There are too many horror stories of the police using force against citizens to gain control of a situation. There is a reason the average citizen fears encountering the police. Any interaction can turn dangerous in the blink of an eye. The protest that turned deadly in Lahore in front of the Punjab Assembly on Friday is another transgression from our under-trained and often-brutal police force, which attacked a group of nurses as they tried to storm the Assembly. No one is sure about the fate of Asia, a nurse who was beaten mercilessly at the hands of the police, who was at least seven months pregnant and now lies in a coma.
The only reason people give up some liberties to the government is to enable it to protect them. A society is constructed along the fundamental principle of the responsibility of the government to protect the public. The public in turn, is granted certain unalienable rights such as the right to decide who is voted into power and the right to protest if things are going wrong. How does a protest by unarmed nurses give the government the license to get violent?
There have been more violent protests in the past. Tires are burnt, buildings are smashed on a regular basis in many corners of the country and people have done more than just try and enter the Assembly. There are direct threats to the security of the country and the attack on IHC is just one example of when the police and the government failed to react to very serious threats. So why was the police hell bent on acting now, when there was no need to resort to violence?
Rana Sanullah’s response claiming that the baton charge was a display of the police performing its duty is insulting to the sensibilities of any civil member of society. The job of the police is to protect the public, not to attack an unprotected group of women for protesting. It also raises further questions of the person responsible behind issuing the orders to the police. The government has much to answer for, and pinning this on the individuals who actually wielded the batons is not going to make this an open-shut case. The attack must be thoroughly investigated with results revealing the real culprits behind this obscene miscarriage of justice.