PAKISTAN
Politics of vengeance

DAWN Editorial 

Published April 30, 2023 

SAME tactics, different faces. Governments may come and go, but a destructive politics of vengeance continues to poison the atmosphere.

On Friday night, a raiding party of Anti-Corruption Establishment and Punjab police officials used an armoured vehicle to break open the main gate of PTI president Chaudhry Parvez Elahi’s residence in Lahore in an effort to arrest him. Upon entering the house, riot police set upon the occupants with batons and later took 12 people into custody.

Despite Mr Elahi’s lawyers saying that a court had granted him pre-arrest bail in a corruption case, the ACE team insisted that the former Punjab chief minister was wanted in a new case and they would not leave without him. The operation, which continued until 2am, was unable to locate Mr Elahi despite a thorough search of his residence. Not content with this unwarranted show of brute force, the police yesterday booked the PTI president on terror charges, claiming that its personnel were “attacked with stones, batons and petrol” during the raid.

No longer is there even a pretence of the rule of law in the government’s conduct vis-à-vis the opposition. Last month, the police used heavy machinery to break into Imran Khan’s residence in Lahore while he was on his way to Islamabad to attend a hearing in the Toshakhana case, and his wife and sister were present in the house.

Arrests of PTI leaders, allied politicians, and critics of the PDM on flimsy pretexts — including ‘spreading hatred’ — have gathered steam. At least two PTI social media activists went ‘missing’ for a time. Such tactics should be familiar to the parties that comprise the incumbent coalition government which were at the receiving end of the PTI government’s high-handedness. Politicians in the opposition at the time were detained for months by NAB without evidence; and anyone critical of Mr Khan’s government, including journalists, was hounded through the courts on various charges, including one as serious as sedition.

But instead of demonstrating maturity and bringing some civility to the political environment, the coalition government has embarked on a wholesale witch-hunt of the opposition without an iota of shame. Last month, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah bluntly cast the tussle in existential terms. “Now either [Mr Khan] will be eliminated from the political arena or us.” This is not the language of leaders that are looking to consolidate the country’s future; this is selfish, bare-knuckle revenge politics.

While Mr Khan may well be responsible for resurrecting a style of politics that in the 1990s had played into the establishment’s hands and contributed to the downfall of several elected governments, the PML-N could have refused the temptation of paying the PTI back in the same coin. Instead, it has chosen a path that will guarantee perpetual instability.

Published in Dawn, April 30th, 2023