There is something deeply painful about watching a country turn its own roads into barriers against its own people. A bridge that once carried families, students, patients, traders and workers from one part of Pakistan to another suddenly becomes a wall. A motorway built with public money to connect provinces becomes a line of separation. Containers stand where traffic should flow, barricades replace ordinary movement, and roads are treated as though they were frontiers between hostile territories. This is not simply a story about a political march planned for September 27. It is a story about ordinary Pakistanis caught between political confrontation and the machinery of the state, people who may have nothing to do with the protest but are nevertheless forced to bear its consequences. How can a province be cut off from the capital of its own country? How can people be prevented from reaching neighbouring provinces because of a political dispute? And how can this happen in a country that calls itself a federation, has a Constitution, Parliament, courts, provincial governments and institutions created precisely to prevent political disagreements from becoming battles between citizens and the state?
The images from the roads are difficult to look at without a sense of grief. The Islamabad-Peshawar Motorway, M-14, Hazara Motorway and GT Road have faced closures or restrictions, while containers and other barriers have appeared at crucial crossings, particularly around Attock, the vital link between Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab. Reports of road-blocking devices and long metal spikes or nails being used to stop vehicles make the situation even more disturbing. What are we preparing for? A political protest or a confrontation? A disagreement or a fight? Is the state preparing to manage a gathering or preparing for something resembling an internal battle? A motorway is not a battlefield. A bridge is not a military frontier. Attock is not an international border. The Indus does not divide two countries. Yet when bridges are fortified, roads are sealed and physical barriers are deliberately placed to prevent movement, the country begins to look frighteningly different from the federation its Constitution describes.
The government has a legitimate responsibility to protect life, property and public order, and no political party has an unlimited right to occupy highways, block public roads or paralyse an entire city. But that responsibility cannot erase the existence of everyone else. Article 15 of the Constitution recognises the right of citizens to enter and move freely throughout Pakistan, subject to reasonable restrictions imposed by law in the public interest. Article 16 protects peaceful assembly, also subject to lawful and reasonable restrictions in the interest of public order. These rights may be regulated, but they cannot become meaningless whenever politics becomes difficult. The real question is therefore not whether the state can impose restrictions. It is whether those restrictions are lawful, necessary, proportionate and limited, or whether an entire population is being made to suffer because the state and an opposition movement have failed to resolve their differences through political means.
Think of the people standing behind those containers. A patient trying to reach a hospital does not care which party is marching. A student travelling for an examination does not care which political leader is speaking. A father carrying his child home does not belong to either side of the confrontation. A truck driver carrying food, medicine or industrial goods is not a political combatant. A farmer trying to reach a market has not declared war on Islamabad. Yet all of them can suddenly become prisoners of a political crisis they did not create. Their time is lost, their income is lost, their journeys are disrupted and, in some cases, their dignity is reduced to waiting helplessly beside a barricade while their own state decides whether they may pass.
This is where the deeper shame lies. Pakistan is a federation. Its provinces are supposed to be connected politically, economically and physically. Islamabad is the capital of the entire country, not a city accessible only when the political weather is calm. The roads between provinces belong to the public. They are lifelines, not instruments of political punishment. If the response to political disagreement is to disconnect a province from the capital, block neighbouring provinces from one another and turn bridges into barriers, then something has gone badly wrong with the way we understand governance. Dialogue may be difficult, compromise may be uncomfortable and negotiation may require patience, but all three are infinitely less destructive than making ordinary citizens pay for political confrontation.
There is a profound sadness in seeing a country that desperately needs more connection choosing separation instead. Pakistan already has enough physical and political distances between its people. It does not need containers to create more. It does not need bridges turned into borders or roads turned into walls. The state has the power to close a road, but power is not the same thing as wisdom, and security is not the same thing as shutting an entire population behind barriers. The most painful question is therefore not who will march on September 27. It is what has happened to us that a political disagreement can make citizens fear the very roads that were built to take them home. A country should build bridges when its people are divided. Turning those bridges into barriers is not merely a security measure. It is a deeply shameful picture of a state losing sight of the people it exists to serve.