Wading through the clutter of the weekend just passed, key problematics might easily become lost to the analytical mind. The role, perception and political misuse of the police is one of them. Though a notoriously inept institution in Pakistan, the extent to which law enforcement officials have been played in a plot far-removed from them, is dangerous for the future, even in the short-term. Consider this: in the event of a great inqilaab that topples the current administration, the police force will remain the same. In the event of the PML-N government retaining power for the next four years, the police force will remain the same.
The policemen that Qadri’s supporters beat and torched at Bhera on Saturday, and clashed with in Model Town, the very same policemen who civilians saw manning petrol stations all over Lahore, hindering them, holding them back, and hurting them; the policemen who have been demonised as the face of the state, as the tools of state terror, and as reflections of the PML-N’s brute mentality, will not fall with the government. The government has, with all the force it could muster, thrust its weight and visibility onto the shoulders of this institution. This has been the greatest excess of the PML-N in all of its graceless political clambering. It has used the provincial police force as its own personal security agency. Without a moment’s thought, it has risked the safety of thousands of law enforcement officials, with TV screens around the country flashing with images of the culmination of a violent showdown between the state (police) and the anti-state on the streets. Of course the public is picking sides, and of course excitable mobs are invariably letting loose their frustrations at the police. After all, who else from the state, from the killing fields of politics, is visible at all?
A police state is generally defined as a country wherein there is no real distinction between the law (in this case law enforcement agencies) and the execution of political power. Over the last few days, any distance between the two in the Punjab has quickly eroded. Time and again, with complete abandon, the government has made the police its own stooge; from refusals to file First Information Reports (FIR) from victims of the Model Town incident, to the Model Town shootings themselves, to the PPO’s sweeping police powers, to cordoning off access and exit points to main roads and highways. Some kind of disconnect, at least perceptively, must be created to separate the idiocies of the government from the behaviour of the police, or more law enforcement officials will die at the hands of the mob and vice versa.
Monday, August 11, 2014
Pakistan: Police State
Wading through the clutter of the weekend just passed, key problematics might easily become lost to the analytical mind. The role, perception and political misuse of the police is one of them. Though a notoriously inept institution in Pakistan, the extent to which law enforcement officials have been played in a plot far-removed from them, is dangerous for the future, even in the short-term. Consider this: in the event of a great inqilaab that topples the current administration, the police force will remain the same. In the event of the PML-N government retaining power for the next four years, the police force will remain the same.
The policemen that Qadri’s supporters beat and torched at Bhera on Saturday, and clashed with in Model Town, the very same policemen who civilians saw manning petrol stations all over Lahore, hindering them, holding them back, and hurting them; the policemen who have been demonised as the face of the state, as the tools of state terror, and as reflections of the PML-N’s brute mentality, will not fall with the government. The government has, with all the force it could muster, thrust its weight and visibility onto the shoulders of this institution. This has been the greatest excess of the PML-N in all of its graceless political clambering. It has used the provincial police force as its own personal security agency. Without a moment’s thought, it has risked the safety of thousands of law enforcement officials, with TV screens around the country flashing with images of the culmination of a violent showdown between the state (police) and the anti-state on the streets. Of course the public is picking sides, and of course excitable mobs are invariably letting loose their frustrations at the police. After all, who else from the state, from the killing fields of politics, is visible at all?
A police state is generally defined as a country wherein there is no real distinction between the law (in this case law enforcement agencies) and the execution of political power. Over the last few days, any distance between the two in the Punjab has quickly eroded. Time and again, with complete abandon, the government has made the police its own stooge; from refusals to file First Information Reports (FIR) from victims of the Model Town incident, to the Model Town shootings themselves, to the PPO’s sweeping police powers, to cordoning off access and exit points to main roads and highways. Some kind of disconnect, at least perceptively, must be created to separate the idiocies of the government from the behaviour of the police, or more law enforcement officials will die at the hands of the mob and vice versa.
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