With opposition parties extending support to Pakistan Awami Tehreek (PAT) chief Tahirul Qadri in the wake of Model Town inquiry report, Punjab Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif and his government are certainly under trouble.
The inquiry report, made public after three years, has held the CM, Law Minister Rana Sanaullah and Punjab police responsible for the 2014 incident in which 14 supporters of the PAT lost their lives during clashes with the police. That the Punjab government decided to make the report public after a delay of three years indicates that they did have something to hide. It has now been established that the higher ups in the provincial government could have prevented the situation in Model Town from turning uglier if timely action had been taken to stop the police brutality.
The PAT chief’s demands for justice are therefore genuine and those responsible for the unfortunate incident should indeed be brought to book. However, one cannot help but notice that Tahirul Qadri has failed to contest the case on the legal front and merely used it as an instrument of politicking. The PAT leader did not stay in Pakistan to pursue the case till its logical conclusion and only chose to appear on media every now and then to announce protest movements.
Meanwhile, Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Co-chairman Asif Zardari on Thursday met Qadri in Lahore and demanded CM Shehbaz Sharif’s resignation in a joint press conference. Zardari’s support to PAT is unusual because the latter had led a protest sit-in in Islamabad against his own government in 2013. That the PPP co-chairman felt the need to join hands with Qadri three years after the Model Town tragedy means he has decided to play politics over the unfortunate incident the same way Qadri has been doing for the last three years. It also means that Bilawal Bhutto’s promise of returning ideology back to PPP’s politics is easier said than done. The latter will entail soul searching and setting the party’s political strategy on a markedly different track.
Justice should be served in the Model Town case, but political leaders should stop using it as a tool to further their own political agendas. *
Published in Daily Times, December 9th 2017.