In an uncivilized turn of events, the chief of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, Imran Khan was manhandled at the Punjab University Campus today. He was later arrested by the police. A group of students kept him detained on the campus and later turned him over to the police. According to Dawn’s Report:
Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaaf chairman Imran Khan was arrested from outside the Punjab University’s new campus on Wednesday after he had been manhandled and detained in the campus allegedly by activists of the Islami Jamiat Talaba. Imran Khan had gone to the university at the invitation of a joint action committee of students.
The visit had been approved by Qazi Hussain Ahmed, chief of Jamaat-i-Islami, to which the IJT is affiliated. On his arrival at the campus, the PTI chief was confronted reportedly by a group of IJT activists who kicked him around and punched him. They took him to a room in the Centre for High Energy Physics and detained him there for about 45 minutes.
This is an interesting (and sad) turn of events. Imran Khan’s party and the mother party of IJT are both partners in APDM. Imran and Qazi have been seen together in many media photo shoots for the past year or so. Will today’s action by IJT guys will cause long term bad-blood between the two parties? It is left to be seen.
We strongly believe that inspite of political differences, no person deserves physical bashing and humiliation as was met out to Imran. Political differences should never be taken to such extreme where people use force to get their point across. It is wrong. Shame on those who manhandled him. I was recently reading an article on political bashing in the Wall Street Journal. It had a punch line which just kept resonating with me. It read:
Our politics suffer when passions overcome reason and vitriol becomes virtue.
Details on Imran’s manhandling can be read here, here, here and here.
Khush-kismat hai woh jo
Zindagi-bhar zinda raha
It takes courage, a lot of courage and sacrifice to stand-up for the cause you believe in. It’s very easy to provide the commentary from the sidelines than to be on the forefront.
Salute to all those ‘Walking the Walk’.
Salman Taseer is in the care taker cabinet. No wonder the Daily Times was writing editorials smacking of intellectual complicity with the dictater.
http://www.dawn.com/2007/11/16/op.htm#2
Concluding Paragraphs
”….Despite his political leanings, Imran of late was on course to restoring to himself the old aura, that of a guerrilla commander who relied heavily on springing surprises to make an impact. His ambushes during his playing days are part of Pakistani folklore. He excelled in catching his opponents napping by sending out a soldier – the Abdul Qadirs and the Salim Yousufs — up the order for rapid-fire action, saving his key men – the Miandads et al — for a later onslaught. He would opt to bowl when every expert in the game would be advising him to bat. The gamble often paid and it was a crucial element of his captaincy.
He does not have the same kind of men at his command now and maybe not the same luck with the coin but he did show the spark of the past in managing to keep the policemen at bay for almost two weeks. The way he was trapped in the end is perhaps a sign for him that he is far better off returning to his old uncompromising ways. Who knows he might end up rallying groups of students to his cause. The secret, as always, lies in selecting and nurturing them on their own.”
Pak Tee house,
Opposition JI, PML N, opinions suppressed by media,
and journalists ! Just check yourselves, watch Geo only !
Dawn is an opportunist newspaper infested by the
secular leftists journalist.
It is hijacked even it was founded by Quaid, it was soldout
to secularism, capitalism, and Raj’s English-speaking
brownies chaprasis.
@ Rafay Kashmiri…
Uh Rafay…I dont know which planet you are currently on..
but Imran gets manhandled..kicked….betrayed…stabbed in the back…whacked….
and the leftists secularists are the thugs??????!!!!!!
how in the world does that make any sense….???
even though that leftist secularist tag you apply without even knowing what it means……and I am not one…if that implies wanting my country to be free….to be able to decide our own destiny…then yes…label me and others as such…
we all know who has no clothes now sir….it’s time you brought that to the table as well…
intellectual bankruptcy is not a ‘virtue’ Pakistan cab afford now…
From the DAWN ope-ed today:
“Those who believed that the honest and the straight-talking should come forward to rescue Pakistan from the clutches of the corrupt, the incompetent and the insincere were happy to see him take the political plunge. Many among them were soon disillusioned by Imran’s sheer ability to lose those who gave his party a progressive look and indeed the appearance of a party rather than a one-man reform squad.
Hamid Khan, who is in the vanguard of the fight for an independent judiciary today, was not so long ago an active member of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf as was Dr Pervez Hasan, an internationally known lawyer of standing. There were many other ‘new faces’ by his side, such as journalist and analyst Nasim Zahra for a brief period making rounds of newspaper offices in Lahore as an Imran lieutenant before, like Hamid Khan and Dr Pervez Hasan, she also turned away from a struggle from the Tehreek’s platform.
The progressive dialogue Imran Khan had engaged himself in came to a halt as he made post haste to the Right. To the surprise of his early supporters who strained to see in him an alternative to the tried and sullied political leadership of the country, even as he sported this new image of his, the cricketing icon would still be known as a liberal face in Pakistani politics, not only anti-America, but liberal, with a special attraction for youth and the domestic and international media. That was an anomaly as big as an ‘alien who neither studied at the Punjab University nor taught there’ leading the student activists who owe their allegiance to the Jamaat-i-Islami.
Sadly, it was written in Imran’s fate. A couple of days before he was scheduled to make his appearance at the Punjab University, hoping to court arrest amidst thousands of cheering students, the Islami Jamiat-i-Talaba had warned him against the adventure. They had actually done the cricketing hero a great a favour by allowing him the benefit of a forewarning.
Only three months ago the organised Islamists cadres had watched in silence as their ally and benefactor, Nawaz Sharif, suffered the ultimate ignominy a politician could ever face: returning home to a cold reception. Now it was the turn of another natural ally to experience the exemplary Jamaat discipline. Even after all the reverses that the all-rounder has undergone in the last decade and a half it hurts to see a rare hero being humiliated like Imran was on the Punjab University campus on Wednesday.”
http://www.dawn.com/2007/11/16/op.htm#2
First protest at NCA
About 150 students at NCA held a peaceful protest yesterday. They are planning to hold a demonstration everyday and have expressed full solidarity with other student activists, especially the ones at LUMS.
Also from the emergency times:
IJT’s bigotry & food for thought for Imran
By Supreme Court
Hopelessness and despondency seem to have an air of inevitability in the current national ambience. The slightest good that materializes has to come tumbling down. We had a judiciary that was finally asserting itself as a bastion of civil rights only to be unceremoniously sabotaged, sacked and sent packing to Neverland. The more foolhardy amongst found solace in the embryonic student movement that has revitalized campuses across the country. Even before it can assume some form and substance, it has been undermined by the most moronic of behavior by the PU’s Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba (IJT). As per reports circulating across the blogosphere, they apprehended Imran Khan, detained him and then bundled him off to the custody of the same state authorities IJT is protesting against.
Let us first see the beef that students have with Imran Khan. Imran has been prancing about masquerading as the unitary champion and the chief-instigator of the students’ movement. One can see why he might be under such an illusion. The emergency and the subsequent student agitation had coincided with a scheduled speaking engagement that Imran Khan had at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). It would stand Imran in good stead to abstain from such a light weight dismissal of the students’ initiative. This initiative is grounded in much academic deliberation and has been motivated by a multitude of past and present constitutional experts, civil right advocates and members of civil society who dwarf Imran Khan in comparison. On a personal note, my animus against the incumbent regime had gestated four years ago during a guest lecture during a course in Constitutional Law four years ago delivered by Hamid Khan, ironically a member of Khan’s party, in his capacity as a Supreme Court lawyer. It is true that it is the sacking of the Supreme court that has triggered the gestation of the students’ initiative from an exclusively academic to a more participatory and agitative form. Students are in the process of collaborating to build a grass-roots organization that would be able to challenge the regime and fight for civil rights. Khan’s efforts are welcome, and I am sure he has an eager audience amidst Pakistani students and hence stands to make a significant contribution. The problem arises when Imran tries to assume ownership of an initiative that is so much bigger than him. Many see it as an underhanded tactic to derive cheap political mileage at their expense. Claiming that he has inaugurated the movement and that he is organizing it may actually fetch him the ridicule that such an assertion deserves. It would stand Imran in good stead to qualify his statements. Something along the lines of “his seeing the students’ movement as a positive and heartening development and ensuring that he does his bit to contribute in whatever way he can” is something that will be perfectly acceptable.
So now we come to the case in point. Imran Khan thought that the PU rally will be a perfect venue for him to make an appearance. I am not sure whether he sought permission from the organizers of the rally. IJT had certainly issued a statement asking him not to come. However, I am not sure how representative is IJT of the PU student body. Apparently there were PU students who welcomed his presence as well. In a place like LUMS even if a minuscule fraction of the student body want to have someone over, they can and their views are respected as a significant constituent of the diverse perspectives present on campus. I have a hunch that IJT might not espouse such egalitarian principles. However, I am not privy to PU’s internal organizational structure, as well as university policy about having politicians. So whether Imran was entitled to be on campus is a moot point. The more important concern is how did IJT choose to act once Imran made his appearance. IJT activists lynched and man-handled him. What in the earth gives them the right to do so? They might not approve of his being on campus and there are ways of asserting their disapproval. University security could have escorted him outside. They could have raised slogans against him, protested against his presence, exposed his claims in front of the media. Yet they chose to physically assault him and hold him hostage. Isn’t that sort of high-handedness exactly what IJT was supposed to be protesting against? IJT’s actions have smeared students’ movements all over. Their behavior reeks of a bigotry that is becoming of the class-act we currently have at the helm of our country’s affairs. Seems their grumble against our autocrat isn’t that he is what the Daily Telegraph called him. It’s just that he isn’t ‘their’ whatever the Daily Telegraph called him.
IJT ought to seriously introspect their modus operandi. Perhaps a leaf out of LUMS’ book wouldn’t be out of order. They had voiced their annoyance at Imran Khan’s eagerness to advertise his prominence vis-à-vis their movement. Benazir the astute politician that she is had invited a group of students to visit her, a master stroke geared towards leveraging the student’s initiative to gain personal political mileage. The LUMS student community being all the wiser to it, politely declined to meet with her in any official capacity, instead relaying to her that she is welcome to come and lecture at LUMS and intellectually interact with the student body at large. The PU student community (which may or may not be synonymous with IJT) are certainly at liberty to let out a clear signal that they would not let their movement be hijacked by political leaders. Preserving the non-partisan identity of student movements is certainly advisable. They could debunk any politician who tries to compromise such an identity, expose her, and let their disdain for such tactics be known in no unclear terms. What they cannot do is man-handle and kidnap someone like they did with Imran Khan. IJT has disgraced student movements at all campuses. One hopes that an apology might be forthcoming and we can actually have a student-led civil rights movement that lives up to the principles it preaches.