Doctors dispute ends

The standoff between the Punjab government and a group of doctors who are members of a faction of the Young Doctors Association (YDA) in Lahore has come to a peaceful end. It would appear that the protesters have been assured of an early implementation of security measures and installation of CCTV plus a rapid response security unit based at the Mayo hospital. They were assured that there would be no reprisals against doctors and nurses that have taken part in the demonstrations. One cannot help but wonder why this could not have been resolved within existing mechanisms for dialogue within the hospital and its administration, rather than the staging of an expensive protest with all the usual potential to descent into violence and destruction — a potential of which the protesters will have been acutely aware.

The government had been wary of using force to break up the protest fearing a repetition of the clash in Model Town, Lahore, in June 2014 that left 14 dead when the police moved in to remove barricades erected by a political party. The doctors were causing havoc within the medical services as well as the daily life of the city as they blocked Mall Road and disrupted traffic as well as preventing patients reaching the care they urgently needed. The YDA statement said that the protest was being called off ‘in the greater interest of patients.’

Crowd control and policing can occupy significant amounts of time, energy and expense for police forces nationally. The killings of June 2014 may in hindsight prove to be something of a watershed. They were a textbook example of how not to manage crowd control and demonstrations. The Punjab police are notable for their violent interventions — a demonstration by a group of blind and otherwise disabled people, men and women, is still remembered for the ferocity of its breakup — and lack of a strategy beyond brute force. This time, fortunately, a (relatively) peaceful end to a protest that never needed to happen and everybody went home (relatively) happy. We wish for more of the same everywhere.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 13^th, 2016.

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