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WE have all lost an object that is precious to us irrespective of its material value. Despite the stress, somehow, we are not despondent because deep down we know it will be found. What drives this confidence? It is the knowledge that no one you do not trust entered the house since you last saw the lost object and it is just a matter of time before it will turn up in some nook or cranny.
Alas! The same cannot be said about the homeland. Untrustworthy characters keep showing up, some overstay their visas; others, it seems do not even require one. They can come, stay here for years on end with families in tow till some other unsavoury characters gatecrash to ‘exterminate’ them as their bosses watch the entire drama on large screens in some war room thousands of miles away. Still other shady characters enact scenes from third-rate movies complete with a car chase and a shootout snuffing out ‘dispensable’ local lives, while the foreign spy aka contractor is ‘extracted’ from the ‘live situation’ by some foreign mission’s minions.
Ever wonder how fellow citizens keep disappearing in broad daylight? Some are fortunate to return after a few hours or days with a warning to mend their ways. Some, like Tahir Khan Dawar, a high-ranking police official from Peshawar never return alive. He went missing in Islamabad in October 2018 and his dead body was found in Nangarhar province of Afghanistan in November that year. In countless other instances, the disappearance is sudden and final; no body, no burial, no final closure for the families. Many such families continue to hold protest marches from one corner of the country to another or observe hunger strikes outside press clubs.
One wonders how it is possible to abduct someone from Lahore, Multan or Islamabad without being caught on thousands of CCTV cameras installed as part of the much-touted safe city projects. Similarly, what about the hundreds of security check posts, pickets, and roadblocks that dot the land end to end? How come no one is ever rescued because some ‘dim-witted’ law-enforcement official could not recognise the telltale signs of blackened windows and insisted on inspecting the vehicle, notwithstanding the burqa-clad ‘lady’ sandwiched between the men on the rear seat? Or do these particular vehicles ply at times when all security staff are asleep? But that never happens to you, does it? Many among you have surely had your breath checked by the most sophisticated breathalyser this side of Atlantic, ie the sniffing policeman, at all sorts of ungodly hours.
Is no one blowing up the images to get a closer look at the faces?
Coming back to the cameras and leaving aside the safe city network for the moment, when journalist Matiullah Jan was recently abducted from outside the school where his wife teaches, the school CCTV cameras recorded the entire episode. Is no one blowing up the images to get a closer look at the faces? Would not Nadra be able to match the perpetrators’ faces with pictures in its data collection? Would Islamabad Police not get sketches made by specialists based on the school footage and then announce a sizeable reward for information regarding the abductors? Or is it that all of this is academic and everyone knows who has done it and would rather let sleeping dogs lie?
Matiullah is a regular guy; former prime minister Yousuf Gilani’s son Ali Haider and the slain governor of Punjab Salmaan Taseer’s son Shahbaz Taseer were kidnapped and returned after years of confinement and alleged payments of ransom and who knows what other guarantees. Their hardships notwithstanding, these were the lucky ones to have returned alive and they would very understandably like to keep it that way, hence no appeals for bringing the culprits to book and no tell-all books, not at least in the near future.
Punjab is the only province to have created the Safe City Authority and implemented Nacta’s directives under the National Action Plan that came about in the aftermath of the Army Public School massacre. Other provinces including Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where the supposedly tech-savvy PTI is leading the second successive provincial government have been deliberating the initiative for the past six years. Sindh was at one point held back reportedly by the security establishment as it did not want a public-private partnership in such a sensitive area.
The TTP claimed responsibility for killing 149 schoolchildren and their teachers in the APS attack in December 2014. The TTP spokesperson Ehsanullah Ehsan who surrendered to Pakistani authorities in February 2017, conveniently escaped from security establishment’s custody earlier this year. A well- functioning safe city network, with or without private sector partnership, would have made his escape inconvenient, or maybe not; the number of cameras notwithstanding; all it takes is to turn a blind eye.
The writer is a poet and analyst.
Published in Dawn, August 17th, 2020
