On any other day Pakistan would have crushed the handful of misguided Islamic parties, but that was not to happen on 27 Nov 2017.
Law Minister Zahid Hamid had been accused by clerics of committing blasphemy due to a change in the wording of an oath taken by parliamentarians. By all accounts this was a clerical error, almost immediately rectified. However, the religious parties felt that this was deliberately done to include Ahmadi Muslims as real Muslims.
A sit in was organised in capital Islamabad to force the law minister to resign. A week later he has.
Yesterday the Pakistani police outnumbering the protestors tried to disperse them with Baton charges and Teargas shells. It so happened that protestors had their own teargas shells that they lobbed on security forces, taking them by surprise. In response the government immediately suspended all live TV coverage and social media.
That didn’t help, if anything similar sit in appeared all across the country. With all its SOPs out of the window, government of Pakistan, like every other time in its history, looked upon the Army to save the day. And all-powerful Army worked out a negotiated settlement immediately. Minister Hamid resigned and the hooligans got scot-free. Now no one is charged or behind bars for deaths and injuries to the police forces or for the damage to the public/private property.
Perhaps the Islamabad Police and Frontier Constabulary personal knew that they were a canon fodder in the big game between PML-N and the Army. That may have been the reason for their half-hearted efforts to evict the nuisance creators in the first place.
The real looser here, is bigger than the Ahmadi sect or the people of Islamabad, it’s the state of Pakistan. While the Army and ISI can pat their backs for controlling extremists, the fact is that they are again trying to ride a tiger. One can never tame extremism. People forget that Osama bin Laden was a CIA agent who turned against his masters. What did incident did is to break the institutions that need to grow stronger for a stronger Pakistan. Lahore High Court’s writs now hold no value, and jawans of the Punjab Police (& FC) have lost respect.
Army is a noble institution in Pakistan, but as long as it continues to be the only institution in the country, only more nuclear weapons will be seen as growth. The actual growth will stop knocking and find a better door somewhere else.
