Pakistan is among the few states whose writ is challenged with impunity. It no longer holds monopoly over violence, which is the most vital of a modern state’s characteristics. It is important to ensure non-violence among its citizens. Religious groups pressing for their versions of political Islam are not the only threat to its stability, the writ of the state is also being flouted by some of its own organs.

The Executive (bureaucracy) has not put its act together; the Judiciary and the government are at cross purposes and the media is a bit too trenchant. Thus, it is not only the government but also the state itself that has become contested and controversial.

The ‘mentality’ that underpins the society, which also has a clear reflection on the state apparatus, is chaotic to the hilt. In simple terms, the wedge between the society and the state apparatus has widened to an alarming extent.

A more worrying aspect is the resistance to reforms from the various organs of the state. Reforms are necessary to bring the society and the state to an even keel. Reforms are also imperative to infuse efficiency and meritocracy in all state organs.

In the rest of the column, I intend to critically examine two theories in the context of Pakistani state. I contend that these theories will yield profitable results for Pakistan if they are inverted. Those are George Orwell’s Big Brother and Michel Foucault’s Panopticon. I will also explain what I mean by ‘inverted’.

Big Brother is a concept taken from George Orwell’s well-known and well cited novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell was a British colonial officer who served at various places, including Myanmar (Burma) but earned his fame as a writer.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of his seminal literary work. His reference to Big Brother implies that all one’s actions and intentions are being monitored by the government to of control and suppress the will of the populace.

The novel tells the story of Winston Smith, a hapless middle-aged bureaucrat who lives in Oceania where he is constantly under surveillance. Even though there are no laws, there is a “Thought Police.” There are constant reminders on posters that “Big Brother Is Watching You.”

The phrase, Big Brother, has become “a common shorthand for government surveillance of its people”. It evokes the idea of being observed by a powerful but “mysterious force over which no one holds any control”. In the case of contemporary Pakistan, the establishment fits in well with this description.

Orwell (Eric Blair) wrote the novel in 1948. It was published the very next year. The overall message is that totalitarian governments like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were atrocious. When Orwell wrote 1984, he was concerned that governments were moving towards totalitarianism.

He appeared to be worried that these governments might start taking away more and more of people’s rights and freedoms. No trespass on freedom and human rights is a fundamental value that we must hold dear. I profess that in the case of Pakistan the Big Brother should make its presence felt in an assertive manner. This is necessary to establish the rule of law and discipline. That is what I meant by “inverted”. What George Orwell considered a bane for the modern Western nations, may turn out to be a boon for us.

Etymologically, the term Panopticon has Greek origin. It denotes a type of optical instrument or telescope. Later, it was also the name of a type of prison designed by British utilitarian thinker and political theorist Jeremy Bentham (1791) in which wardens had a constant view of all inmates, and “a showroom”. Thus, panopticon is a circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners can be observed and watched all the time.

Bentham laid down two principles of extreme significance that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is monitored. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being snooped and watched at any one moment; but he must be sure that he will always be subject to close monitoring. Great care is taken to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable. The prisoners incarcerated in their cells, do not even see a shadow. Thus, the power is visible yet unverifiable.

The main effect of the Panopticon according to French philosopher, Michel Foucault, is to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that makes him aware of “the automatic functioning of power”. Foucault’s Panopticon was a metaphor that allowed him to explore the relationship between 1) systems of social control and people in a disciplinary situation and, 2) the power-knowledge concept.

In his view, power and knowledge come from observing others. In his study of the origins of the prison, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault explored the invention of the Panopticon, a way for a guard to see others without being seen himself. Bentham’s Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition.

Foucault uses the Panopticon as a metaphor; it is “the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form”. The efficiency of this theoretical model lies in the fact that “observation does not need to be constant for its effect to be permanent”.

The example of the Panopticon as a prison showcases how an institutionalised form of power can use its authority to observe and regulate its subordinates. In the case of Pakistan, the inversion of panopticon is highly recommended. Pakistan and its people must go through the phase of evolution of a strong state exercising its authority in a stern manner so that its writ is firmly established.

The author is a professor of history and a writer. He can be reached at tahir.kamran@bnu.edu.pk