IT didn’t worry Shahida when her repeated calls to her husband on his cell phone went unattended; nor was she surprised when he didn’t call her back. During the six years of their married life, it was not for the first time that Ali Ahmad had not returned from his duty at the expected time. For a policeman like him working long hours is but a routine.

However, she started to worry after a neighbour told her about reports of violent clashes between police and protesters of the Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan, encamped at Chowk Yateem Khana blocking the busy Multan Road for all vehicular traffic to express their anger over arrest of their leader Saad Rizvi. Her anxiety rose further when a woman from the neighbourhood shared with her video clips going viral on social media, showing some policemen being beaten up and humiliated by the protesters.

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At around 10pm, the doorbell rang and her two minor daughters ran towards the door, expecting their father to be there with some sweets or their favourite fruits, which he would buy while returning from office. “There are some friends of Baba Jaani on the door,” the girls told Shahida, after seeing two men in police uniform standing at the door. What the visitors told her was a nightmare for any wife whose husband had a law and order job and who could not be contacted for over 14 hours. She was informed that her husband had been kidnapped and taken hostage by the protesters, along with some colleagues, while he was on duty at Chowk Yateem Khana and that efforts were continuing for their release. She was given a phone number to call for any further information.

“For a moment it felt as if someone had pulled the ground from underneath my feet,” Shahida said, adding that TV channels were mostly blacking out the clashes between protesters and policemen and airing vague reports. However, one channel was repeatedly telecasting footage of injured protesters and policemen, and people carrying clubs while roaming streets littered with stones and bricks they had pelted the police with.

“I kept calling on the phone number given to me, but they had no concrete information about my husband and others,” she said. Finally, at around 2am there was some good news for her when an official informed her that Ahmad and others had been “rescued and are being provided medical treatment and examined by the doctors”.

“After two more agonising hours my husband, with a bandage around his head, was brought home by his colleagues, who were supporting him because he could not walk on his own and seemed to be in great pain,” Shahida told Dawn. “My daughters started crying and clung to him. Later, when I removed his blood-soaked shirt to apply medicine, I was shocked to see that his whole body was literally covered with wounds, mostly deep cuts. He was brutally tortured by his captors, even though he was fasting,” she said in a choked voice.

“I was doing duty somewhere else, when I received orders on the wireless set to reach Samanabad, the area where Rehmatul Lil Alameen seminary — the Labbaik headquarters — was located. On reaching there we were told to don anti-riot gear as we had to charge at the protesters to get the road cleared for traffic. We were also disarmed and were told to carry nothing but batons,” Ahmad said, narrating his ordeal the next morning when he was feeling relatively better because of heavy doses of painkillers and sedatives.

“The protesters seemed to be better prepared than us. As soon as we fired tear gas shells to disperse them, they began throwing the smoking shells back at us. Suddenly, a shell landed near my feet and I felt the pinching smell of gas filling my nostrils and heavy smoke filling my eyes. I ran towards the washroom of a closed petrol pump nearby and splashed water into my eyes and over my face. This took me hardly five minutes, but as I returned to the road, the tables had been turned on the police. A contingent comprising around a hundred policemen had scattered and everyone was running. The policemen were being chased by a large number of protesters, who had been joined by locals, mostly youths carrying bricks used in road construction and heavy clubs fitted with long iron nails. Police were no match for them,” Ahmad said.

“Me and a colleague of mine also ran to save ourselves and entered a house inside a lane after finding its door ajar. Once inside the house we locked the door. But unfortunately we had been spotted by a group of charged protesters who gathered outside the house and started kicking and hitting the door with clubs. The owners of the house panicked and opened the door, leaving us at the mercy of the zealots, who gave us a sound thrashing on the spot and then took us to their headquarters in a procession like a trophy,” the policeman said with a faint smile.

At the seminary, he said, they found that some other policemen and two Rangers personnel had also been taken hostage. “What frightened me were the dead bodies of two youngsters placed in the seminary’s compound. Before another round of brutal torture, we were told they had been martyred during the clashes.

“Despite being tortured, I felt sorry for them. We were told the deceased had come to Lahore to join the agitation from south Punjab,” he said, adding that the party was getting supplies of goods, including crates of bottled water, juices, and bags of flour, rice and sugar, as donation from traders and some unknown sources. “The activists were carrying wireless sets and weapons inside the compound,” he said, adding that the captured officials were also taken to the tomb of Khadim Rizvi inside the compound for offering fateha before they were told they were being released.

Ahmad said the protesters’ last condition for the security personnel’s release was that some senior officers should be present to receive those being freed. “We don’t want to be blamed if something bad happens to you after being released by us,” one of their leaders said.

“I think the government should reconcile with them, as even some police officials feel that although their methods were not correct they were fighting for a just cause,” said Ahmad, echoing the thinly veiled mindset of those who ran the government and who subsequently capitulated to the zealots by releasing most of the protesters involved in torture and humiliation of the police.

Published in Dawn, April 26th, 2021