Pakistani Protesters Ransack State Television Headquarters

By SALMAN MASOOD and DECLAN WALSH

Pakistan’s political crisis deepened on Monday when protesters stormed the headquarters of the state-run television network, causing a temporary lapse in transmission until army troops regained control and secured the building.

Hundreds of people, many armed with sticks, ransacked the Pakistan Television building in central Islamabad, smashing vehicles in the parking lots and cutting transmission cables in the newsrooms. The network said that at least 14 cameras had been stolen.

The dramatic scenes underscored the growing sense of chaos in the Pakistani capital, which has been paralyzed for more than two weeks by protesters calling on Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to resign. Mr. Sharif has refused to leave office, but to help bring the capital under control, he has been forced to rely on the military — which ousted him in a 1999 coup.

Hours after the attack on the television headquarters, Mr. Sharif held a two-hour meeting with the army chief, Gen. Raheel Sharif (the two men are not related), prompting speculation in some local media outlets that the prime minister had been asked to resign. The government and the army immediately denied the reports; in a Twitter post the military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Asim Saleem Bajwa, called them “baseless.”

The protesters are led by the opposition politician Imran Khan and the cleric Muhammad Tahir-ul Qadri, who accuse Mr. Sharif of election rigging and who led thousands of supporters into central Islamabad on Aug. 15. After two weeks of heated speeches and political theatrics, the standoff turned violent over the weekend when thousands of demonstrators burst through police lines amid clashes that left at least three people dead and hundreds wounded.

Now groups of protesters are camped on the lawn of the country’s Parliament and outside the prime minister’s official residence — a humiliating image for Mr. Sharif, who only 15 months ago came to power when his party scored a landslide election victory.

“We want a revolution,” said Muhammad Zulqarnain, a 25-year-old farmer from Punjab Province wearing a gas mask around his neck and holding a metal bar outside the Parliament building. “We will not leave before we achieve victory.”

Mr. Khan, a former cricket star, has had the media spotlight largely to himself since the protests began. Yet Mr. Qadri’s fervent following, which is drawn from his countrywide religious network, has provided the impetus for the protests. The men who attacked Pakistan Television on Monday appeared to be mostly in Mr. Qadri’s camp, as evidenced by their flags and slogans.

They met little resistance as they entered the building, and they cheered the army troops as they left. Some demonstrators pulled a portrait of Mr. Sharif from the building and beat it with their shoes.

The army’s role as mediator has heightened anxiety in a country where the military has a history of seizing power during times of political strife — fears that were stoked by a prominent defector from Mr. Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf party, who warned on Monday that a slow-motion coup was taking place.

In a sharply worded speech outside the Parliament, the defector, Javed Hashmi, the party’s former president, accused his former leader of taking orders from the military and its intelligence agencies. “He said we cannot move without the military,” Mr. Hashmi said, referring to Mr. Khan.

Hours later, the military rejected Mr. Hashmi’s accusations. The “army is an apolitical institution and has expressed its unequivocal support for democracy,” the military said in a statement.

Although the armed forces have resisted the urge to mount a coup, many Pakistani analysts believe that the military is using the crisis to erode Mr. Sharif’s authority. The two sides have a notably troubled relationship. Since Mr. Sharif’s return to power 14 years after the military ousted him, he and the armed forces have repeatedly clashed over talks with the Taliban, relations with India and the treason trial of the former military ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

Mr. Sharif, however, has also undermined himself. As the street protests neared in the early summer, he resorted to violence instead of negotiation to deter Mr. Khan and Mr. Qadri. The police killed at least 10 supporters of Mr. Qadri during clashes in June, lending his movement a sense of wounded legitimacy in the eyes of many Pakistanis.

Mr. Sharif still enjoys the backing of most of the opposition, which fears that the demonstrations could upend the country’s fragile democracy. Yet the prime minister’s failure to find a negotiated end to the protests has badly eroded his authority and created a palpable sense of drift.

Mr. Sharif says he is willing to accede, at least in part, to the demands for electoral reform put forward by Mr. Khan and Mr. Qadri. But he has insisted that he cannot, under any circumstances, accept the calls for his resignation.

In the hope of bolstering his standing, the prime minister has called an emergency joint session of the lower and upper houses of Parliament for Tuesday. But if the chaos on the streets continues — during the worst violence, demonstrators threw pavement stones as they clashed with the police, who fired rubber bullets — it could prove hard to attract a strong showing in Parliament.

The attack on the television headquarters was symbolically significant because many Pakistanis have strong memories of the last coup, when soldiers seized control of the same building. Mr. Khan and Mr. Qadri denied any involvement in the assault, drawing a disbelieving response from Mr. Sharif’s party.

“Both Qadri and Khan are saying these are not their people,” said Marvi Memon, a governing party lawmaker. “Then who are they?”

The defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, indicated the government was preparing to take tougher action against the protesters. “If not mass arrests, selective use of force can be used,” Mr. Asif told Reuters in an interview at his home on Monday.

But the protesters insisted they were going nowhere. “We will follow our leader’s orders,” said Usman Ahmad, a 23-year-old barber from Sialkot who wore a badge with Mr. Qadri’s image. “If he says ‘go back’, we will retreat. If he says ‘move ahead’, we will obey the command.”