Words of one of the journalist of Pakistan:-
“Every day I come here and speak to you, and many of you probably already know why. And for those who don’t, maybe this will help you understand. Six days ago, precisely while I was at my workplace, I received a call from home telling me that my family was under live fire — armed individuals had entered my house, shooting, looking for me.
How do you feel when something like that happens? Maybe you can’t truly know unless it happens to you. But whatever happened, whatever the motivations were behind it, that is not my job to tell you and explain for sympathy. I’m not here to tell you “look how badly I was treated” so people can feel sorry for me and make me larger than life”.
“The cost of Journalism isn’t measured in ink and paper anymore. It is measured in threats, exiles and silence”.
“Every kind of political pressure, every threat call, every humiliation in public that I have faced because of my work — I never came here crying about it. When digital lynch mobs sat online posting my pictures, threatening me with bloodthirsty rage, I never made videos asking for sympathy. Because I am not weak in the head”.
The greatest sign of strength is having the courage to stand against the majority when the majority has become irrational. The easiest way to gain validation is simple: say what the crowd wants to hear. Become their hero. Let them praise you day and night. Let people salute you on the streets.
That’s the easiest thing in the world.
People throw around labels like “agenda-driven journalist” or “paid journalist” for anyone who refuses to follow the trend. What they don’t realize is that following the trend is the easiest possible path. If I wanted applause, I could simply repeat what nine out of ten people are already saying and become a champion of democracy overnight.
But someone has to think about the larger picture — about how dangerous this force has become. For seventy years, this country has struggled against one form of unchecked power: the establishment that overturned governments and manipulated politics. But now another monster has emerged — mobs that won’t even let you walk freely in the streets.
These are the people who follow you abroad just to hurl abuse at you. The people who leak your phone number online. The people who publicly post where your children play cricket and at what time. This happened to senior journalist Talat Hussain. And now there are organized campaigns demanding that journalists’ home addresses be found and posted online.
As journalists are saying, when they made a single tweet about what happened to them, do you really think it was because they wanted some mindless mob to suddenly support them and say, “Oh, this is terrible”? They saw that coming, and they never sought your validation. To seek validation from mobs, you first have to stop thinking for yourself. And if your expectation from this was that they would sit there and beg forgiveness from people angry at them on social media, then the answer from us is no.
When journalists hear, “If you speak like this, you’ll be finished,” they know the criticism misses the point — they started exactly where others fear to end up. They began by questioning clerical authoritarianism. They challenged rigid right-wing orthodoxy. They pushed philosophy, books, and critical thinking into universities and into the minds of young people. In nearly every video, they recommended books, ideas, and the habit of independent thought. Because popularity was never the goal.
The goal was to teach people how to think — even when thinking comes at a cost. The aim was always to improve public understanding of events, not to tell people, “Just believe whatever I say, click the bell icon, subscribe, and go to sleep while I think on your behalf.” They sat in study circles in parks, through heat and cold, speaking to people for free.
Was that a political party?
Were they gathering votes?
Whether it was the persecution of the Christian minority, the forced conversions of Hindu women, the oppression in the Pashtun belt at the hands of the establishment, or the Baloch missing persons — name one issue they avoided. So if you want accountability, question them on that basis.
The people who have followed them from day one already know this:
“They started off there where people should end up.”
But today, many people suddenly present themselves as anti-establishment voices only because their devotion to one political figure has consumed them to the point where they’ve become bloodthirsty. And if journalists refuse to speak exactly the way they want, then apparently those journalists should feel ashamed. What those mobs have become is the civilian arm of the same force journalists have been fighting for the last seventy years. So let journalists make one thing clear: if people expected them to suddenly “understand” after what happened to them — to hell with that. The second thing is this: after the incident, the trends run online were horrifying. People wrote things like “should have been shot,” “wish he had been hit,” “burn him alive.” Their families were mocked publicly on social media. Twitter Spaces were filled with people asking why they were left alive at all. These are the stories of journalists. And many of these so-called revolutionaries sit comfortably abroad — in Canada, the US, the UK — demanding revolution inside Pakistan while facing none of its consequences themselves. Then they took clips from one of the journalists’ previous vlogs: a fifteen-minute discussion cut into random eight-second and ten-second fragments. A complete manipulation job. This is exactly how these mindless mobs — these zombies — are fed their daily dose of outrage. The clips were stitched together into a one-minute viral video so distorted that even the journalists themselves would watch it and think, “Did I really say this nonsense?” The editing made it appear as if they were saying,
“So what if people were killed?” or dismissing abuses and state violence. Sentences were ripped entirely out of context.
What they conveniently removed was the actual context of the video: the journalists were condemning the loss of civilian lives. The entire point was that ordinary people were dying in a power struggle between Imran Khan and the establishment/government apparatus. The message was simple: do not sacrifice your lives in battles between power centers. But through editing and propaganda, they turned that into proof that the journalists were defending violence. And then some journalists — people who should know better — joined the outrage without even watching the original fifteen-minute video. They tweet instantly whatever arrives in their WhatsApp groups because they don’t have the time, or maybe the willingness, to think independently anymore. That is the real tragedy: reason no longer matters. Nuance no longer matters. Once the mob decides, words will be twisted until they fit the narrative it already wants to believe.
That is why no amount of abuse changes anything. Because principles are tested precisely at the moment when standing by them becomes costly. When the entire country stayed silent, and the people of Gilgit-Baltistan came out protesting for wheat subsidies, electricity, and their land rights against the government — they spoke about it. When nobody in mainstream discourse covered the protests in Kashmir, they spoke about what the actual demands of the people were. When the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement came out demanding justice for victims like Imran Zoni, or when PTM workers were tortured and killed, they took cameras there and talked about it. Whether it was the issue of Baloch missing persons, sectarian violence, attacks on minorities, or the misuse of religion and state power — they covered it.
And if after watching all these videos you can still find even one instance where we visibly supported the establishment’s narrative, directly or indirectly, then bring that clip forward and show it to them.
Whether it was military-engineered political conflicts, the era of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the regime of Pervez Musharraf, the old establishment or the current one — especially after the crackdown following political regroupings — go back and watch their videos. Look at what they were saying on the day Imran Khan was arrested. Look at the tweets from that day.
When churches were attacked, occupied, or minorities were killed unjustly, who condemned it? They did. Even when people advised them not to. They stood with the Hindu community, with Christians, with anyone facing persecution.
When clerics came onto television insulting and humiliating ordinary people, who challenged them publicly? They did.
Who explained to young people the seventy-year pattern of how the establishment manipulated politics in this country? They did.
Who recommended books to students so they could understand the structural roots of Pakistan’s crises instead of blindly following slogans? They did.
And now many of the loudest voices online only discovered “political awareness” after 2022. Some of them were practically born politically yesterday, yet today they behave as if they alone own morality, democracy, and resistance. Tell them honestly: name a single issue where you had the courage to speak and they didn’t. That is why these edited clips and propaganda campaigns do not matter to them at all. Validation is only sought from people who actually think — not from mobs that have surrendered their minds. Once a crowd turns into a mob, supporting it is not some democratic duty. Their responsibility is to think rationally about the long-term interests of the state and society. Because if these emotionally manipulated minds ever gain unchecked power, what exactly will they do with it?
Otherwise, the easiest thing in the world would be to support whatever trend is popular. Journalists who do that receive ten times more views, ten times more subscribers, and a hundred times more public love. People celebrate them at weddings, in family gatherings, everywhere — because society itself has stopped thinking critically. Recently, someone said to them at a wedding: “You criticize him so much, surely there must be some personal reason. Nobody can criticize him sincerely.” But what exactly is he? A demigod? A figure beyond criticism?
No. And they will not treat anyone that way. Not today, not tomorrow, even if they return to power again. Principles remain the same. Even after everything that happened, even after people tried to silence them, they are still saying the same basic things because they will only back down from a position if they believe it harms national interest or violates reason. Otherwise, whether ten people stand against them or ten million, it changes nothing.
His point was to condemn the sale of emotions and identities — especially the exploitation of Pashtun and Baloch suffering for political objectives while ordinary people lose their lives. They literally said in that Pashtuns are a peaceful people, and that reducing their sacrifices to political tools is immoral.
But people took fragments, twisted them, and weaponized them because outrage is easier than honesty. And if some people believed that because shots were fired at their house they would suddenly change their position just to win support, then they fundamentally misunderstood them. It does not work like that.
And finally, to all of you — the thousands who condemned the attack and stood by principle instead of mob mentality — they owed you their gratitude.
So in the end, they could only say this: if you believe that simply having an independent opinion is some unforgivable sin, and that political vengeance should be normalized, then you are merely standing on the opposite end of the same spectrum — waiting for your turn to do exactly the same thing.
At moments like these, philosophy always comes back to mind. And this time too, I remembered Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, who wrote in The Crowd Is Untruth:
“There is a view of life which holds that where the crowd is, the truth is also.”
That there is somehow a belief that wherever the crowd stands, truth must stand with it. That any idea supported by a large number of people automatically becomes true. But then there is another view:
“Wherever the crowd is, there is untruth.”
Kierkegaard argues that the moment individuals merge into a crowd, truth begins to disappear. Even if every single individual privately possesses truth, once they dissolve into collective noise, untruth enters immediately. That is why I have always rejected mob mentality and never sought validation from crowds. From the very beginning, this is what I learned.
“ People used to come and tell them, “Your videos receive so many abuses and insults in the comments, doesn’t it bother you?”
And they would say: insults do not worry them. Praise worries them more.
Because they were never here only to fight the state. They were here to wage an intellectual war against the deeper sickness inside society itself.
Standing against an institution is difficult, yes. But confronting the mob is far harder — because the mob is everywhere. It surrounds their homes, their streets, their families, and it can emerge from anywhere at any moment.
In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard writes:
“To venture wholly to be oneself is far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd.”
And that is exactly what we see around us. People proudly count crowds in hundreds of thousands, as if human beings are merely livestock to be displayed for political power. Politicians puff out their chests saying, “Look how many people I brought out.”
But the tragedy is that within those crowds, individuality disappears. People stop being human beings and become numbers. Ciphers. Copies of one another.
Because becoming like everyone else is easy. Becoming yourself is difficult.
Then there is another philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, who writes in The Revolt of the Masses:
“The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select.”
Anyone who does not think like everybody else risks being eliminated.
Anything that possesses individuality, excellence, or independent thought becomes a threat to the mass simply by existing.
And perhaps Kierkegaard’s most haunting observation is this:
“The greatest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing.”
A person notices when they lose money, lose a limb, lose a relationship, or lose status. Society notices every visible tragedy.
But people rarely notice when they lose themselves. Quietly, without even realizing it, they hand over their identity, their conscience, and their ability to think to someone else — and spiritually they disappear long before physically dying. That is the philosophy that teaches individuality. The philosophy that teaches you this: even if an entire society stands against an idea, if it still does not make sense to you intellectually and morally, you must have the courage to stand apart.
These are not revolutionary slogans for me. This is simply the architecture of my selfhood.
And in the end, Kierkegaard said something remarkable:
“I wish that on my grave there might be written: The Individual.”
A single human being. A person who stood by his ideas and refused to surrender himself to the crowd.