For over a week now, some two to three thousand protestors of the Tehreek Labaik Ya Rasool Allah (TLYRA) have blocked traffic between Islamabad and Rawalpindi through a sit-in protest at Faizabad Interchange. This has made the lives of the residents and commuters of the twin cities miserable since people cannot get to work, children and students cannot get to their educational institutions and even the sick and elderly are deprived of medical attention. The protestors are demanding Law Minister Zahid Hamid's head for a mistake in the wording of the Elections Act 2017 regarding Khatm-e-Nabuwat, which was corrected soon after. But that did not satisfy the firebrands of the TLYRA, who have sworn to continue their lockdown of the capital until their demand is met. Not even the formation of a parliamentary committee under Senator Raja Zafarul Haq to probe the matter has cooled the anger of the TLYRA, which claims the mistake was a deliberate attempt to water down the clause regarding belief in the finality of our Prophet (PBUH). Actually this 'anger' and charges of deliberate attempts to water down the provisions of Article 260 of the Constitution appear to be motivated by anything but an adherence to the truth and facts. In fact they smack of another agenda altogether: using the sensitivities around the anti-Ahmadi constitutional provisions and the blasphemy law to browbeat the government and all those who do not subscribe to the TLYRA's extremism. The government has been treating the disruption of life in the capital with kid gloves, perhaps fearing the fallout of the use of force to remove the recalcitrant blockers. Ministers from Ahsan Iqbal to Talal Chaudhry have been blowing hot and cold for days, trying in one breath to persuade the protestors to come to the table for talks and threatening the government has the means to clear the road within half an hour in the other. This flip-flop performance has done little except make the government look weak and ineffectual and embolden the extremists to continue their defiance of the writ of the state.
The illogical and irrational stubbornness of the TLYRA defies all norms of conduct allowed by the constitution, law and civility. Citizens have a right to protest peacefully on issues that concern them. But such concerns must rest on the facts, not imagined conspiracies when the mistake has already been corrected. Secondly, one citizen's right to protest ends where another citizen's nose begins. By blocking access to Islamabad, the protestors have deprived thousands of citizens of the right to a normal life, freedom to travel about their business and not be accosted by stick-wielding, stone-throwing violent extremists who do not hesitate to beat up citizens attempting to gain passage through their blockade or policemen deployed to maintain law and order. Complaints of violent beating of citizens, attacks on and kidnapping of law enforcers and ratcheting up the nuisance factor are multiplying. If the TLYRA are not open to reason and civilised conduct, there appears little recourse except to establish the writ of the state by whatever means under the law. A clear message needs to be delivered to the protestors: their rights stop where others' begin. This might also have a salutary effect on their ravings elevating Mumtaz Qadri, the assassin of Salmaan Taseer, to the status of a 'saint' and attempting to make a mountain out of a molehill to fulfil their sinister agenda of browbeating all and sundry into submission to their warped vision.