“The time has come for people to take matters in their own hands,” PML(N) leader Khwaja Asif told angry mobs earlier this month. He told them democracy had failed and rioting would resolve their problems. Public and private property was burnt down, records were lost, business was stopped and major roads were blocked in major cities of Punjab.
What Khwaja Asif did not know was that similar mobs would riot against his own government two weeks later. In line with the instructions of key PML(N) leaders, they took the matter in their own hands, burned down public and private property, stopped businesses and blocked major roads in protest against the provincial government.
“People have lost all hope in democracy,” Khwaja Asif had said, although his own party is in government in Punjab. Khwaja Saad Rafique, another key PML(N) leader, said the government should exempt Lahore from loadshedding. Urban Punjab, especially Lahore, is the perceived stronghold of the party. A large number of television viewers also live in urban Punjab. When protests against power outages were reported from key cities in Punjab, Nawaz Sharif and his party’s top leaders decided to follow the mob, hoping it would lead them to Islamabad. In what they thought was a smart move, they turned a major political problem into a major political opportunity.
“Let’s bring a revolution and get rid of the present rulers,” Nawaz Sharif told rioters in Islamabad. “We need the cooperation of masses like during the long march held for the reinstatement of the Supreme Court judges.”
The phrase ‘Long March’ has been used very liberally in Pakistan recently. It is generally used for a series of marches that were part of a 12,000-kilometre retreat made by the Communist Party of China’s Red Army, to escape the army of the Chinese Nationalist Party that was chasing it. One and a half million people, mostly peasants, died in the Long March and the country’s cultural heritage was destroyed.
PML(N)’s long march was made on cars and was limited to cities of urban Punjab along the GT Road. Key leaders of the party stopped at Gujranwala, less than an hour’s drive from Lahore, because the government decided to accept their demands.
Gujranwala is also the town worst hit by the riots against loadshedding. Led by PML(N) leaders and workers, baton-wielding protesters attacked the Gujranwala Electric Power Company head office on GT Road, stole office supplies, broke down furniture and computers, and then burned down the building and the motorcycles of the company’s employees. All company records were lost.
TV footage showed extremely angry people beating up inanimate objects with sticks. Some burned down their electricity bills. They had been told they wanted justice, jobs and good governance, they had been told they had lost hope in democracy, and they had been told they must take matters in their own hands. A day later, loadshedding in Punjab almost ended. But the surplus anger remained.
I had said in a column that week that once mobs are unleashed, they will not follow plans. The PML(N) runs Pakistan’s most populated province, and it already has the ability to solve problems for a very significant percentage of Pakistani people.
If there is no immediate resolution to the people’s problem, mobs will continue to be angry at whoever is in charge. The mobs will not disperse even if Nawaz Sharif becomes prime minister.
But we did not have to wait for that long to see the mobs turn on the Punjab government. Last week, thousands of students from all over urban Punjab began similar riots against what appears to be the chief minister’s latest mess – a ‘computerised’ exam results system malfunction that would mark people absent in the exams they have proof they took, and gave them scores for the ones they missed. Some were graded in Computer Science when they had taken Biology; others were given more marks than the total.
The most violent protests took place in the very Gujranwala where the PML(N) had thought it was using the mobs against the federal government.
Hundreds of young people ransacked and burned down the office of Gujranwala Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education. All records were lost. “The only thing left are the walls,” the board’s chief had told TV reporters, after he was held hostage for several hours.
But the PML(N) seems to have learned no lessons from these riots. It is now planning a protest rally in Lahore – the capital of the province it governs and the city it seems to solely care about. It looks like it will be democracy against itself on October 28.
The writer is a media and culture critic and works at The Friday Times. He tweets @paagalinsaan and gets email at harris@nyu.edu