By Sadia Saeed, Visiting lecturer at the Department of Sociology at Boston University

Modern forms of governance do not simply enumerate citizens; they produce them by rendering them into being through the states’ practices of categorizing identities and populations. In Seeing Like a State, James Scott has aptly observed how the state works to render the society and the population transparent and simplified so that the various state functions–conscription, taxation, quotas, even rights–can be carried out. Legibility, as Scott says, is “a central problem in statecraft.”

In this TQ conversation, we explore the production of legibility by the Pakistani state. How does the state produce normative and marginal populations? How are minority rights, sexual rights and religious rights mediated by the state? What is the relationship between the central problem of statecraft–legibility–and disbursement of rights and justice? What might failures of the state to render certain beings legible tell us about the legibility project as well as possibilities of countering the logic of the state?
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In 1974, the Pakistani state constitutionally declared the Ahmadiyya community a non-Muslim minority. Exactly 10 years later, in 1984, military ruler General Zia-ul-Haq passed an executive ordinance that, among other things, makes it a criminal offence for Ahmadis to refer to themselves as Muslims or to their religion as Islam, and bans them from publicly practicing Islam. These laws highlight that the enactment of religious laws is intimately entangled with how the relationship between religion and politics is understood, articulated and contested in the public sphere. States are unlikely to support religious norms that do not have at least some degree of visibility in the public sphere.

Secondly, once formed, laws regulating religion require elaborate supporting narratives in order to stick and successfully authorize new narratives and sensibilities about religion. Such laws, in other words, need mechanisms of support and, unsurprisingly, courts are one of the key institutions that perform this task. The Pakistani state’s anti-Ahmadiyya legislations elucidate both of these points well.

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