The Right to Public Protest
By
I. A. Rehman
THE establishment’s favourite method of dealing with any street agitation against its policies or actions is to deny the people their rights to assembly and protest, and to subject them to violence if they persist in exercising their basic freedoms. This has again been amply demonstrated during the current movement against the outrageous attack on the rights and dignity of the country’s Chief Justice.
When the lawyers started taking to the streets the Punjab police were unleashed to give a display of wanton savagery for which they have been known since the colonial period – not only in the subcontinent but also across large areas in Asia and Africa. Heads and limbs were broken and teargas was used in a spirit of abandon rarely witnessed even in our part of the troubled world. Journalists who were guilty only of performing their professional duties were similarly targeted.
The government’s attempts to terrorise the media (and indirectly the lawyers and the people in general) into submission reached their peak with the raid on the Islamabad office of a TV organisation by a police contingent in full uniform and equipped with officially supplied weapons. The realisation that the incident had been seen by TV watchers across the globe prompted an unusual show of remorse and rehabilitation of the anchor who had been ordered off the channel a day earlier. No such consideration was shown to the other victims of police brutality that are not needed by the regime for its image-building.
Scared into some semblance of sanity by adverse reaction to its resort to excessive force against lawyers, the administration modified its tactics. Instead of preventing lawyers from assembling and parading the thoroughfares, it embarked on plans to divide them and separate them from elements outside the legal fraternity, especially political parties. There have been reports from a few district towns, and even provincial capitals, of some lawyers’ bid to dissociate themselves from the mainstream.
An attempt to engineer an exchange of brickbats between lawyers and political workers in Islamabad was followed by an incredible clash between black-jackets and media professionals in Karachi.
Meanwhile, the establishment’s propaganda batteries are being relentlessly used to demonise the protesters. The stock argument is that they are politicising a legal/constitutional issue that can only be agitated in a court or a tribunal enjoying the appearance of a court. The untenability of this specious plea can easily be proved.
Instances when regimes of various kinds have sought to justify political excesses under legal subterfuge are legion. The colonial rulers strove for decades to use their legal apparatus to prove that they punished the seekers of freedom for breaking the law and not for their views, and the people had no business to protest against the killing or detention of their popular leaders. General Ziaul Haq did not succeed in convincing anybody that his decision to liquidate Bhutto was not so much a political choice as a legal obligation. Washington has not been able to persuade the world that the atrocities being committed at Guantanamo Bay cannot be ‘politicised’.
Anybody who says in Pakistan, of all the countries in the world, that constitutional issues cannot be treated as political matters betrays not only a corrupted mind but also ignorance of history. The Quaid-i-Azam consistently maintained that the demand for Pakistan grew out of failure to evolve a constitutional formula for India that satisfied the Muslims. In his address of August 11, 1947 too he described the partition as the only way to solve the subcontinent’s constitutional problem. In other words, the Pakistan movement could be described as “politicisation” of a constitutional issue.
Besides, the Quaid did not rule out street action to realise constitutional objectives. It is possible to argue that his break with Gandhi on the latter’s decision to confront the alien rulers was a matter of disagreement on tactics and the prohibitive cost and not one of principle. When by 1946 he was confident of Muslim League’s strength he did not hesitate to call for direct action.
That extra-constitutional regimes often try to protect themselves by denouncing politics as a law and order matter and as something unnecessary, wasteful and even treacherous is known. The truth, however, is that each and every public grievance, be it the lack of drinking water or unemployment or high power tariff or involuntary disappearance or the use of a long knife against the head of the judiciary, is political in nature and no law or pretext can deny the people their right to secure their due through any means available to them.
More often than not the choice of agitation in the street is forced upon the people by their rulers who block all other routes to protest for a democratic change.
It is clearly time the first principle of modern, civilised governance was accepted by Pakistan’s oligarchs -- that the people have an inalienable right to challenge the edicts of their surrogates in authority and to punish the incorrigible by removing them. As a corollary to this principle, public protest, within the four walls of a bungalow or in the open, simply amounts to the exercise of a basic human right to participate in the country’s governance, directly when indirect means do not bear fruit.
Public protest against government policies or actions usually either shrouds a demand to undo something that is perceived to be contrary to people’s interest or a plea for some action the people consider necessary to secure relief in a hardship situation or to meet a pressing need. Two factors commend mass agitation through public rallies, processions and hartal to our people. First, it has been an essential part of the people’s political culture since the time they started challenging the colonial power in the subcontinent. It is a tradition they have every reason to be proud of.
Secondly, a public demonstration in the open gives the cause provoking it a face and a personality that other forms of expressing citizens’ demands, such as petitions, memoranda, demands through media or courts, cannot grant it. A public rally not only reveals the identity of the protesters but also the number affected in the given territorial context and the intensity of their feelings. Authorities that claim to govern by popular consensus should welcome public agitations as they offer them possibilities of correcting their policies.
It is true that sometimes mob power can be mobilised in support of demands society cannot afford to concede. However, just as ordinary people cannot distinguish good candidates for elective offices from bad coins unless a tradition of free and fair polls has been set over a long period, the masses cannot learn to reject unhealthy calls without enjoying the freedom to congregate in support of issues of public interest, and that too over a long period.
Much confusion has been caused by the policy of tolerating only processions and rallies staged to hail the rulers of the day and condemning most, if not all, other assemblies as subversive of good order.
The theory of blocking public rallies was developed in the colonial period on the premise that putting pressure on the government established by law was an offence. The post-independence authorities have used this theory far beyond its legitimate application. Coup-makers have sought to crush public protest as an activity designed to undermine authority established by law although they have had less claim to this status than even the colonial masters.
For many years now all public protests have been prohibited. At one stage the Supreme Court made a modest move to examine this bar to the people’s fundamental rights but the matter was not pursued to any conclusion.
The most commonly used tactic to ban public rallies is the abuse of Sec. 144 of the Cr.P.C. According to the text drafted by the British authors of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the district authorities could ban the assembly of more than four persons (how five made an unlawful assembly was never known). But this power was to be used only when a situation demanded and an order under 144 could not be valid for more than 14 days. It was left to our present-day rulers to keep large populations, especially in big cities, permanently under 144 although this is not only unlawful but also violative of the people’s fundamental right to peaceful assembly.
The second common tactic to prevent the people from registering their protest against a regime is that of detaining leaders and activists concerned on the eve of protest. Since no law holds criticism of any government to be a crime, all dissent is defined as anti-state activity and preventive detention is justified. It can be said without any fear of contradiction that most of such arrests, if not all, constitute criminal abuse of authority. Some time ago the Lahore High Court had to rule that raising anti-government slogans did not warrant the arrest of political activists under the Anti-terrorism Act.
The third method to interfere with the people’s right to assemble and protest is the use of plainclothed musclemen from security forces to beat up and terrorise the protesters. In this form of cussedness Pakistan’s so-called law-enforcers have surpassed their colonial role models. No head is safe from their unruly hands, not even that of the country’s Chief Justice. They are free to use their dirty hands to probe women protesters’ bodies and rough them up as they wish. No woman is safe – neither the head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan nor the president of a widely respected association of Pakistani doctors in the US.
The neoliberal apologists of market economy have started criticising mass action, especially hartals, on the ground that poor vendors are adversely affected. They should welcome Pakistan business people’s opposition to rallies in shopping avenues. Time was when traders had a stake in liberty and democracy. It may not be impossible for them to realise that when demonstrators who belong mostly to disadvantaged sections of society call for democracy and justice, they fight for a change that would bring themselves smaller rewards than traders. Subject to undertakings against destruction of property, no part of any city should be a ‘no go area’ for public processions / rallies.
Whatever the result of their present agitation, the people expect of the country’s jurists and lawyers a determined effort to rid them of the myth that opposition to government is always an attack on the state and also to get Sec. 144 repealed or at least radically revised and to end the use of plain-clothed goons to attack any citizen’s inviolable person and dignity. This should also be high on the people’s demands on political parties. They must learn to respect the citizen whose vote alone will help them win the right to be lawful and legitimate rulers of this magnificent land of ours.
http://www.dawn.com/2007/04/19/op.htm#1