Pakistan - Batons for the blind & Punjab Police

We would think that in a country besieged with law and order problems, the police would have better things to do than beat up the blind. Yet, this is just what they chose to do in Lahore on Wednesday when a rally of more than 150 partially sighted and blind persons staged a demonstration outside the Lahore Press Club on World Disability Day to draw attention to their need for jobs and was violently broken up by our brave Punjab police, using batons and allegedly slamming a vehicle into the crowd. Ironically enough, about 210 police officers had graduated from a training course just a day before this unfortunate event. We wonder what kind of training they had received. The Punjab police’s enthusiasm for brutality is well established – notably over the last decade or so. In February 2010, the Punjab Assembly took up the matter of the beating of protesting school teachers by this force. In February 2013, there was outrage over the beating up of young doctors in Lahore, and in other incidents this year citizens protesting electricity outages have been treated just us violently even though they were unarmed. The manner in which the police force treats citizens contrasts with its abject failure to maintain law and order. 

This is hardly an acceptable way to handle what was a peaceful protest by a disadvantaged group. The government needs to carefully consider its policies and its control over its security forces. It already faces problems on all kinds of fronts. Surely the last thing it would want is to open up more. The Minhajul Quran incident this summer should be a lesson. The handling of public protests is a primary responsibility of police. Around the world, forces are trained in how to deal with public protests calmly – without causing injury or damage. But the way our police treats citizens – even the most harmless of them – is disturbing. It reflects one of the reasons why relations between people and the police are so bad. It is an established fact that security forces need to work with the public if good law and order is to be maintained. We seem to be hell-bent on doing just the reverse.