The administration of both Rawalpindi and Islamabad should not have ruled out the possibility of persons who attended chehlum proceedings of Mumtaz Qadri taking to the streets once the chehlum was over. Any magistrate or police officer having experience of tackling mobs understands that one should never halloo till one is out of the woods, meaning thereby, that one should never lower one’s guard till one has seen the back of the last member of a protest procession. Both the Rawalpindi and Islamabad administration and police didn’t do enough home work and prepare themselves adequately for facing all types of situation. Once the chehlum function was over it was free-for-all. The protesters walked all the way to Islamabad without any let or hindrance and ransack whatever came their way on last sunday. The prime minister was right to ask :Why was there no coordination between the administration and police of the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad? If the organisers of the chehlum had given written undertaking to the Rawalpindi administration that they will disperse once the chehlum procession was over, they had better be arrested now and proceeded against for abetting violence on the street. If the government wants to see that the writ of the state should be visible it would have to give a free hand to the district magistrate for maintenance of law and order and stop posting officers as DM on political basis and then interfering in their work.
Why have the district magistrate and SP, whose responsibility it is to look after the law and order of the district, lost the initiative, verve, gumption, farsightedness and guts to pre-empt such incidents, try to defuse the law and order situation and use force to disperse a mob? The answer is Elementary. They are afraid that in case their action misfired, their political masters, their rulers, would not own their action. There would be no body to stand behind them and chances are that in nine out of ten cases they might be made scapegoat and penalised. Gone are the days when the DM of a district wielded real and full power, insofar, as every thing related to maintenance of law and order was concernced. He was a cushion, a shock observer, who absorbed all shocks of actions relating to law and order and the strikers knew that his word is going to be the last word so they feared and respected him at the same time. It is unbecoming and naive that government ministers who are political animals and who have nothing to do with law and order should be talking to the ring leaders of a mob. They are not trained for this task.
POSTSCRIPT: Bilawal has, in one of his latest public statement excoriated judiciary, parliament, bureaucracy and the Fourth Estate, all in the same breath, by billing them as rubber stamp of Nawaz League. Should we assume that only leaders of his party are angels who have descended from the heavens.
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