- Intimidatory tactics
e dozens of cases registered against PML-N for its attempted welcome of Maryam and Nawaz Sharif on Friday – as if the preemptive crackdown, and the blockade during the day, was not enough – did not come without their fair share of irony, to say the least. It was PML-N, after all, that wrote the book on employing the police force as an arm of the government to coerce, pressure, even torture when needed, political opponents of all varieties. Now, with the state bearing down on them in clear violation of their basic democratic rights, and the police registering cases against many of their leaders, they seem in the old position of their opponents.
During the most recent PML-N tenure the police was used not just to pick up people and beat crowds – including unions, teachers, nurses, even blind people (on at least two occasions in Lahore) – but also kill them; as in the horrible Model Town incident. To make matters worse in the Model Town killings, the government then allegedly arm-twisted police officers that were part of the investigation, then gave attractive assignments to its blue-eyed boys that carried out the carnage. Their influence on the force, especially in the stronghold province of Punjab, was so great that senior police officers have, at least in the last election, been seen campaigning for the party.
Calls for police reforms have been ignore so long, by all sorts of democratic governments, that they have almost ceased being raised. PML-N is partly to blame for the sad reaction to its Friday march because in all its time in power it never lifted a finger to meaningfully reform the police force, and how it is used by the state. PTI made much noise about improving things in KP, with mixed results. However, nobody has yet realised the urgency of thoroughly streamlining the state security apparatus, and completely removing it from politics.
