A damp squib
The loud and maximalist claims by the opposition parties
participating in Tahirul Qadri’s sit-in on The Mall Lahore yesterday turned out
to be hollow. The rally’s failure to stir the masses or the imagination despite
two major opposition parties, the PPP and the PTI, and a host of smaller ones being
present, was owed to a number of factors. First and foremost, the rally
organisers were unable to achieve a critical mass of participants. Ignoring the
tall claims of the opposition parties, the fact that even the 25,000 seats the
organisers claimed had been provided at the venue showed gaps and empty seats
belies any exaggerated claims by the organisers. Crowd estimation is an inexact
science at best, but no estimate, whether from sympathetic or hostile sources
exceeded 16,000, although the organisers claimed an exaggerated figure of
50,000. Some 6,000 unarmed police and Rangers were deployed or on standby to
provide security to the venue, guard sensitive sites and ensure the rally
passed without incident. Unarmed because the Punjab government, while
monitoring the rally closely, wished to avoid any repetition of the Model Town
Lahore or Kasur incidents of a trigger-happy force letting loose on unarmed
protestors. The relatively low turnout put paid to any thoughts of continuing
the sit-in beyond the midnight closure imposed by the Lahore High Court, which attempted
to balance the right of peaceful protest with the rights and convenience of
citizens at large. Even this limitation did not satisfy The Mall traders
community, who had petitioned the court to disallow the rally in consonance
with its 2011 order (unimplemented to date) banning rallies and protests on The
Mall except in the confines of Nasser Bagh or Attique Stadium. The second
factor that ensured the rally’s tall claims ended less in a bang and more of a
whimper was the disunity on display within an ostensibly united opposition.
Tahirul Qadri was unable to persuade Imran Khan to share the stage with Asif
Zardari, leading to a ‘two-phase’ rally that took something away from its
weight and importance. So much so that when Imran Khan arrived on stage and saw
his party leaders sitting cheek by jowl with PPP leaders, he commanded them to
move away and only sit next to him. Tahirul Qadri was even unable to deliver on
his promise that the combined opposition leadership would hold a strategy
meeting in the container and issue an agreed set of demands. None of this
transpired due to the glaring rifts in the ‘united’ opposition front. While
Qadri may take away whatever crumbs fell from the rally’s table as compensation
and try to put a brave face on the outcome by declaring a future strategy
within two days, on the evidence of the rally not much is expected to emerge
anytime soon. Even the much dreaded disruption to normal life and traffic
gridlock that usually accompanies blockage of the city’s main commercial artery
failed to materialize except on The Mall itself. Everywhere else life went on
normally and for once the traffic police seem to have managed the situation
relatively well.
Apart from numbers and disunity, what was said by the
leaders at the rally failed to fire the crowd, let alone the country at large.
Imran Khan railed against parliament and contemplated his fellow traveller
Sheikh Rashid’s threat to resign from parliament. Perhaps someone should remind
him that given his record of non-attendance of the house, he may not even be
missed! The PPP in the person of Bilawal Bhutto and Khursheed Shah rose to the
defence of parliament against the abuse heaped on it by the Sheikh
Rasheed-Imran Khan duo. Asif Zardari fell back on the ‘patriotic card’,
accusing Nawaz Sharif of weakening the country because he had reminded people
of what happened in 1970-71 when Sheikh Mujibur Rehman was denied power despite
his mandate, in the context of recent happenings in Balochistan. Given the
off-the-mark speeches, relatively low attendance and glaring contradictions
within the ranks of the opposition, it would not be amiss to describe the much
touted ‘final assault’ on the government in the shape of the Lahore rally as
not much more than a damp squib.
No comments:
Post a Comment