When authority chases freedom, suppression occurs. When power stalks ideas, violence takes place. When the state pursues citizens, death ensues — death that comes as an official order, that launches a thousand threats, that hits like a pistol fired at close range. From a university in Lahore to social media and on to a blood-spattered roadside in Karachi, it roams around like a soldier possessed — targeting dissent, attacking liberty and killing all avenues for thought and expression.

Just a look across the border will underscore the futility of it all. Over the last month or so Kashmiris have twice raised the flag of their choice, knowing full well the brutal oppression it could lead to. A state that is bigger, richer and mightier than ours has tried everything it could to force the people of Kashmir into submission. It has only failed. The politics of resistance and protest has always defied the politics of control and power in that region. That has made heroes out of ordinary Kashmiris and martyrs out of men and women who, in a normal situation, would be content to be doting fathers and dutiful housewives.

What failed to work in Kashmir will meet the same fate in Karachi and Lahore and Islamabad. A state that tries to control ideas, suppress freedom and take out the humans it does not like is not worried about securing itself — it is paranoid. The greatest weakness of a paranoid state is that it stretches itself thin over all the things it is scared about. It launches security operations in the country’s biggest city; it sends its thought troops to university campuses, to cyberspace, to cafes; it takes on a nationalist insurgency in the largest province and a religious one in a war zone known as the graveyard of empires. It seeks intrusive authority to look into what people do in cyberspace; it has already acquired the power to detain anyone it deems an enemy alien, disallowing them any legal or constitutional guarantees they may be entitled to; and it is trying people behind closed doors.

And in the wake of its unceasing activities, it is creating foreign agents out of activists, saboteurs out of university teachers and traitors out of citizens. This is exactly what it did in East Pakistan. Did Sabeen Mahmud organise a talk about human rights abuses in Balochistan at her cafe in Karachi because she wanted Balochistan to secede from Pakistan? No, she simply wanted to ensure a free expression of dissident political views, no matter how unpalatable. Suppress them and you will have an armed insurgency to tackle.

Is Taimur Rahman conspiring against Pakistan by being a Marxist, the one who dared to talk about Balochistan in Islamabad after his university in Lahore refused to host an event on the province? He was not even in the original line-up of speakers — his father was. Vilify him and next you have to raid the campuses to clear them of his supporters, the same way you did in University of Dhaka six decades ago. Is every Urdu-speaking resident of Karachi being arrested by the security forces a traitor, the recipient of terrorist training from an Indian intelligence agency? Treat them as such and you’ll face pitched battles in the narrow streets of Landhi and Liaquatabad — as, indeed, you have since 1992.

And yet, the state is unrelenting. It wants everyone to know that security trumps everything in Pakistan as it always has. Even the prime minister, the purported representative of the people, the custodian of the fundamental freedoms as enshrined in the Constitution, tells everyone to shut up since we have serious security problems.

The only way that these security problems can go away is through opening up a national dialogue, a genuinely free national discourse even on the most sensitive of questions confronting the survival of the country. Control, suppression and death have been used too many times and mostly with mixed, indeed, deadly results. A security state spreading itself into every nook and cranny of the national life needs to hold back and let people breathe — breathe the freedom to say what they think, to profess what they believe and to live as they like.