EACH day, Lahore has at least a dozen protests where demands are chanted, a few heated arguments exchanged and a baton or two waved to contain the emotion.

A few breakfasts are ruined as the papers act as if they have nothing to flash but the images of demonstrators lying on the road or holding placards. Young doctors win, a group of lawyers has its way, but in many cases the protests yield little.

A large number of recent protests in Lahore have been about long hours of power suspension. These inspire little hope of relief. Amid the patriotic yet linguistically outdated calls by the chief minister that Punjab was getting ‘step-motherly’ treatment, the general feeling is that you cannot ask someone to give you what that someone doesn’t have in his store.

The federal government has failed to add a significant number of megawatts to the electricity grid. Ask a protester and he will tell you that he knows how futile his antics on the road actually are.

The story of a trader losing business has been repeated so many times that it is in danger of losing its bite. Invariably, the public is more worried about the road blockade due to a demo, and not too receptive to the demands of the protesters.

There are people who have played up the political angle. The power riots in Lahore and elsewhere in Punjab last week and the ones earlier are understood to be a part of some grand design by the Punjab government to destabilise a seemingly shaky set-up in Islamabad. Indeed, those with good eyesight have been able to identify PML-N workers acting as agents provocateurs among the rioters.

It is said the PML-N for the moment wants to keep these protests relatively small, keeping the option of inflating them at an opportune moment open.

When push comes to real shove closer to the election, a variety of more issues are going to be raised. Punjab appears all set to play the victim itself, with the movement for a Seraiki subah run by PML-N rivals making it a lot easier for the Sharifs to assert their politics in the upper Punjab areas they have traditionally controlled.

Still, that a series of protest demonstrations has to be sustained by some forward movement is evidenced in how difficult it is to sustain a protest in a particular area. The protest is moving horizontally from one city or locality to another, rather than rising vertically.

There are few cases where a group of power rioters — who perhaps lack political patronage — has staged a demo one day and then turned up for a similar show of anger the following morning. There is a protest demo in one area of Lahore one day and the venue shifts to another part of the city the next.

These are plain occasions — disorganised displays — to vent frustrations. Given the slogans for an end to discrimination in the distribution of resources, over reasons valid or not, they could be taken as much for sporadic exhibitions of anger against the growing disparity in society as a whole than events specifically bringing out the inefficiency of a government.

Quite often a government has to pay for the disparity in the ranks of a professional group. A group of young lawyers for example may be as much disturbed by their inability to match the influence and earning graph of some senior and some not so senior colleagues at the bar. Some of their recent resorts to violence to force the issue demonstrate that they have not quite been ‘empowered’ and rewarded the way they had expected during the free-judiciary movement.

Some groups of relatively junior lawyers have got together and they are forever asserting themselves not just against government functionaries such as the police but, before that, against their senior bar colleagues.

The seniors are thought to have already attained considerable professional success, which also brings them material gains that the juniors somehow cannot wait to acquire.

Often the senior lawyers are almost browbeaten into participating in campaigns they would rather avoid but for the pressure they are put under by the juniors or as yet the less-privileged fellow professionals.

A similar senior-junior divide exists among journalists. There are those who have benefited from the recent media boom and ‘performance-based’ criteria for deciding the worth of a professional that has come to be applied of late.

The new entrants as well as the old ones who have not benefited from the new criteria are as suspicious of journalists who draw high salaries as they are wary of newspaper managements, and ultimately of the government which they still hold responsible for protecting their rights.

The young doctors’ movement in Punjab also has at its base disparity between the young and more experienced doctors.

The young doctors do not trust the senior doctors when it comes to fighting for the rights of medical officers and doctors working as apprentices in public-sector hospitals.

The seniors have to mind their lucrative private practices on the side. In the past, they would create envy and command respect from those following behind them. Now these ranks want a quick share, if not equal to than at least proportional to the money the senior practitioners have come to make today.

There is a clear clash of interests between the well-known doctors who have a long queue of patients waiting outside the examination rooms in their private clinics and the young doctors at public-sector hospitals who toil and are bossed around, yet go unsung and un-remunerated for their labour.

This divide between the senior and junior among professionals — doctors, journalists, lawyers, etc — deprives the protest of ‘mature’ heads who could act as both guide and mediators for more durable solutions. A patch-up among fellow professionals is required. This is not easy to achieve given the rights the un-protesting have to protect.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.