EVEN after butchering local ecologies and evicting tens of thousands from their decades-old homes, they insist on calling it Islamabad the beautiful. It really ought to be called Container City. The federal capital — and its twin city, Rawalpindi — once again resembles a loading dock for cargo ships. And as always, we are told that besieging the twin cities is in the greater national interest.

The fact that official definitions of the national interest are completely unrelated to popular sentiment is not a new quandary for the powers that be. But in comparison to almost every other dispensation in Pakistan’s history, this regime is not bothered with gaining even a modicum of consent from the people, having liberally deployed the big stick in the country’s core regions to match what has always been the historical norm in the peripheries.

Barely veiled threats have been issued this time too, ‘violent groups’ warned against trying to enter Islamabad. There have been a series of pre-emptive strikes against anyone and everyone that the government designates a ‘security risk’. From Imran Khan’s elderly sisters to the president of the Islamabad street vendors’ association, the regime is intent on ensuring that it alienates even those who have no link to the PTI. Whether the latter’s ‘long march’ even materialises is irrelevant, because the optics of a heavily contained population is the real story.

The container city, in fact, is a microcosm of the country at large. If you have a dissenting political opinion, you can be locked up, issued a Peca notice, or maybe even disappeared. To aspire to an economic situation beyond bare survival requires one to work longer and harder for slave wages — if you are amongst those from the army of unemployed that can actually find work.

The container city is a microcosm of the country at large.

It should not go unnoticed that Islamabad’s police officials have asked for Rs827 million to manage the yet-to-happen protests. Meanwhile, there is no suggestion that even a pittance of that sum will be allocated to upgrade facilities and quality of services in PIMS in the wake of the horrific fire which claimed the lives of 14 newborns.

There is no pretence at play here, no meaningful hegemonic strategy. The only consistent and conscious interest of the regime is in the realm of geopolitics. But unlike authoritarian rule under Ayub, Zia and Musharraf, today’s rulers cannot count on a structural windfall due to favourable geopolitical winds.

Aside from acquiring geostrategic rents from anti-communist Seato and Cento pacts, the Ayub regime actually had an industrial policy, cultivating something resembling a manufacturing sector and absorbing some labouring masses displaced from the agrarian sector. The 22 families, including emergent state profiteers, may have captured the major spoils, but there was some logic to the regime’s claim that a little wealth would eventually ‘trickle down’ to the masses.

Even while presiding over de-industrialisation, Zia benefited from the Gulf remittances as well as big industrial investments made under the Bhutto dispensation, not to mention windfalls from the ‘Afghan jihad’. Musharraf came to power after industrial policy was definitively declared dead, but the dictatorship nevertheless benefited from post 9/11 remittances and ‘war on terror’ dollars.

The current dispensation only secures fuel to keep government running the next day by extorting the masses through a levy, while its economic imagination is limited to FDI and a developmental logic revolving around resource grabs. It has shut down border trade with Afghanistan, which is a major supply of the everyday eco­­nomy. Mean­while, members of the Pakistani bourgeoisie itself lament its comp­rador character, the CEO of the Sentinel Group recently penn­ing a telling essay on ‘Pakistan’s missing multinationals’.

To be sure, the rot extends much deeper than the present regime. The so-called ‘demographic dividend’ which has been hyped up for at least 15 years is, instead, a huge pressure cooker; neither the state nor the private bourgeoisie — and for the most part this nexus operates in unison — has the capacity or interest to develop the skills of an exceedingly young population let alone guarantee it a dignified income.

And where young and old working people alike demonstrate enterprise so as to make ends meet, the response of the state is to suppress, confiscate, even destroy. Look no further than the treatment of Islamabad’s katchi abadi dwellers and street vendors in recent months.

Containment of the political and economic freedoms of Pakistan’s teeming masses is what the militarised state apparatus knows best. But building container cities does not make acute contradictions disappear, they only magnify them.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, September 25th, 2026