Pakistan: Clashes in Lahore

IT ought to be inexplicable and inconceivable. But the inconceivable all too often does occur in Pakistan. And the reasons are all too explicable. Whatever the claims of the Punjab government and police, a basic set of facts is already perfectly clear and incontrovertible: the Punjab police used stunningly excessive force against the supporters of Tahirul Qadri in Lahore yesterday and every single one of the deaths and casualties that resulted from the police action was avoidable. So clear is so much of the evidence that while a judicial commission has been hastily created, Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif surely has enough grounds for immediate suspensions and possibly even summary dismissals of the police officers involved. The point is so essential that it bears repetition: the police, a force designed and meant to protect all citizens equally, simply must not be allowed to get away with extreme violence against the very citizens it is meant to protect.

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If the violence was shocking, perhaps nearly as perplexing is the undefined threat the PML-N senses in Tahirul Qadri and his supporters. Mr Qadri and the Minhajul Quran/Pakistan Awami Tehreek network have tried to destabilise democracy before — in a much bigger way than anything that they have been able to muster this time so far. But the PPP-led government in Islamabad defused the pre-2013 election crisis Mr Qadri tried to engineer by simply waiting out the preacher and his supporters and allowing the limited support for his cause to be exposed. If only the Punjab government had followed that successful template. In Punjab, the PML-N’s political support, electoral base and parliamentary strength is so overwhelming that the party could easily have stood back and allowed a political nonentity with few legitimate or genuine hopes to do his worst. Somehow, though, the PML-N political ethos seems to involve using their crushing advantage to squash would-be rivals. That is as undemocratic at its core as it is illegal when the law-enforcement agencies of the province are used to further party goals.

Yet, astonishing, depressing and even sickening as the Punjab government’s approach may have been, neither are the PML-N’s opponents behaving in a dignified or appropriate manner. Spurred on partly by certain elements in the media that roared into action, sections of the political class have erupted seemingly less because of principled opposition to the violence in Lahore and more to try and see if they can hurt the PML-N politically. Gone is the talk of the national unity and consensus needed with the country in an undeclared state of war against militancy that just days — hours — earlier had been all everyone in the political class wanted to talk about. Since it was the PML-N that started this round of accusations and recriminations, it should be the PML-N that should close it quickly. Shahbaz Sharif should announce quick and appropriate punishments, judicial commission or not.