- Does the right hand know what the left is doing?
The whole affair of the arrest of journalist Irfan Siddiqui, and his release on Sunday, raises more questions than it answers. Mr Siddiqui was first of all arrested on a charge that normally does not provoke the police into such action. He was accused of having given a house on rent without giving the local police the papers necessary for this. True, new laws have made this a terrorist offence, but the journalists’s plea that the house was his son’s, not his, and that the paperwork would be completed in a day or two, and Mr Siddiqui arrested, while the police party in attendance was worthy of a hardened terrorist, not a peaceable journalist. The duty magistrate gave judicial remand. Then the storm broke.
The arrest was seen as an attack on press freedom, and it was noted that Mr Siddiqui, while a teacher, had a number of distinguished pupils, among them the current COAS. However, one person who did not know the arrest had occurred, was the PM’s Information Adviser, Dr Firdous Ashiq Awan. Another person denying knowledge was Interior Minister Brig (retd) Ijaz Shah, whose surprise was despite the Islamabad police, which made the arrest, being under him. His suggestion that pro-Nawaz elements in the Islamabad police may haven responsible was surprising, considering the fanfare with which the PTI’s first anniversary was celebrated. Have the ministers lost, or given up, control of the police? Or is all power concentrated in the hands of the Prime Minister? When the matter reached him, he seemed displeased, and things began to happen Mr Siddiqui was produced before a magistrate on Sunday, and given bail.
Has the matter ended happily? Should Mr Siddiqui have been arrested at all? Or was his sin that of acting as a speechwriter for the imprisoned Nawaz Sharif? Is the entire press supposed to learn from Mr Siddiqui’s example? Or is it that the left hand carried out the arrest, while the right arranged for the bail, with neither still knowing what the other is up to? That last is most dangerous, for it means that the government does not know what might happen next, and cannot distinguish between events of its own making, and those it must respond to.
