Playing clever, govt sends kites up as PTI plans protest

The Punjab government has announced that the Basant Festival will be held from February 6 to 8 after receiving formal approval for the first government-sponsored and fully organised celebration of the festival in over two decades.

The move comes amid sustained online and offline opposition to an event that remains banned under Supreme Court orders due to its historically high casualty rate.

The timing of the festival has raised eyebrows as it coincides with Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf's (PTI) countrywide protest and strike call on February 8 to mark alleged rigging in the general elections.

While critics see the overlap as deliberate, PTI has said it will seek to turn the situation to its advantage rather than treating Basant as an obstacle.

PTI Punjab spokesperson MPA Brig (retd) Mushtaq said the event had been intentionally scheduled to overlap with the party's protest call, adding that "this event has been deliberately kept on days to overlap with our protest call, but we will use this incident as an opportunity".

Meanwhile, police sources acknowledged that the overlap posed an operational challenge, as law enforcement would be required to distinguish between festival-goers and PTI protesters.

Given the threat Basant poses to human life, the festival has been placed under a series of strict guardrails, chief among them a Rs2,000 fine on motorcycles without safety rods.

Former Jamaat-e-Islami spokesperson Qaiser Sharif said that despite the ban, the festival had claimed ten victims.

He said one person lost his life and nine others were injured due to stray strings.

He added that the festival was being revived for political purposes, noting that the Supreme Court ban had been imposed because of deaths caused by stray strings, particularly among two-wheeler riders.

He said that while the government was happy to distribute safety rods free of charge, the same commitment was not shown when it came to helmets. He said the online survey showed that people did not want what he described as a deadly festival to return.

Former PPP Lahore president Aslam Gill also opposed the revival of Basant, saying there was no point in reviving a festival that people had long forgotten. He said the event put innocent lives at stake and should have remained a memory of the past.

PTI's Brig (retd) Mushtaq also opposed the revival, saying that a single human life was more valuable than the entire event.