. He was labelled a criminal
and a Communist by the apartheid regime. Today, he is a global icon of justice.
One has not only a
legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral
responsibility to disobey unjust laws.
— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
They may torture my
body, break my bones, even kill me — then they will have my dead body, not my
obedience.
— Mahatma Gandhi, on resisting unjust
authority
I am not afraid of an
army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.
— Alexander the Great — a reminder that
leadership of courage is the only kind worth following
The parallels to Mandela are not flattery — they are historical
mirrors. Mandela was convicted of real crimes under a system designed to
eliminate him. The question was never whether those acts occurred; the question
was whether the system prosecuting him had the moral authority to judge anyone.
Pakistan must ask itself the same question. When the judges who convict are
appointed by the same hands that benefit politically from the conviction; when
cases multiply in exact proportion to the political threat posed by the
accused; when international human rights bodies issue formal warnings — history
is watching, and history has a long memory.
VII. The Call to You — The Youth of Pakistan
You are 64% of Pakistan's population. You are not bystanders.
You are the nation. And you are being failed — by the political elite of every
stripe, by an economic system that extracts your labor and returns inflation,
by a governance structure that demands your obedience and offers you darkness.
The question before you is not whether Imran Khan is guilty or innocent.
Courts, ultimately, must answer that — and those courts must be courts worthy
of the name. The question before you is deeper: what kind of country do you
want to inhabit? What kind of justice do you want to live under?
Demand transparent courts, not managed ones. Demand
accountability that applies to all — not selectively to political enemies.
Demand energy policy that serves the people, not signed agreements that serve
powerful corporations. Demand a government whose officials fear the ballot box
more than they fear each other. These are not radical demands. They are the
minimum requirements of a functioning democracy. They are what Jinnah promised
when he stood before a newly born nation in August 1947 and said that the state
would make no distinction based on religion, caste, or creed — and by extension,
no distinction based on which political camp a man inhabits.
Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years of imprisonment to lead
South Africa not because his captors relented, but because a generation of
young South Africans refused to accept the narrative that their hero was a
criminal. They held the mirror to history and made power blink. You have the
same power — if you choose to use it, not with violence, not with chaos, but
with the most powerful weapon ever wielded: an informed, awakened, and
uncompromising conscience.
✦
"The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil,
but by those who watch them without doing anything."
— Albert Einstein
Pakistan Zindabad.
Truth endures. Justice must follow.
Syed Pir Adil Anwar ud Daulah ✦
May 2026 ✦ Gujrat, Punjab
