THE relief is short-lived. Just when a PML-N government shows signs that it has learnt some valuable lessons from its long years in power, a PML-N government butts in at some place to spoil the impression. Scepticism is well and truly restored and a past defined by the PML-N brand of authoritarianism comes back to haunt — especially when the blatant blunder is acted out in a theatre close to home in Model Town, Lahore.

A city clean-up squad taking up an assignment in the dark of the night — maybe shrugged off as some kind of an expansion on Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s tradition of starting off early. With some effort and a lot of feigning of ignorance and animated waving of principles, perhaps, the task of removing barriers outside someone as current and sensitive as Dr Tahirul Qadri can also be dismissed as routine.

This is it. This is as far as your imagination and your belief in good, sincere intentions can take you. What follows is too intimidating a barricade in official brutality to broach easy explanation and allow your trust in the maturity, in the statesmanship, in the good politics and good governance of the PML-N to stay unaffected.

Eight people killed in the heart of Lahore, at a time as happening as this, when an operation in North Waziristan had just been announced and, separately, various political groups, prominent among them Dr Qadri’s party, had given calls for anti-government protests.

The shooting took many hours to build up, yet there was no one to offer a word of caution to the clean-up team, which looked ever more determined to accomplish its task with each passing minute. The chief minister was within shouting distance.

The whole Punjab administration was a call away; yet lives were lost as if it was inevitable — as if it was collateral damage — in pursuance of a grand cause. We might just find out that collateral damage weighs far more heavily in Lahore in comparison to the stirs it does and doesn’t cause elsewhere.

The action in Model Town on Tuesday took ages to get ‘noticed’ officially in places which mattered. By the time a rather dazed chief minister faced the cameras to express his regrets his government was well and truly embroiled in the most awkward and most embarrassing moment of its current term.

This was a solemn, eyes-cast-downwards moment, but a typically undeterred Shahbaz still sought to get a positive out of the people by asking them to bear in mind all the good he had done for them. His head held high, he thought the occasion was fit for a leader of his reputation to compare himself with other, lesser rulers of Punjab.

If that was unavoidable in the case of someone as proud of his abilities and as convinced of his infallibility as Shahbaz Sharif, there was, unfortunately, no change in the political strategy of the PML-N aimed at containing Tahirul Qadri. Instead of relying on reason, the PML-N politicians providing the second and more vocal line of action to their leadership were as intense and as personal in their attacks on Qadri as they have been at any juncture in recent weeks.

They stuck to the shame-Qadri plan that they had been pursuing in days prior to the Model Town shooting. Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah has been the most active exponent of the vitriolic attacks on the PML-N opponents, and true to form he has been in the vanguard of the assault on the Pakistan Awami Tehreek leader.

In the wake of the police shooting, his tone remained unchanged, in aid of those who were eager to connect the Model Town raid and the subsequent killing to the anxiety caused in the ruling ranks by Dr Qadri’s vows of revolution.

The PML-N is forgetting its lessons fast. The attacks on the PAT leader were not dissimilar in their tone and tenor to the PML-N ‘resistance’ against Imran Khan in recent months, which have, if anything, benefited the latter.

The ‘wayward cricketer’ since then alternates with the ‘false pir’ in the unending statements from the likes of Rana Sanaullah who remain dangerously unaware of the merits of remaining silent and sober and composed in the face of a move by the other side, thus allowing their challengers sustenance that only overemotional, blundering opponents can provide.

Dr Qadri, like Imran Khan, is a challenge that merits much more than a few personal taunts and some desperate punches. He has demonstrated that he has people who are willing to stand by him through seasons, and dangerously, who are ready to fall for him. They are not likely to be coerced into inaction by the bullets fired on them. They are angrier now than before and the blame for that lies squarely on the PML-N government in Punjab that has exposed itself to greater trouble by pursuing a policy of bulldozing their opponents rather than engaging them in reasonable argument.

The government will try and place the responsibility of the occurrence on the police. The best the police have been able to do falls embarrassingly short of a good defence and the reports about an overzealous party worker extending the law enforcers a helping hand and a vicious stick makes matters worse.

The government has had its issues to deal with, but this is a very serious affair, with the media in hot pursuit. The chase was well and truly on a day after the incident as cameras keenly followed the movement of police officers connected to the case and anchors harshly tried their interrogating skills on PML-N politicians. It is unprecedented for the PML-N.

The writer is Dawn’s resident editor in Lahore.

Published in Dawn, June 20th, 2014