“No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms”—Hannah Arendt
There is something deeply unsettling about the fate of whistleblowers. We celebrate them after the event, build laws around their courage, occasionally name institutions after them and describe them as guardians of public interest. Yet when they actually stand up, documents in hand, against an employer, a government department, a corporation or some other concentration of power, they are frequently left terribly alone.
History contains enough proven murders of whistleblowers to make the danger real. It also contains deaths officially classified as suicide or accident but surrounded by circumstances that have left families and the public asking questions for decades. Intellectual honesty requires us not to convert suspicion into fact. However, intellectual honesty also requires us not to dismiss the larger pattern merely because every individual death cannot be proved to have resulted from assassination. The more important question is this: Why does truth become dangerous when it threatens power?
Whistleblowers are rarely a conventional adversary. They do not arrive carrying weapons. They may be accountants, engineers, civil servants, scientists or employees sitting quietly inside an organisation. What makes such persons dangerous is knowledge. The whistleblower knows where the papers are, who signed them, which figures do not reconcile, which safety warning was ignored, which payment was irregular and which official explanation does not correspond with the facts. That knowledge disturbs a comfortable arrangement.
Pakistan has its own haunting example in Omar Asghar Khan, son of Air Marshal Asghar Khan. He was found dead in Karachi in June 2002. Police described the death as suicide, but his family immediately disputed that conclusion, pointing to circumstances they considered inexplicable and to the plans and appointments he had made for the following days. Years later, Dawn reported that an independent inquiry commissioned by his father had concluded that Omar was first suffocated and subsequently hanged. Yet no judicial finding ever conclusively established murder. His death therefore belongs to that disturbing category in which certainty has never been achieved and questions have never entirely disappeared.
That distinction matters. We must not say, merely because a death is suspicious, that powerful people necessarily caused it. Otherwise the defence of truth itself becomes contaminated by speculation but neither should the label “suicide” automatically close public inquiry when surrounding circumstances reasonably demand investigation. Elsewhere, the connection between truth-telling and lethal retaliation has been far less ambiguous.
In India, Shanmugam Manjunath, a young Indian Oil Corporation Officer, challenged adulteration of fuel and A trove of emails shows that Deloitte Cyprus helped firms beneficially owned by Roman Abramovich attempt to skirt tax and disclosure obligations by retroactively transferring assets to British Virgin Islands companies using backdated paperwork acted against a petrol station involved in the practice. In November 2005, he was shot dead. Six men ultimately received life sentences, upheld by the Indian Supreme Court. His offence, if it can be called one, was doing precisely what an honest employee is supposed to do: refusing to look away.
A society that asks citizens to expose wrongdoing but abandons them once they do is not protecting truth. It is merely outsourcing courage.
South Africa provides an even more chilling contemporary example. Babita Deokaran, a senior official in the Gauteng health department, flagged hundreds of millions of rand in suspicious transactions connected with Tembisa Hospital. In August 2021, she was gunned down outside her home. Six men were subsequently convicted of her murder, while investigators have continued seeking those who commissioned it. Her disclosures helped uncover extensive procurement irregularities involving public money intended for healthcare. Pause over that for a moment. Public money is stolen. An honest official detects it. She performs her duty. And it is she, rather than those whose conduct she exposes, who must fear for her life.
What sort of institutional morality have we created when integrity becomes the occupational hazard? Yet elimination need not always take the form of a bullet. The recent death of British whistleblower Simon Andriesz raises another dimension of the problem. Andriesz had made disclosures concerning alleged wrongdoing at brokerage BGC Group and complained of retaliation. He died by suicide in September 2026. There is no evidence that anyone killed him, and it would be irresponsible to suggest otherwise.
Britain's Financial Conduct Authority is now reviewing how it treated him and has acknowledged that it incorrectly advised him concerning his whistleblower protections. His case exposes a subtler form of institutional failure: a person may survive physically for years while being steadily exhausted professionally, financially and psychologically. This may be the aspect of whistleblowing that receives too little attention. We imagine retaliation as a dramatic event but more often it is administrative.
A promotion disappears, a transfer arrives, colleagues stop speaking, performance suddenly becomes unsatisfactory, confidential information concerning the whistleblower mysteriously circulates. Lawyers become necessary. Litigation consumes savings. Reputation is attacked. The organisation possesses time, money, institutional memory and an entire legal department while the individual possesses a conscience and perhaps a folder of documents. Technically, nobody has silenced him. Practically, everything has been done to make speaking unbearably expensive.
Transparency International observed in 2026 that although whistleblower laws now exist in many jurisdictions, dismissal, harassment, professional exclusion, reputational attacks and costly proceedings continue, with weak enforcement frequently defeating the purpose of legislative protection. The European Union's whistleblower regime accordingly goes much further than simply declaring retaliation unlawful: it protects confidentiality, provides remedies and interim relief, and can shift the burden onto the organisation to demonstrate that adverse action was not retaliatory.
Pakistan should take particular notice. We already have experience of legislation that looks better on paper than in operation. The Senate's own proceedings concerning the Whistleblower Protection and Vigilance Commission Bill, 2025 record that the earlier legal framework dating from 2017 had remained largely dormant for want of enforcement. The newer bill passed the Senate but had not passed the National Assembly within the prescribed period and was referred for consideration by a joint sitting in February 2026. Legislation alone will never suffice.
A meaningful whistleblower regime must protect identity before retaliation begins; provide independent reporting channels outside the organisation complained against; offer rapid relief against dismissal or transfer; provide legal, financial and, where necessary, physical protection; punish those who reveal a whistleblower's identity; and investigate the disclosure instead of putting the complainant on trial.
Most importantly, institutions must reverse a deeply embedded mentality. The whistleblower is not the problem. It is the wrongdoing. Yet organisations instinctively protect themselves. The person who exposes misconduct becomes “disloyal”, “difficult”, “unstable” or “disgruntled”. Attention shifts subtly from what was disclosed to who disclosed it. Once that happens, the accused institution has successfully changed the subject.
There is, of course, another side. False accusations can destroy innocent people and institutions. Whistleblower protection cannot mean immunity for malicious fabrication. Due process, evidence and the rights of those accused remain indispensable. Protection should attach to disclosures made on reasonable grounds, not to reckless character assassination. That safeguard cannot become an excuse for frightening genuine informants into silence.
The real measure of an accountable society is not how many anti-corruption slogans it produces. It is what happens to the person who walks into an office one morning and says: Something here is wrong, and I can prove it. If that person must thereafter choose between conscience and career, truth and livelihood, disclosure and personal safety, the institution has already failed. When people watch truth-tellers being ruined, isolated or killed, the message travels far beyond the individual victim. A thousand others learn the safest lesson of all: See nothing. Say nothing. Survive.
That is why protecting whistleblowers is not an act of generosity towards unusually courageous individuals. It is an essential defence of the public interest itself. A society that asks citizens to expose wrongdoing but abandons them once they do is not protecting truth. It is merely outsourcing courage.