Let there be no doubt about it: The Pakistan Protection Bill is a bill of war. It blurs the limitations of acceptable legal conduct by the government and security agencies, giving sweeping powers to the state to indulge in the use of force against actors it perceives to be “retaliating against government conduct,” amongst a host of other things. Akin to the notorious Patriot Act of 2001, signed into law by then US President George Bush, the sheer magnitude of the Pakistan Protection Bill must be fully understood. It is a war-time document, that, while taking arguably necessary steps to speed up the legislative and judicial process in the nation’s war against militancy, also erodes the democratic rights of innocent citizens, and gives dangerous authority to civil armed forces, such as the police, to take the law and lives of the people of Pakistan into their own hands. Following the brutal tragedy at Model Town, it is alarming that police conduct on that day can quite neatly fit in and fulfill the rather vague legal requirements enshrined in the bill.
The bill talks of arresting without warrant, those “reasonably” suspected to have committed, or to commit in the future (near or far, we do not know), a scheduled offence. It allows a police officer of Grade 15 and above (that includes anybody above sub-inspector level), to give orders to shoot suspects on sight under “reasonable” levels of suspicion. Whereas the inevitable misuse of power will perhaps be marginally better addressed in larger urban centers, what of small towns and villages, where police inspectors and SHO’s have in many regards replaced feudals to emerge as untouchable bastions of power? How many innocent people will become victims of this non-democratic, non-transparent bill? Perhaps what makes the PPB most dangerous in Pakistan, is that it gives the most amount of power to arguably the most inefficient, corrupt, ill-famed institution of the country- the police. There must be some intelligent restrictions put into place before serious damage is done; the included amendments to the original document do not, pun intended, fit the bill.