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Opinion
May 4, 2021
Some of the more effusive opponents of the current regime are prone to exaggeration. A most amusing bit of hyperventilation is when some claim with great confidence that the current era is worse than the Gen Ziaul Haq dictatorship.
This is pure nonsense, but not because the protagonists of the current scenario are necessarily trying for things to be any better than the darkness of the 1980s. The comparison with the 1980s is nonsense because turning down the volume of the national discourse in Gen Zia’s era was just so much easier than it is today. In an era of a seemingly unlimited number of newspapers, television channels, social media feeds and angry, underserved citizens, the feeble attempts to ‘manage’ the national discourse only expose the limited imaginations of the protagonists of this unique time in Pakistan’s political history.