The question of my Pakistani friend from America was apparently simple but there was a long history behind it which was summed up in the words of the question. Is. In fact, this protest has become a movement against police brutality and the killing of about three to four hundred citizens by the police every year. The protests started in America and spread from England, France to Germany and all over Europe. According to an estimate, this protest has cost 140 human lives so far.
Despite the protests, the police in the United States shot and killed a black American while sleeping in a car. It is obvious that those who do not have a home sleep in the car. This friend’s question was that in the United States, the fire of protest against police killings has spread so strongly that on one occasion President Trump was forced to hide in the basement after seeing the flood of people in front of the White House despite the Corona season.
Advised, these basements are designed to shelter from nuclear wars, but this protest in front of the White House was no less than a war. Are the Pakistani people afraid or timid or apathetic that the immense police in Pakistan do not protest against the atrocities? Every year, hundreds of innocent people are killed by the police in hawala torture or fake police encounters. Sometimes a family arrives to protest in front of the Governor’s House with a dead body, but returns after two to four hours with “child consolation”, no one joins them and no one is aware of these cruel acts.
A protest movement is conducted in a city, province or country against. Every ruler promises to change the police culture and leaves after making things worse. Then my friend’s question changed the tone and said that the massacre of Dr. Tahir-ul-Qadri’s lovers in Model Town was watched by the whole nation on TV channels for several hours. The blood flowing of the elders, the dusty beards, the rifles pointed at the honorable ladies and the scenes of Glo Butt’s “conquests” were heartwarming but could not melt the coldness of our nation.
A family traveling in a car to attend a wedding in Sahiwal was pelted with bullets. The entire nation saw the scenes of the massacre of the husband, wife and child and the transfer of the surviving children to the police car, but the nation did not miss it. There was no effective protest and no movement against police brutality. One of the results of the movement in the United States is that several bills are being considered in the Senate to make laws and change existing laws, which will reduce the powers of the police and “stop” the massacre. Efforts will be made to do this, but nothing like this has happened in Pakistan.
I also saw that video of George Floyd and this is the wonder of social media that within minutes the news spreads all over the world. The truth is that George’s gruesome murder scene gave me sleepless nights. Allegedly, he bought cigarettes from a Palestinian shop with a fake $20 note, the shopkeeper called the police. The police officer knocks him to the ground and puts his knee on his neck, he is begging for his life from below saying I’m suffocating.
The bright-faced police officer is smiling, the whole incident reveals another universal human truth that has touched the souls of millions, evoked feelings of sympathy and ignited the fires of hatred against the police. This fact of this tragedy remained hidden from the eyes of Pakistani social media. When George Floyd despaired of life, he called his mother twice in his last moments before dying. His mother had died two years ago, it is a universal truth that in the most horrible, pitiful and desperate moments of life one remembers the mother, calls upon the mother for help and sometimes appears to her as if she were her own.
His mother has come to pick him up or to help him. According to a news report, George’s mother died two years ago on the same day. The saddest part of the tragedy was that the twenty dollar bill turned out to be genuine, it was not fake, so the protestors burned down the shop itself. The sound of calling the mother in her last breath ignited a fire of hatred against cruelty in America and European countries. Ten years ago in Tunisia, 26-year-old Muhammad Bou Azizi used to feed his widowed mother and six children by selling fruit on a cart. I set you on fire that this is the last resort of the weak.
This incident sparked the Arab Spring (Spring) protest movement that overthrew the governments of Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh. Apart from Syria, the monarchies of many Arab countries began to shake, someone controlled the subjects by using force and someone opened the mouth of the treasury, but why do the people of Pakistan not protest systematically against atrocities?
Awami Tehreek in Pakistan overthrew a strong government like Bhutto, but the day-to-day atrocities do not affect them, aren’t people afraid? Are you discouraged? Are you depressed because of poverty, or have you become despondent?
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