Govt banking on chilly weather to cut short Qadri’s Dharna

ISLAMABAD: The federal and Punjab governments are counting on the icy weather as they believe it will be a major contributory factor which will drastically cut short the stay of Dr Tahirul Qadri’s long marchers at the Parliament D-Chowk on Jan 14.

“In the chilly January nights, it will not be humanly possible to stay put at the open place for too long even by wearing warm clothes, without risking serious health hazards,” a senior official told The News.

Both the federal and Punjab governments have made it public that they would not stop participants of the long march to reach their destination that Dr Qadri wants to equate with Al-Tehrir Square of Egypt. They don’t wish to take any measures that could turn the protest into a violent movement.

“However, we have to protect and guard key installations and would not allow any disruption in the capital,” another official said. “It will be our responsibility to maintain law and order in Islamabad that we will perform effectively.”

When approached to get the details of Dr Qadri’s programme for the D-Day, a Lahore-based official of his Minhajul Quran International told The News that the chief will leave Lahore in the company of 300,000 followers around 2pm on Jan 13.

He said the remaining 3.7 million people would join the march during Qadri’s travel to Islamabad on the GT Road. Besides, people from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Azad Kashmir and surrounding areas of the federal capital will reach the D-Chowk in droves, he said.

The official said that 4-million long marchers would arrive at the D-Chowk on the morning of Jan 14 and remain camped there till the acceptance of their demands for electoral reforms to purge the system of perennial ills. “We will come fully prepared to deal with the cold weather.”

Among other things, the organizers would need to erect a large number of makeshift toilets for the participants otherwise they would be in trouble in the cold weather.

The government official said that whatever crowd Dr Qadri would be able to pull to the D-Chowk would stay there till the sunset, but would disperse as the night would start and the weather would begin biting. It is out of question that the long marchers would remain there beyond the daytime of Jan 14, he believed.

A Punjab government official said that they did not want to make something big out of a small event by taking any stringent steps to thwart the march. He said that they would let the protesters pass through Punjab peacefully and would provide them complete security ensuring at the same time that no public or private property is damaged.

He confirmed that so far there was no contact or coordination between the federal and provincial governments on how to jointly react and detail the law enforcement agencies to handle the protest in order to stop it from harming normalcy and public order.

It appears that no government is in a mood to take the blame for any faux pas on the occasion. This time, Interior Minister Rehman Malik too has not issued bombastic statements to cope with the “revolution”, and is more interested in softening and weaning away Altaf Hussain from Dr Qadri’s support by going to London for a meeting with the MQM chief.

He and his boss are satisfied that their other ally, the PML-Q, quickly distanced itself from the long march though as a second thought immediately after agreeing to Dr Qadri’s agenda but Dr Qadri says the participation of Q-League in the long march never came up in the discussions when Chaudhry Shujaat and Pervaiz Elahi met him.

A senior politician, staunchly opposed to Dr Qadri’s agenda, said that the PAT chief would have been wise enough had he acted like Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan after holding his first grand public meeting. He said that like Imran Khan Dr Qadri should have cashed in on the success of his Lahore show and continued with hammering his agenda for a long time to come. By doing so, the PAT chief was going to achieve a lot politically as the PTI chairman did.

Such a policy, he felt, would not have put him to test as quickly as Jan 14 because it is not known what the PAT chief would do after this show would end as he has not unveiled his future action plan.

Posted in: National