Zulfi Bukhari: Pakistan is under a soft martial law

A guillotine, and the veneer of democracy

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Zulfi Bukhari not as a former minister for overseas Pakistanis — the title most viewers know him by — but in his current role: the man managing PTI’s international affairs from outside the country, while most of the party’s senior leadership is in jail. The first question is the obvious one. Looking at Pakistan from a distance, what does he see?

The answer is unsparing. “It’s a guillotine at the moment,” Bukhari says. “And that chokehold is getting stronger and tighter. Whatever name you want to give it — soft martial law, soft coup, 2024 martial law — you can. But one thing it is not, for sure, is democracy.”

The framing matters because Bukhari is careful to distinguish this moment from earlier military takeovers. Past martial laws, he argues, were possible because the geopolitical conditions allowed them. A full army coup today is, in his words, much harder to enforce. He recounts a recent conversation with a foreign minister of an unnamed country who told him plainly: “As long as there is a veneer of democracy” — that was the phrase he says he will never forget — a martial law can be run from behind the curtain. The result is what he calls a martial law of the new ages, where the prime minister himself does not know that the DG ISI is being changed until the announcement is made public.

”Our martial law was lighter” is not an argument

Muzamil presses on the most obvious counter. If this is a soft martial law, the period when Bukhari himself was in government also featured serving and retired military officers in key civilian positions — General Asim Bajwa at CPEC being the most cited example. What is the principled difference?

Bukhari does not duck the question. He acknowledges that during PTI’s term, military officers were placed in certain positions, and that in some cases the officer in question may have been more capable than the available politician or bureaucrat. His distinction is not about whether the military is involved — he accepts that, given Pakistan’s history and geopolitics, you cannot apply a Western lens to that question — but about whether the civilian government has the electoral and moral authority to make those joint decisions in the open.

“If Khan sahab and Bajwa sahab sat down together and decided that this person is good for this position, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that,” he says. “I have always been a firm believer of that. But when you don’t even have the ability to come into power, that is a big problem.” His point is that the current set-up has lost moral credibility with the people and with the institution itself, “because the institution knows that you didn’t win the election and how they made you win the election.” Forms 45 and 47, he insists, are not a meme — “to date no DG ISPR, no information secretary, no prime minister has given an excuse for why Form 47 and Form 45 don’t match.” That silence, for him, settles the question of whether the government is genuinely elected.

The two-year campaign of attrition

Muzamil notes that most Pakistanis outside Twitter — which he estimates at around twelve percent of the country — only know vaguely that “something is happening.” He asks Bukhari to walk the audience through what the last two years have actually contained.

The list is grim and Bukhari delivers it without flourish. A former prime minister shot at and nearly killed. CCTV footage from countless houses where masked, armed men entered at three or four in the morning to abduct people. A point at which, by his count, around thirteen thousand party workers were in jail. He pushes back gently on Muzamil’s suggestion that people may not fully grasp the scale: “I think everyone knows.” He describes meeting overseas Pakistanis abroad, including two delivery drivers in England who chased him down on a bike to show him a photo of one of them receiving a gold medal from President Arif Alvi. They had left, they told him, because “there is suffocation. There is nothing for us there, and we cannot even speak.”

Was it incompetence, or was it deliberate?

The most analytically sharp passage in the conversation is Bukhari’s attempt to make sense of how the February election was actually handled. He frames it as a forced binary. Either the previous DG ISI, Nadeem Anjum, was so incompetent that he damaged his own institution at a scale Pakistan and the army somehow tolerated — which Bukhari calls “very dangerous” — or he deliberately damaged his own chief.

“I fail to believe that someone can be so incompetent,” Bukhari says. “He had to do it with an alternative motive.” His reasoning is technical. The hand-off of seats on election night did not happen at 3 a.m. — when, on his telling, the PML-N was clearly losing — but only began shifting in the morning and afternoon. By then the social-media-generation electorate had already screenshotted enough Form 45 numbers to make the reversal impossible to sell. A more competent operation, he argues, would simply have finished the job earlier.

Muzamil floats a third option: maybe the operation worked exactly as it had in 2013 and 2018, and what has changed is the world. “The hacking happened exactly the way it always happens. The delivery was exactly the way it has always been delivered. But the world has changed. Social media exists, people are different, young people are no longer ready to be zombies.” Bukhari does not dismiss the point. But he keeps returning to a specific contrast — that in past elections, the overall outcome was broadly correct even if individual seats were tilted. “The problem this time is that the total outcome is incorrect, and that has never really happened.”

Why the constitutional amendment bites everyone, not just PTI

Later in the discussion, the conversation turns to the proposed constitutional amendment and the parallel push toward a constitutional court. Bukhari’s framing here is striking because it is not partisan. The amendment, he argues, removes the ordinary Pakistani’s right of appeal. It is not, in his telling, primarily a tool to ban PTI or move Imran Khan to a military court — though he believes that is the immediate purpose.

“It goes beyond that,” he says. “Once they wrap up one arm, they will come for the PML-N. They will come for the PPP. The right of appeal of an ordinary citizen disappears.” He sketches a scenario in which a future falling-out between Shehbaz Sharif and Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari ends in one of them being charged and finding the constitutional court is the only court left to appeal to — a court whose judges, under the amendment, the government itself picks. “It bites everybody. It’s just a question of when. And they cannot see it.”

It is one of the moments in the conversation where Bukhari steps fully outside the PTI hat. The argument is not about Imran Khan. It is about whether Pakistan keeps the basic architecture of an appellate judiciary.

Bilawal’s missed window, and the disconnection of the elite

Muzamil presses Bukhari on the opposition. What is the People’s Party actually playing for? What is the PML-N’s game? Bukhari is at his bluntest here. Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari, in his reading, had a genuine opening — a generational void in PTI’s traditional space — and could have publicly distanced himself from his father and emerged as a young leader. He didn’t.

“The problem with Bilawal is that he is a non-serious politician,” Bukhari says. He contrasts him with Maryam Nawaz, who he says is at least taking herself seriously. He extends the empathy he is not always given credit for: “I am not saying this as a bad thing. He is a young man whose family has been through so much, probably tormented, in a field he did not want to be in.” But the political verdict stands. “He has not managed to live up to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s legacy. Or Benazir Bhutto’s.”

He widens the lens. The elite around both major dynasties, he argues, are structurally disconnected from the country they are trying to run. He says he has seen it firsthand from inside government — the courtiers who tell the leader “boss, all under control” when nothing is. “Even if some alternative view comes in, that poor person is gone.” Maryam Nawaz, on his telling, is now surrounded by exactly that ecosystem.

The PTI street, and why agitation has not come

Muzamil asks the question that PTI’s own base has been asking loudly: why hasn’t the party brought people out on the streets? The KP government in particular, he notes, has been a disappointment to many supporters who expected a more confrontational posture from a province PTI actually controls.

Bukhari’s answer combines tactical caution with a longer historical argument. The trauma of May 9 — the crackdown that followed it, in his account, with a brutality that has no recent precedent in Punjab — has made the party deliberately careful about giving the state a pretext. He keeps coming back to Punjab specifically: “The suppression that has happened in Punjab has not happened anywhere else. And until Punjab comes out, you will not see liberation at the scale people are imagining.”

He uses Bangladesh, which Muzamil raises as a comparison, to make a structural point about how mass movements actually ignite. “It was obviously a fifteen-year government. But the triggering effect was a trigger. It was not protests for two years and then this. There was a trigger, and they took advantage of it.” In his framing, PTI’s job until that trigger arrives is to give the courts every last opportunity and to keep Imran Khan inside the system he himself still believes in. “When that belief breaks completely, and it is clear to everyone — that is when people will have a different kind of feeling.”

Foreign policy: don’t pick a side you cannot afford

The most substantive policy exchange in the conversation comes near the end, when Muzamil — fresh from a trip to Russia where he says he was approached by both a Palestinian in a lift and a Brazilian journalist who recognised Imran Khan as a global-South figure — asks how PTI would position Pakistan as the world moves from a unipolar to a multipolar order.

Bukhari pushes back on the framing. He rejects the idea that PTI ever ran an anti-American or anti-Western foreign policy, citing Imran Khan’s three meetings with Donald Trump as evidence. More importantly, he rejects the idea that Pakistan should pick a side at all. “Nor is Pakistan in a position to pick a side, nor should Pakistan put itself in a position to pick a side.”

His positive case is for economic diplomacy. India, he argues, does not pick sides — it has built enough economic mass that no one can impose terms on it, and that is the only model worth following. He is sharp about the limits of the conventional Pakistani approach. The brotherly Gulf state offering ten billion dollars is “very kind,” but Pakistan’s economy is not deep enough to digest it. “There is nothing to buy for half a billion dollars in Pakistan. Which company are you going to buy? Which two are you going to merge? What plots are you going to buy?”

Muzamil narrows the argument. Pakistan, he points out, has a defeatist instinct in practice — Iran sanctions deter the IP pipeline, GSP-plus deters too much closeness with China, and the net result is paralysis. Bukhari concedes the bind but reframes it. “You have to calculate what is better for your people. You cannot be emotional about it.” The calculation depends on leverage, and leverage depends on having a leader and a team that the world treats seriously. Without that, every neighbour pushes you over. “When they know it is going to be a hard negotiation, there is always give and take.”

The only negotiation that begins

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil arrives at what is, for many viewers, the actual question. Why not negotiate? Why not sit down with the democratic side, or with the real power, and find a settlement that gives the country some stability?

Bukhari’s answer is the cleanest articulation of the PTI position in the episode. The party would absolutely take a genuine opportunity, he says, if the goal is to move Pakistan back toward a democratic system rather than to entrench PTI. But the precondition is non-negotiable. If PTI sat down with the PML-N government, or with the army, the first demand would be the same in both rooms: fresh, fair elections, soon.

“The person who has become prime minister through a rigged election cannot go below that first demand,” he says. There is no agenda item that comes before it. The other side, he argues, cannot accept that demand without unwinding its own legitimacy, which is why no real negotiation has happened in two years. Muzamil tries the obvious counter — what if the other side offers to drop the cases, end the victimisation, move on? Bukhari’s answer is short: “Okay. When are the elections?” If the answer is “in four years, after we finish our term,” there is nothing to discuss. “We are already sitting here for four years. So that is what I am trying to say. It is all well and good in saying that, but what is the conversation supposed to be about?”

Muzamil closes the conversation past the one-hour-eighteen-minute mark, with the closing line he uses on these episodes — half-serious, half-rueful — about the gun-to-the-head reality of doing political interviews in Pakistan today. The substance of the hour-and-a-half, though, is unambiguous. Bukhari’s read is that the chokehold tightens until either the courts move, the street moves, or the other side accepts that the only conversation worth having begins with a date for the next election.