Lahore Clash: Asking for trouble

So far the Punjab government has been unable to find a single supporter for its brilliant idea of removing the barriers from Dr Tahir-ul-Qadri’s home and his institution Minhaj-ul-Quran in Model Town, Lahore in the wee hours of Wednesday night. What had been the compulsion that the government could not wait until morning for the so-called operation? The Chief Minister (CM) Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif has announced a judicial commission to probe into the incident that has claimed eight lives including two women, and wounded 80 people. He has also vowed to step down if his government is found complicit in the mayhem. The FIR filed yesterday has nominated Dr Tahir-ul-Qadri’s son and 3,000 Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) activists. According to the Law Minister Punjab, Rana Sanaullah, PAT has been responsible for rousing anger in the police by not cooperating in letting the barriers be removed. He said that there had been reports of illegal movement of arms and ammunition inside Minhaj-ul-Quran and that the PAT activists have been found taking oath on the Quran to topple the present government through a revolution. The police, according to the minister, did not use force until they were forced to do so by the PAT activists. The Punjab government has been in a state of denial over the killing of innocent people by its police and has blamed an unseen force for the dirty game of beating and killing people.

It is now left to the judicial commission to find out the culprits. In the meantime quite a few police officers have been suspended from their job, to be restored later of course when the heat dies down, a usual governmental exercise to buy time. Whatever the Punjab government says or claims will not undo the live images flashed on TV screens of police brutality and a man called Gullu Butt smashing the windows and windscreens of the cars parked in the vicinity of the PAT’s head office. Not only did the police allow him continue his wrecking activity undisturbed, he was patted for doing a good job by a senior police officer. According to the latest reports, he has been arrested and the Punjab government has apparently distanced itself from him.

The police in Pakistan could be anything but the protectors of citizens’ rights and lives. It uses torture as an instrument of so-called law enforcement routinely and because it is not trained in modern crowd control tactics, often resorts to becoming trigger-happy unjustifiably. According to the standing operating procedure, the police must first exhaust the option of using tear gas, water cannon and rubber bullets to disperse the crowd before using live ammunition. In this case none of the first three options were used. That the police did not seek any advice from the government or its higher-ups before opening fire is both unbelievable and perplexing. If the police had acted on its own, then we as citizens are in serious trouble at the hands of an undisciplined force. And if it had acted on orders, the government’s unnecessary fear of Tahir-ul-Qadri’s return creates more confusion. What is there to fear from Tahir-ul-Qadri’s? Unless the government is sure that it has done something terribly wrong, oppositions generally cannot topple governments through street agitation alone. The theatrics of Dr Qadri, as they had been dubbed until Tuesday, would probably have passed unnoticed or at least not had even his past attempts’ impact, especially amidst the military operation in North Waziristan. Not now perhaps.

Whosoever had advised the CM Punjab on this operation has done him irreparable harm. It was an attack on the democratic principles that the PML-N government does not tire of proclaiming. In its misguided effort to cow down the opposition, the Punjab government has invited more trouble for itself and inadvertently strengthened the very hands it perhaps wanted to weaken.