During the recent Tehreek e Labaik (TLP) Protests in Pakistan, police was given difficult task of controlling the difficult mob, which definitely was a difficult task and on many places they were able to accomplish the task. Even the police force personals did lost their lives. There is no denying to all of these but lets get to the point now, on lots places the good old Gullu Butt factor was seen in the police. Some actions of Punjab Police depicted that they still need some discipline and training about how to deal with the citizens.
For example, here an incident worth mentioning, a TLP worker was kind of arrested by a police man, he was fully co-operating with him, he had him and it looked like police man was walking down with the prisoner towards a vehicle etc, another police man comes and unnecessarily starts beating the man. The man who have already have given up and is fully co-operating. He keeps beating him with sticks, even after the men fells down but the sticks keep coming. Luckily some other police men around interfere and stop him, otherwise it was looking too bad for him. Yes I am talking about the incident in following video tweet.
Than there was another incident where a bullet proof police vehicle goes towards protestors in full speed, putting their lives in danger. In background a voice says, two people are hit and gone under the vehicle. And you can clearly see, it happened, people can be seen on ground behind vehicle, this is not the way the state institutions work. Even if mob was out of control, they are citizens of this same country, so should have been dealt accordingly. Further you can see in the following video tweet, by the way. Police should deal with mob or any other situation professionally.
Another video from this clash was this ambulance video, where injured are not being spared inside the ambulance, they are being pulled out of ambulance and being beaten further with sticks.
Than there were other videos where the singled out TLP supporters which were in custody of Police, they were hand cuffed and were being beaten. These videos I can embed here but I don’t feel like doing it, you can search by hashtags of one of these above videos and you can find them. The point here is, it is not the job of state institutions like police to start taking revenge at their own, if they have picked up someone, they must be delivered to courts for due action. No society allows such behavior and violation of human rights which Punjab police is used to.
Also it is responsibility of Police departments that such incidents must not go unnoticed, due action must be taken against the individuals involved and details must be made public. As, I fully understand no institution allows this, but these are acts of individuals which are being ignored.
Finally, to make it clear that this article was not written due to some political motivations, I did voted PTI in last elections and I feel they have not done enough to bring the reforms in our police. Still, I have not seen any minister mentioning anything against these incidents. On other hand I have no affiliation of any kind with TLP but on same time I am unable to take these human rights violations lightly and let them pass by. Finally, yes TLP workers did similar stuff where they caught a singled out police man but the point here is, Police is an institution which have to go be rules and certain discipline and cannot be judged on standards of a mob.
