Daily Times

Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar during his press conference after the Islamabad standoff revealed that it was he who had instructed the police that if the terrorist had not taken anybody as hostage, he must not be fired at. He had also ordered that all efforts be made to arrest him alive. His chief reason why the terrorist should not be killed was that he did not like the man being killed in front of his children, though he saw no harm in ‘killing’ him in the presence of children after dusk. The pronouncements of the minister raise a few fundamental questions that must be answered so that in future the police and other law enforcement agencies present at the spot act swiftly and conclusively to check such acts of terrorism without waiting for orders from the top quarters. Needless to say such exigencies call for immediate action and hardly allow time for meditation or for seeking instructions from above.

An act of the police is reprehensible if it is illegal. The Pakistan Penal Code explicitly enumerates nearly a dozen exigencies where if a person kills another person exercising his right of self-defence, he cannot be held guilty of any offence. The police force must know all such exigencies under which if they act and kill a likely offender, no blame can lie with them. In the case in point, I believe all circumstances were present in which if the terrorist had been killed, the police could not be held liable under the law. In full view of the public, Sikander, the offender, carried two lethal assault rifles, one in each hand, his fingers resting on the triggers showing his intention to kill anybody at will, his threatening postures and his frequent sauntering to and fro at the site, his face beaming with rage and his inaudible mutterings on seeing himself under the siege of police, all unmistakably showed his dangerous intentions. He spurned the offer of the SSP to disarm himself and to agree to a dialogue with the police. He wanted his demands to be met immediately, which his wife scribbled on a piece of paper and handed to the SSP. During the five and a half hours that he kept the Capital hostage, he frequently resorted to straight and sporadic firing at the force to show that he was not joking and that he meant serious business. If despite all this, the police had been waiting to see his next move, it could be no other than letting the offender kill a sizable number of people before becoming accountable to face the consequences. This was by all appearance the strategy of the police, which was being watched by all people in and out of Pakistan, and which exposed the worthlessness of the law enforcement agencies in Pakistan. It was this lack of action that made some politicians come to the scene and offer help and guidance to the police. And quite unwittingly, the drop scene came through the ‘commando’ action of a prominent civilian at grave risk to his own life, which surprisingly and to his good luck made the offender surrender by raising both his hands up in the air at which time the police was emboldened to fire a volley of bullets incapacitating the assailant. This is another question: was firing at a surrendering man at that point of time justified?

We have heard of police actions in the past against such criminals when several hours and days were allowed to him to surrender by weakening his nerves through a process of attrition. But in all those cases, the assailants had occupied a position of vantage by taking shelter behind another object or building, which shielded him from being attacked directly from outside. In such exigencies, the delay in attack appears to be justified. But in the case in point, when the offender roams about the scene freely in a swaggering manner firing shots to scare the police and the public, not disarming himself on police orders and posing a grave threat to the lives of the people (notwithstanding the extreme sensitivity of the area ), I cannot conceive of a better stage to launch a swift and decisive action against him. The Anti-Terrorism Act (Second Amendment) of 2013 has amended Section 6 of the Act and made the existing laws more stringent by making the threat of terrorism to also include intimidating and terrorising the public. Thus any person merely intimidating or terrorising the public is committing an act of terrorism for which he renders himself liable under the law and there is no more need to find further evidence of his actual intention.

The interior minister’s diffidence to order action in front of the children of the offender amounts to nicety of manners. But in situations like this when there is an equal probability of the suspect going on the rampage by killing several people without caring for the sensitive feelings of his children, the nicety of manners from the side of the police seems ill placed.

The police is our primary agency for the enforcement of law and order. With the general decadence of moral values in every strata of our society, the police has been no exception. I can vouch from my own experience of public administration that the police have to carry out their arduous duties under very difficult conditions. The lower formations of police in particular perform patrolling at night and during the day, multiple duties of crime investigation, court attendance and duties of law and order, etc, thus getting hardly any time for rest and recreation. They are expected to be on duty 24 hours and whenever there is a call, they have to act promptly. Resultantly, they remain overworked and underpaid. With such dispensation, one can hardly expect them to work with the requisite efficiency and zeal. And as is the tradition in all services, good and honest work is seldom appreciated. In such a scenario, when they are burdened with highly sensitive tasks, it is essential that their morale should be boosted by necessary incentives and their failings should not be visited by stringent penalties. The interior minister in his press conference took strong umbrage at the police security lapse by suspending all those responsible for allowing Zamurrad Khan, a former MNA, to proceed to tackle the terrorist on his own, when the police had failed to act. It is yet to be seen under what circumstances Mr Khan gained access to the terrorist, and how far police was responsible for this, but the axe peremptorily fell on the police. If things had to be sorted out at that level, those who failed to cordon off the entire area to prevent the public and the media from approaching the site of occurrence should have been similarly proceeded against. And if by the same analogy, the minister too, by his own admission, was responsible for delaying action against the terrorist, much to the chagrin of the public and to the embarrassment of the government internationally, then he too should have resigned.

When all is said and done, this human drama of real life came to a happy end, as had been wished by everyone. Now is the time to reflect and ponder. A proper SOP to meet such exigencies should be formulated, and the officer in-charge present at the site should be given full powers to tackle the situation within the given parameters instead of seeking instructions from remote centres of authority.

The writer is a former member of the provincial civil service and can be reached at zafar.aziz.ch@gmail.com