PESHAWAR: On Febru­ary 27, thirteen-year-old Suleiman carried his father’s AK-47 to his school, along with his school bag — a daily ritual, except on weekends — to help the security guard protect the school in the outskirts of Peshawar.

That day, the seventh grader shot himself in the abdomen and died. Police said the boy was love-struck.

What the police did not say was that the incident was the consequence of what a senior government official in his letter to the education department described as a bad law — The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Sensitive and Vulnerable Establishment and Places (Security) Act, 2015.

The law virtually declares almost everything as sensitive and vulnerable, thus allowing the police to effectively wash their hands off their responsibility, leaving the head of such establishment to fend for themselves.

Pro forma advisories are issued to such establishments as a matter of routine and if, something goes wrong, these are diligently reproduced in the didn’t-I-tell-you manner to absolve themselves of their responsibility.

Now read this with Chief Minister Pervez Khattak’s February 23 missive to Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan. The chief minister wrote the letter in the context of an alarming increase in the number and cases of extortion and calls for extortion in Peshawar.

The eleven points contained in the letter call for every possible assistance, from blocking of signals and mobile network and communication towers along the border, to the provision of billions of rupees, to raising one-thousand-strong special force, to establish the Karakoram Security Force to ban on coverage of terrorist incidents.

What, however, was more alarming was the demand for deployment of Rangers for the security of Peshawar. The capital of this north-western province is already well-deployed. The Frontier Constabulary is occupying all the posts running along its boundary with the tribal areas. In addition to the police, the military also has check-posts and deployments in and around the capital city of millions.

What is it then that the Rangers would do what the Peshawar Police could not do, to check the growing number of extortion cases that have gone through the roof?

The police personnel to population ratio in KP – 1:337 – is better than in Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan. The KP police budget ratio in percentage terms – 7.20 per cent – is marginally second only to Sindh where it is 7.37pc of its budget. The police budget in KP, Rs1,035 per capita, is also slightly lower than Sindh’s Rs1,119, according to official figures of 2015 available with Dawn.

According to police’s own figures, police have been allocated Rs32.7 billion for the current financial year, up from Rs31bn for 2014-15, though in percentage term, there has been a marginal 1.4pc decrease in the overall provincial budget.

Sindh’s marginal increase in budget is owing to the equipment and payment made to Rangers in Karachi; otherwise if the differential payment accrued on the paramilitary force were to be deducted, KP’s spending on its police would surpass all other provinces. Whereas Chief Minister Khattak asked for Rs66.280bn as “special financial package for capacity building of the police”, the police’s own budgetary utilisation has been less than impressive. From 2012-13 to 2014-15, the police surrendered Rs9.93bn.

And this is where the problem lies. It’s not so much about increase in the number of policemen or resources, as it is about getting to the root of the problem. Granted, the police’s strength in KP needs to be enhanced and it has to be provided with the resources and better tools and equipment to fight militancy and the many challenges it has spawned including extortion and target-killings.

But does this stop the police from doing its basic job, which is policing. The police in KP have been in the forefront of the fight against terrorism and have lost some very good officers. But over the past few years the government here has been in a responsibility shifting mode. First blaming the tribal areas for all that was happening here and calling for fencing the settled districts from the tribal areas, to now blaming all the ills emanating from militancy on Afghanistan.

The Afghan dimension of terrorism and allied crimes cannot be denied. All terrorist attacks have now been traced to groups operating from the other side of the Durand Line while more than 90pc of the extortion calls have been traced to Afghanistan.

But terrorists don’t fire missiles from Afghanistan to hit Bacha Khan University or the court compound in Charsadda. Likewise, extortion callers don’t pop out of cell phones, to put a gun to the helpless traders to cough up money. There is a network of facilitators here to help them carry out their task.

In 2004, the then interior minister, Faisal Saleh Hayat, circulated a 25-page document among the provinces. Written in Urdu for all and sundry to understand, the document outlined the SOPs for the police to identify and register and monitor the movement of suspected extremists.

In May 2012, the government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in its 46th cabinet meeting approved its first Counter-Terrorism Strategy (CTS). It noted that the “most effective and widespread intelligence input can be obtained from the local police station, thus underlined the “dire need” for the diversion of “more resources from existing police budget to the police station level”.

According to figures obtained under the Right to Information Act, 2013, the home ministry acknowledged that from May 2012 to 2015, a total of 4,166 people were placed under Schedule VI. According to the ministry of interior, the number of people placed under Schedule VI in KP now stands at 5,410.

Although sketchy, (just a few DPOs responded to the RTI request by Dawn), the data so collected reveal that neither the SOPs by the interior ministry nor the relevant sections of the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997, were followed in letter and spirit. The Kohat DPO reported 168 persons placed under Schedule VI, 68 of them failed to furnish bonds, not a single individual placed under the category sought permission to leave their station of abode. In Dera Ismail Khan, 80 persons were placed under Schedule VI and 62 of them failed to produce bonds.

This raises serious questions as to the compliance of the relevant and most important sections of the ATA, 1997, specifying categories of people to be placed in Schedule VIA, including not only those who are members of proscribed organisations but also those who might even have an inclination to join any such organisation.

As was pointed out in the letter by the additional chief secretary to the secretary education, KP, Article 4 (1) of the Police Order, 2002, provides for duty of the police to a) Protect life, property and liberty of citizens, b) preserve and promote public peace, and c) prevent the commission of offences and public nuisance.

“Cases should not be registered against teachers under the garb of a bad law. Rather those who having been specifically mandated under the Constitution, anti-terrorism laws, rules and cabinet decisions, SOPs, to perform specific tasks and they have failed to perform their assigned roles need to be held accountable as lives have been lost resultantly,” the letter concludes rather bluntly.

Published in Dawn, March 9th, 2016