Pakistan: Load shedding protests

EDITORIAL : Daily Times

The first raging protests against the massive load shedding plaguing the country were seen in Faisalabad on Tuesday when residents, unable to hold in their anger any longer, ransacked a grid station and the offices of the Faisalabad Electric Supply Company (FESCO). They blocked roads and traffic for more than 10 hours and threw stones at the police deployed to keep the protests in check. However, the police did a lot more than keep the angry citizens in check. With brute force, the police beat back protesters and, when they ran away, the police scaled the walls, broke down doors and entered their homes forcefully, beating and dragging women and children outside brutally, arresting more than 10 people in the process. This is abuse in every sense of the word from breaking and entering to violent treatment of citizens. Faisalabad has remained a hotbed of protests against the debilitating power outages. This is because the city is home to the country’s textile industry, a part of our business sector that has been all but shutdown due to the power cuts. This has left many without jobs and, hence, with enough time to boil over with rage and frustration. Add to this the police brutality that was witnessed and it makes for an explosive combination. People are now angrier and the government has plenty to answer for. The Shahbaz Sharif government has been in power for less than a week and already protests have begun. This just goes to show that the people will not sit back now and listen to the usual rhetoric on the energy situation. The Sharif government has hardly had any time to chalk out any conclusive policies to curtail the power crisis but the people are impatient; they do not want to wait because they want immediate results. It is a well-known fact that the Punjab police is notorious for being a brutal force practicing unrestrained violence. The kind of barbarity that allows unlawful entry into people’s homes is not something Shahbaz Sharif brothers should overlook. He would do well to look at the swelling protests in Turkey that have made global headlines all because of the excessive use of force by the police against protestors. It would be better for the Punjab government to address the public’s woes and not increase them through brutal crowd control tactics by the police.