The Making of a Counter-hegemonic Discourse – The Nation, the Lawyers’ Movement, and Pakistan’s Evolving Social Arena

Contemporary scholars of political discourse, rhetoric, and communication continue to face the challenge of producing socially sufficient explanations for phenomena such as popular social movements. This in their view is owed to the fact that existing endeavours generally pay limited attention to the agentive, temporal, historical, and cultural functions of the media discourses vis-à-vis those phenomena. This limited attention, in turn, is hampering the provision of an expansive account for the trajectory of social change triggered partially by the latent transformation of those discourses, from hegemonic to counter-hegemonic. Emphasizing methodological eclecticism as the best way to address these issues, scholars call for using a language-intensive methodology which is systematic, tiered, detailed, and easy to replicate. Pushing forward this agenda from the disciplinary lens of linguistics and genre analysis, and delimiting its scope to news media, in my thesis I propose and demonstrate a robust methodology that draws on expanded versions of Discourse Theory as advanced in particular by Glynos and Howarth (Glynos and Howarth 2007) and Frame Analysis theory building on especially the work of D’Angelo (D’Angelo et al. 2019; D’Angelo 2012). The object is discourse of the traditionally conservative mainstream daily The Nation on a popular social movement, the Lawyers’ Movement of Pakistan (LM, 2007 – 2009). Using the findings, I furnish an explanation for the dialectical relationship between the counter-hegemonic transformation of The Nation’s discourse on the LM, and the process of cultural change triggered in the politics of Pakistan partially by that dialectic as sketched out ahead.

The initial focus of my study concerns the events of March 2007 when two ‘critical incidents’ took place: the forced suspension from office of the sitting Chief Justice (CJ) of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, and the consequent birth of the LM. Analysis of The Nation’s discourse on these events reveals that a process of reframing of the identities of the President of Pakistan (who also happened to be the sitting chief of the Pakistan Army) and the CJ was underway, with the result of counter-hegemonically rearticulating, or 'resubjectivating,' the structural positioning of the two.

Subsequently, in order to investigate the possible origins of this reframing, the focus of the study switches to 2006 when the CJ annulled the privatization of Pakistan’s largest industrial complex, the Pakistan Steel Mills (PSM) causing embarrassment to the country’s military establishment. Analysis of The Nation’s coverage of this event indicates that this was indeed the point at which the paper had started the process of reframing the identities of the President and the CJ. At the end of the thesis, an attempt is made to draw some indicative connections between The Nation’s counter-hegemonic articulations during the LM and the discourses shaping the ongoing Movement for Real Freedom, i.e., democracy (MRF, 2022 to date). In brief, the findings of this thesis show in empirical detail that the rearticulation of Pakistan's social arena brought about in part by The Nation's response to the LM in 2007 was triggered by shifts that took place in the paper's discourse during its coverage of the 2006 privatization case. Using these findings in conjunction with the deeper historical context of the pro-democracy struggle of the people of Pakistan, I provide some preliminary observations of the ongoing MRF in the concluding sections of the project. This thesis has implications for the fields of discourse analysis and media studies, as well as making potential contributions to political science and cultural studies.