Two children, aged four and six, were taken from a house in Lahore early on Monday morning along with their father. They were later found safe. Their great-uncle is in prison, and there is a march next Sunday.
I do not know what happened in that house. PTI says police broke in and put people into vehicles without explanation; the police have not said anything. It is possible there is a written order somewhere that makes all of it lawful, and if there is, producing it would take an afternoon.
What I want to write about is not that morning. It is the widening circle of people who are now paying for an argument between a party and a government, none of whom chose any part of it.
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Start with the circle’s centre, which is small and entirely political. A man is in prison. His party has called a march. The government intends to stop it. Everything about that is ordinary contested politics, and both sides have been doing versions of it for years.
Now trace outward.
His sister was detained on Sunday under a 1960 ordinance that permits a district officer to imprison a person for thirty days without charge. Her driver was detained with her. On Monday, by the party’s account, two more sisters, a nephew, a niece, her husband, four cousins and two small children.
The driver is the first person in that list with no political role at all. He was at work.
Keep going. About a thousand containers and trucks have been seized to barricade Rawalpindi and Islamabad — loaded ones, carrying vegetables, fruit, medicines. The wholesale dealers say the contents begin rotting after seventy-two hours. Thousands of loaders have no work. Traders are talking about prices doubling by the weekend. The cargo belongs to importers and shopkeepers in Karachi, Faisalabad and Sargodha who have never attended a rally in their lives.
Then the city itself: markets shut, Metro Bus suspended, schools and universities closed for a week, mobile internet to be cut, hospitals on emergency footing, eight entry points sealed with containers carrying eight-inch spikes.
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There is a name for the principle being applied here, and it is worth using precisely rather than as an insult.
Collective punishment means imposing a penalty on people for what someone else has done or may do. It is not a synonym for “policy I dislike”. It has a specific shape, and the shape is visible: the four-year-old is not suspected of anything; the driver is not suspected of anything; the man whose tomatoes are rotting in a sealed container at Faizabad is not suspected of anything.
Each measure has an official justification that is individually coherent. Detain organisers and the march loses coordination. Seize containers and the roads can be blocked. Cut the internet and crowds cannot assemble. Every one of those is a real administrative logic, and none of them is a conspiracy.
But their combined effect is that the cost of this confrontation has been distributed to everyone in the vicinity, and the vicinity keeps growing.
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I want to be fair to the government’s position, because there is a genuine one and it has been made.
The finance minister costed protest disruption at a hundred and twenty billion rupees a day and called it self-inflicted pain. He is not wrong that shutdowns are expensive, and a party that calls a march knowing the state will lock down two cities cannot disclaim all responsibility for the lockdown.
And this is a bad month to be relaxed about crowds. Twenty-one people were killed at a police compound in Kohat three days ago, fifteen of them policemen, at Friday prayers. Six soldiers died in Hangu. A government that permitted a mass gathering into that environment and then buried people would be destroyed for it, rightly.
So the security argument is real. What it does not explain is the driver, the children, or the tomatoes.
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Here is the test I would apply, and I think it is a modest one.
For each measure, ask: does this fall on a person who has a choice about whether to be involved?
Detaining a named organiser under a written order, appealable to a court — that falls on someone who chose. Sealing a road on the day of a march — that falls on everyone, but for a day, and it is the ordinary price of policing an event.
Holding a hundred loaded trucks until the food inside is inedible falls on people with no choice at all, for a week, and destroys something that cannot be recovered when the march is over. Taking a four-year-old out of a house at dawn is not a security measure by any definition the state has offered.
The distinction is not between firm policing and weak policing. It is between costs imposed on participants and costs imposed on bystanders, and a state that stops tracking the difference will find that the bystanders eventually notice they are being treated as participants.
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Governor’s Rule is now being discussed for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The interior minister said on Monday that it is among the legal options, and that the prime minister will decide.
I will write about that when there is something to write about. For today I note only that the circle has widened again — from a party, to a family, to a supply chain, to a city, and now to the constitutional status of a province of forty million people.
Nobody in that province voted for a march. Most of them have spent the month burying policemen.
[Image: PPI via The Express Tribune]
