Expect more than shoes and ink to be thrown at politicians in the coming days

By Omar R Quraishi


Over the weekend we first saw ink being thrown on Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif as he spoke at a party event in Sialkot. Dawn reported that the man who threw ink on him chanted 'Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah' as he carried out his act. He was promptly arrested.





Here is a pic of the man who threw the ink on the foreign minister



The following day, on Sunday, a shoe was thrown on ousted Prime Minister (and the ruling PML-N's 'Supreme Leader') Nawaz Sharif as he visited a madrassa in Lahore. In this instance, the person who threw the shoe was reported to be angry with the then government of Mr Sharif for its execution of Mumtaz Qadri in 2016 for the assassination of Salmaan Taseer in 2011.







The man who threw a shoe on ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has been identified as
 Abdul Ghafoor, resident of Kahuta 


Almost all heads of political parties promptly criticized these two unsavoury events. However, all politicians, not least Imran Khan and Nawaz Sharif himself must share the blame for the increase in political invective and name-calling that seems to occur almost on a daily basis between the heads of most of Pakistan's major political parties.

Of course, there are some who think that the fact that religious elements were involved in these two incidents may mean that we may see a repeat of 2013 when the Taliban quite openly targeted the PPP and the ANP in the run-up to the general election that year. Of course, the part would have lost anyway but the targeting of the parties like the PPP and the ANP shrunk the public campaigning space available to at least two mainstream parties. 

It would be fair to say that in the coming days we are going to see more of these incidents, targeting the ruling PML-N, not least because of the increase in its popularity in recent weeks. Something has to be done to break that momentum after all. However, it may not be just a shoe or ink and we could see far more lethal things being thrown at political party leaders, especially those not willing to toe the line demarcated for all parties by the powers that be.

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