A Letter from Prometheus
Losing a battle that lasted for 30 hours in downtown Lahore, the state power surrendered and retreated from the scene without fulfilling its legal duty f arresting former prime minister Imran Khan. Followers of Imran Khan protected him with full force and did not allow the police to enter his residence at Zaman Park although police and rangers were trying to arrest him under court orders. The police entered n Saturday, but by then it was too late.
This was an excellent example of how a weak state surrenders in front of unruly and charged groups of people. A Lahore High Court judge directed the police to withdraw from Zaman Park because he did not want a grave law and order situation in Lahore. The DIG Police of Islamabad fainted due to the heavy presence of tear gas in the environment and he was shifted to the hospital. Over 59 policemen were injured by PTI workers and the scene amicably ended. The former prime minister has over 70 cases registered against him and he had never been arrested in any of the cases because he is protected by his strong followers. In fact the former prime minister testified that he is beyond any law and rule and he is larger than the State itself. He was crafted like this by the designers of Project Imran Khan.
Robert Irwin Rotberg is a professor in governance and foreign affairs and he was director of the Program on Intrastate Conflict, Conflict Prevention, and Conflict Resolution at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government for decades. One of his books, Failed States, Collapsed States, Weak States: Causes and Indicators, is very famous among students of civil administration all over the world. In this book, he says that states fail because of many reasons including losing their legitimacy as an umbrella for protecting the population from social, economic, legal, and physical exploitation of powerful individuals or groups.
He believes that weak states fail to control the formation of armed groups and their armament and then mobilization of groups easily defeats law enforcement agencies and that is what we saw in the Lahore fiasco. Police failed to disarm and demobilize Khan’s followers who had been attacking law enforcement agencies for over 30 hours, resulting in the disgraceful withdrawal of forces from the scene.
For a long, we are not investing in training and capacity building of our institutions and we allow privatized security management now. This country has only 397,364 policemen while the unofficial/unconfirmed strength of private security guards provided by registered security agencies is over 3.2 million and if we add the strength of unregistered and personal security guards then the figure can jump to 4 million.
Figures indicate that individuals and groups are stronger than the State if we talk about security issues. The judicial system has an extremely low strength as the Supreme Court of Pakistan has 17 judges, thye Lahore High Court has 50, Sindh High Court has 25, Peshawar High Court has 15 and Balochistan High Court has 6. Districts & Sessions Judges/Senior Civil Judges & Civil Judges are 649 in Punjab, 390 in Sindh, 177 in KPK, and 125 in Balochistan. When the State power starts squeezing then it becomes easier than before for armed groups to subjugate the state.
Pakistan has a long history of closing its eyes when any armed group flourisheSd rather than the State, which has been hand in glove with those groups in many cases. Religious, ethnic, and political groups ruled their respective areas of operation for decades and the best example of this was MQM Altaf Hussain. He was needed in the early 1980s by Gen Ziaul Haq to control the Pakistan People’s Party and the Jamaat-i-Islami in Karachi, so he got state sponsorship. Several Lashkars (religious armed groups) were needed for the Afghan Jihad and to snub a particular sectarian group and many of them thereafter targeted the Pakistan Army, including the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi that was behind attacking GHQ in Rawalpindi. The irregular armies and state-sponsored extremists sooner or later stand against the regular state and this is what we have seen in human history, particularly in the Middle East and in Pakistan. Instead of wasting time in detailing what we had seen in the past, we should review the mechanism of how and why the formation or acceptance of armed groups makes the State weaker.
Professor Anna Leander is a sociologist and political scientist. currently teaching at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. In her famous book, Globalisation and the Eroding State Monopoly of Legitimate Violence, writes that bloc interest in politics can cause a kind of warfare nd sometimes includes vertical, hierarchical command; the importance of the battle, and extremist tendencies.
Such minute incidents slowly but surely develop a situation where the State slowly but surely allows extremist groups to take over the situation and encroach the writ of the State. If the State continues to allow ethnic, social, political, and religious groups to use the monopoly of the use of violence that is the only prerogative of the State, then the state later or sooner starts crumbling.
The point of “the importance of battle” was strongly propagated during the Lahore fiasco and it worked well as mentioned by Prof Leander. The message was sent by vertical (Imran Khan himself), was amplified by the hierarchical command, and extremist tendencies were converted into a power show and attacks on law enforcement agencies. The Inspector General of Punjab Police (IGP) in his press conference claimed that militants were residing inside the residence of a former prime minister who is (was) wanted by law enforcement agencies.
Photos of one Iqbal Khan appeared on social media followed by his statement. Iqbal Khan had been fighting against the Pakistan Army in Swat Valley and he was arrested and jailed for over six years. He had been living in Afghanistan and came back to Pakistan when the PTI allowed TTP militants to resettle in Pakistan after a deal with militants arranged by the former leader of the Pakistan Army.
Iqbal Khan, according to journalists, is a leading figure in protecting the former prime minister against law enforcement agencies. Journalists who covered the pitched fight between Khan’s followers and police claimed that hardly 20 to 30 percent of followers who were there could belong to Lahore because their outfits and language indicated they were not from Punjab either. If we consider the statement of the IGP valid that militants were or are living inside the residence of the former prime minister, it is the sheer incompetence of the state institution to let them live in the heart of the provincial metropolis.
Such minute incidents slowly but surely develop a situation where the State slowly but surely allows extremist groups to take over the situation and encroach the writ of the State. If the State continues to allow ethnic, social, political, and religious groups to use the monopoly of the use of violence that is the only prerogative of the State, then the state later or sooner starts crumbling.
“Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.”: Dwight D. Eisenhower
