Designed demos?

It all started off in Dera Ghazi Khan. Irate voters grilled Sardar Jamal Leghari, a Nawaz League candidate in the coming elections, for his ‘neglect’ of their town in southern Punjab. As a video of the otherwise meek confronting a dominant Sardar goes viral on social media, it was readily perceived as something of a change. There was no dearth of experts who hailed the ‘awakening’. While some praised the media for creating ‘such an awareness’, others tried to claim credit for their ‘long-drawn political struggle’.

A replay of the same came about in Karachi’s Memon Masjid where Farooq Sattar was surrounded by people drawing his attention to the ‘ruins’ the megapolis has been turned into. An incensed resident even went to the extent of urging the MQM-P leader to repent to Allah for his ‘sins’. Many a candidate was embarrassed then — including PTI’s Arif Alvi and PPP’s Murad Ali Shah — by the protesting constituents. But the practice took a real ugly turn last Sunday when PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari had a rocky welcome in his party’s own stronghold of Lyari. As the scion of the Bhutto dynasty visited the PPP bastion to launch his election campaign, his motorcade was attacked with sticks and pelted with stones, resulting in injuries to several party workers and passers-by as well as shutdown of businesses in the area. No less than 400 were booked for the violent protest.

The very scale of the protest provides room for one to agree to the PPP leadership that it was a demo designed by their political rivals rather than a simple act of deprived voters venting out their anger. If not a deliberate attempt, such a protest does have the tendency to create an atmosphere of fear ahead of elections and snowball into something bigger, given the power of social media. Quite rightly, the onus of protecting candidates and ensuring peace falls upon the caretakers and the election commission whose prime job is to guarantee free and fair elections.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 4^th, 2018.

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