PROTESTS OUT OF CONTROL

Mishandled and underestimated by the federal government from the outset, the three-week-old protest on the outskirts of Islamabad exploded yesterday into a dangerous and destabilising national crisis. Quite simply, the PML-N has handled every aspect of the protest — from its inception through the journey from Lahore to Islamabad to its disruptive tactics at the protest site — disastrously. Whether legitimately concerned about potential casualties among the protesters or wrongly focused on the electoral fallout among the PML-N’S right-wing support, the government has failed to live up to its basic responsibility to protect the life and property of the citizenry. There is no reasonable set of circumstances in which a ledgling political party, no matter how aggrieved or agitated, could be allowed to not just hold the federal capital and the fourth most populous city of the country hostage, but also trigger protests across the country. Yesterday’s shocking events demand an urgent rethink of state policy towards such protests. Certainly, the irst step for the state must be to restore order in the country. The federal and provincial governments and the security and intelligence apparatuses must pool together their resources to irstly prevent the countrywide protests from escalating overnight and secondly to put a deinitive, as-peaceful-as-possible end to the original protest outside Islamabad. Dawn