“Don’t know much about history, don’t know much biology,
Don’t know much about the science book, don’t know much about the French I took…”

THIS is an old song, which seems to be an apt description of journalists — especially in Pakistan. Over the decades, the profession has moved on from print to television and now digital but our training remains rooted in old-fashioned ‘generalism’ (if there’s such a word). As with the bureaucrats who run petroleum one day and health the other, we journalists move from commenting on foreign affairs one evening to the economy and healthcare the next. The notion of specialising in issues or studying them in depth is as alien to us as democracy is to Islamabad’s neighbours.

Perhaps this is why most in the profession rarely bother with reading and books. Take history — even of Pakistan. Those of us who entered the field at the time of newspapers learnt the country’s history through oral tradition. Late-night chats with senior colleagues, who had survived martial laws and newsroom working hours, told us of tumultuous times such as war, secession and dictatorship. They included those who remembered what it was like working during the censorship of Ziaul Haq’s times, the night Pervez Musharraf removed the government or when an operation was first launched against the MQM in Karachi. The oral history we learnt alongside copy editing was the best counter-narrative to the whitewashed account taught in school books under Pakistan Studies. Our daastango provided us with a fun but patchy account of the land of the pure.

Patchy, for it leaves us with more questions than answers — the personal accounts that we learn history from are rooted in Pakistan but are a little sketchy on details of the region. Few journalists have travelled around the region and reported on other countries. As a result, many may point out similarities between Pakistan and Egypt (aren’t they obvious?) but few will note what makes them different and why. For a hack such as myself, the biggest difference is perhaps Pakistan’s impatience with its rulers. Our last dictator spent eight years in power, struggling in the last two. And in Egypt, Anwar Sadat spent 11 years in power, Hosni Mubarak around three decades, while Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has been ruling for 12 and is still going strong.

Closer to Pakistan, the Gulf states in general have also enjoyed stability and long reigns without much pressure from below. Evidently, this is due to oil, but can it explain everything? After all, Iran is no less oil-rich and yet it went through a revolution, which perhaps remains unprecedented as a political event in the region. Despite the authoritarianism of both the Shah and the theocracy that followed, Iran has demonstrated that its people believe in resistance. In recent years, they have pushed back multiple times against crackdowns; at times they have even compelled the state to change course. This is a strain missing in Iran’s neighbours to the west.

Crowded, noisy and poor, societies in this region struggle with imperfect democracies.

But to its east, it’s a different story. Pakistan and the rest of South Asia, in comparison to its western neighbours in the Middle East, are poorer and noisier.

Is this why this region has avoided the kind of authoritarianism that marks the Middle East? Crowded, noisy and poor, societies in this region continue to struggle with flawed and imperfect democracies; there is flirtation with authoritarianism but on paper most of them adhere or aspire to the framework left by the British. This is true of Pakistan where martial law dictators have also worked hard to prove their democratic credentials by holding elections. And with it comes the inability of rulers in the region to lord it over their citizens for long periods. Indeed, in recent years, Hasina Wajed’s 15 years in power has been quite a feat. In India, Jawaharlal Nehru and Narendra Modi have also enjoyed prime ministerships for a similar period of time. On the other hand, in Pakistan, the longest power stints have been a bit shorter.

In a tradition closer to Iran, South Asia has also pushed back against dictators of the civilian (Wajed) and military (Musharraf) type, with street protests forcing them to call it a day. Strongmen such as Modi have also been bested by students armed with their wit and social media, while in Pakistan, authoritarian establishments have struggled to clamp down on criticism on X. This is not entirely new: back in the 1970s, both Indira Gandhi’s imposition of the Emergency and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s authoritarian rule came to an end, albeit in very different ways. In one country, the democratic system pushed back while in the other, the military establishment did so.

With all our problems, Pakistan’s journalists still sit in talk shows and complain about the censorship they face; their counterparts in nearby regions are perhaps not allowed to whine thus on live television. In most countries with censorship, journalists usually spend their time complaining about absolute freedom.

There is an ‘argumentative’ South Asian that shapes this region differently from its western neighbours. And perhaps also its eastern ones. Travel east to Myanmar and here once again, regimes tend to become more authoritarian and more long-lasting. The long detention of Aung San Suu Kyi under a martial law regime illustrates this best. After a short experiment with elections and civilian control, Myanmar has returned to military rule but one in which contestation by the people has turned to civil war. While this may seem alien to Pakistanis, it is worrying that in parts of our country we, too, face a situation where the state appears to only control the cities.

But what eventually determines the different state-society relationships in these countries? Why is Myanmar able to sustain military rule while Bangladesh is not? Or why has Pakistan, despite its close ties to the Middle East, not been able to impose a similar system of government? Now if I hadn’t learnt history in newsrooms and had read more, perhaps I could have answered some of these questions.

The writer is a journalist.

Published in Dawn, September 22nd, 2026