When one of the ring leaders of the Chotu Gang asked him for his final wish, the captured SHO Hanif Ghauri stared in the face of death and said it was to shoot the gangster himself.
Meanwhile, the news channels were busy overlaying the episodes of the police’s fight against the gang with Punjabi film songs; presenting the cops as some character actors in a Charlie Chaplin movie.
The Punjab police, beleaguered, ill-equipped and ill-managed by the provincial government went to the trenches, so to speak, and took on the Chotu Gang. They needed air-support and the number of gunship helicopters that the Punjab police has is equal to the number of gunship helicopters the Pakistan Cricket Board has. It had to appeal to the army for air-support. The latter, however, demanded complete control of the operation.
The late SHO Hanif Ghauri’s daughter, Laraib Bibi, has written a morose two-page letter to the chief minister, stating the bereaved didn’t want any compensation other than the effort to set the record straight in the eyes of the public.
Different countries have different approaches to the problem. The British, for instance, hand over situations to the army (the SAS) whenever they escalate beyond a set of defined parameters. In such set-ups, saying the police is incompetent because it had to call in the army to handle the situation would be akin to saying the police was incompetent because it had to call in doctors and paramedics to save lives after a building collapsed. Square peg; round hole.
Other countries, like the US, have SWAT teams within their police forces. The history of such teams within the police had stemmed from an initial discomfort in having the military performing any function within the country. It’s a democracy thing; we wouldn’t get it.
We don’t have SWAT training and equipment for the police in the country. It’s just too expensive a proposition. Our police forces barely have enough cash to keep the grid of local police stations afloat. The police could at least be trained better, you say? Well, it appears that there are a number of recently retired officers from the SSG hired on contract by the Punjab police, some of whom were conducting this very operation and were unsuccessful. The only thing that the army brought to the table in this operation was the air-support and the nearly unlimited manpower that they have at their disposal.
The police didn’t need to be made fun of. The mainstream media doesn’t make fun of the army’s less than stellar record in the war on terror.
Post-script: coincidentally, it was the same under-funded, decrepit DG Khan police that had, after an encounter, informed the army that there was going to be an attack on the GHQ. The army brushed it off, much to its expense much later.
