From the ‘Final Call’ to the Night of ‘Retreat’, What Happened?
On the morning of Wednesday, September 27, while going to the office, I glanced at Jinnah Avenue, which passes in front of Islamabad’s famous commercial center, Blue Area. Where the protesters who had come for the ‘Final Call’ the previous evening were, the ashes of burnt containers were flying and the windshields of broken vehicles were strewn.
The government ministers had taken credit for ‘driving away’ the enthusiastic crowd chanting slogans to ‘release PTI’s founding chairman Imran Khan from jail’ in the darkness of the night, but the PTI leadership did not come to ‘satisfy itself’ with any explanation on this ‘retreat’ until morning.
The government spokesperson kept calling the PTI workers who came out on November 24 in the name of ‘final call’ as ‘anarchists’ and on the evening of the 26th, when I spoke to a worker standing on the tracks of the Seventh Avenue Metro Station in the Blue Area, the 26-year-old youth was calling himself a ‘revolutionary’.
It is not that every ‘justice’ who joined the protest came to bring a ‘revolution’ to Islamabad. Taking advantage of his ability to speak and understand Pashto, he spoke to several workers who had come from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on Tuesday evening.
If the youths who surrounded Ali Amin Gandapur’s car in the Blue Area and were jumping on the roof were asking them to move forward, a 32-year-old worker from Karak district had to say very seriously, ‘No, this far is fine and we should obey the leadership.’
Another worker who came from Swabi said that he faced difficulty at number 26 Chungi, but he will always remember the shelling he endured at the Kati Pahari location on the motorway. The 22-year-old said he had not slept for two nights.
An enthusiastic young man from the southern district of Dera Ismail Khan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa interrupted the serious conversation of two other protesters and said, “If we do not move forward, how will this government end, how will the revolution come?”
Both tracks of the road in the Blue Area were full of protesters and the vehicles bringing them, and dozens of vans and buses were also parked at Zero Point on Faisal Avenue. Perhaps their drivers were the ones who benefited the most from the night’s ‘retreat’.
On Wednesday afternoon, when a large number of protesters had set up camp on Jinnah Avenue, our attempt to reach Express Chowk via Embassy Road was thwarted by police pelting stones at local ‘spectators’ coming out of the streets, and we, along with three other journalist colleagues, barely escaped ‘after being stoned’ on the roof of our car.
After that, I turned towards China Chowk via the polyclinic to report the face-off between protest workers and police, but the ‘taste’ of tear gas burning my throat, nostrils and eyes prevented me from moving forward.
By evening, the largest crowd of PTI workers was in front of Kulsoom International Hospital on Jinnah Avenue and this was the ‘safe place’ where Imran Khan’s wife’s car and Chief Minister Gandapur’s ‘protocol and government security convoy’ were parked.
Both their vehicles were heading towards D Chowk, but when the Rangers, FC and police launched a ‘grand operation’ at night, these vehicles were the first to move forward because the drivers were in their seats.
Compared to the previous several protest rallies and sit-ins of the PTI, this was the first convoy where apparently the workers dominated their leadership and it had become a ‘leaderless’ or ‘mob’ without any leadership.
Whether this protest was successful or unsuccessful, what did the PTI achieve from it and to what extent the government’s claims are correct, everyone is free to draw their own conclusions by mentioning various factors in their opinions, analyses and comments, but during this time, the deaths of three Rangers personnel, one police constable and one civilian had been confirmed by the evening of the 25th.
The PTI leadership is also claiming the deaths of ‘dozens’ of workers. But in a political protest, isn’t the death of even a single person/citizen a tragedy, be it a worker or a security personnel?
For those whose homes the dead body came to, life will continue to burn in the dying ashes of the memory of those who went to such protests.
