Protest this

In the ongoing political drama, distinction must be made between the government and the state. We can protest against our government but we should be clear not to go against the state.  This is the context in which civil disobedience must be weighed.

We need also to be practical. Both Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri may be making the right noises right now but they don’t have the bulk of the populace behind them. On the call for disobedience given by Imran Khan, what we didn’t see was trains stopping, ports shutting down or the PIA pilots going on an indefinite strike. The country continues to function.

Ironically the most successful attempt at civil disobedience came last week from a person who wasn’t even a supporter of the PTI or the PAT. All he did was rile up fellow passengers who were kept waiting for more than two hours for a PIA flight to take off.  Thanks to social media, his video went viral and the media picked it up.

In the past, most passengers would have shrugged their shoulders. This time one person took matters into his own hands and made Senator Rehman Malik beat a hasty retreat.

One wonders what would have happened if it wasn’t the happy-go-lucky Rehman Malik but our present Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar. This is a man who proudly says that he settles all his scores — big or small. A fact made clear when he went ahead with his press conference despite being told by the PM not to do so.

Had Nisar been the main character, we would have had the ASF and other security forces entering the plane and arresting all the passengers who tried to stop a VIP from boarding.  So the question is, how far will we go with our show of public disobedience?

Another question is, what exactly classifies as civil disobedience? An incident took place recently where a PIA captain refused to fly his plane until the PM’s daughter’s maid was not removed from business class where she had been upgraded to despite holding an economy ticket. The refusal to fly came because a senior bureaucrat from the Ministry of Aviation was on board.

This gentleman protested having a maid placed next to him and told the crew to remove her. The double irony here is that this gentleman too had been upgraded from his economy seat. And given that technically he was also the boss of the PIA crew, the captain indulged in a bit of civil ‘na-farmani’.

What can we do to show our anger and to protest the wrongs of our politicians? Some more saner elements suggest that instead of burning electricity bills or bringing our remittances through the illegal hundi system, there may be ways to shake the government and not damage the state.

Let us start by focusing on the VIP culture. The next time a VIP tries to push your car off the road, maybe one can resist. Or, as one friend regularly does, show the ‘lanat’ sign to the VIP as his passes by. But be warned that it is not only politicians in power who try and bully others on our roads. You may end up cursing a member of the party you support, or worse, still someone who isn’t even a politician.

We should be clear that this VIP culture must be attacked. Why do parliamentarians have a separate check-in at the airports? Why is the VIP terminal in Islamabad larger than the departure lounge of the airport? How many times have you raised your voice when VIPs break into lines at airports, in government offices even at private places like clubs, hotels and restaurants? Why not raise a stink?

Public disobedience can take several forms. I remember meeting a journalist from Ukraine earlier this year at a conference organised by the Deutsche Welle. He was part of a group working to salvage the documents they found of their ex-president Viktor Yanukovych and his supporters. These were dumped in a pool at the presidential estate while they fled the country after the Maidan revolution. The project is called ‘Yanukovychleaks’ and it puts online those incriminating documents for all to access and read.  I asked the gentleman whether the project made an impact in identifying the robbers of public money. “Beyond our wildest expectations,” is what he replied.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 22^nd, 2014.

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