A Pyrrhic victory for Pakistani state

The Pakistani state may have succeeded in pushing the protesters back from the streets of the capital on Tuesday night, but consider what it took to make that happen.

- KHURRAM HUSAIN

Even before the crowds had departed, the scale of the lockdown in Punjab was perhaps unprecedented, even compared to the pandemic. Speak with industry owners across the province and listen to the stories of shipments stuck—whether of raw material coming into factories or finished product ready for shipment to the port—and you will get a sense of how far-reaching the lockdown was.

The state won the showdown; there is no doubt about that. But in order to win, they had to literally paralyze the largest province in the country, as well as its industrial heartland. Let's not bother tallying up the losses the few days of shutdown inflicted on industry. Those are puny by comparison to the long-term losses we are all going to suffer on account of the manifest weakness of the state that the protest exposed.

This is the first time I have seen state authorities compelled to use so much violence to secure the streets of the capital. It is also the first time I have seen such extreme and stringent measures to ensure nobody from Punjab could come out to join the protest. Lockdowns were required to keep the pandemic at bay. They were also required to clear the air in the wake of the smog emergency. But nowhere did the state move with such decisive speed to implement a near chokehold on the province, paralyzing all intercity movement as well as digital traffic, as it did when a protest call needed to be thwarted. Given all that it took to contain the protest and then to beat it back, it can be asked whether or not the state's is a Pyrrhic victory.