ON Sunday, a few people were picked up in Faisalabad for protesting. One of them was an elderly woman whose daughter, Quratul Ain Zaman, brought her to life for those on Twitter.

“Today they arrested my 73 year old mother for peacefully protesting in Fsd [Faisalabad].” The rest of her tweet may not pass the editing stage so I am sparing the op-ed editor by leaving it out to begin with. Her second tweet adds that “Last time my mother was arrested [was] almost 40 years ago. It was dictator general Zia’s draconian era.”

There was an immediate reaction on Twitter. Outrage in the cyberworld is sometimes effective in communicating details missed by a news cycle dominated by politicians and their comings and goings and their fighting within and without.

Read: Karachi police detain 33 PTM workers in anticipation of 'law and order situation'

Indeed, when India is threatening us every now and then and there are multiple rumours regarding the longevity of a government, who would have paid attention to a dozen people being picked up in Faisalabad (doesn’t the ‘candlelight brigade’ exist only in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad?) And had a worried daughter not tweeted about her mother, we would never have known that a gentle-looking, bespectacled woman, with white hair, neatly tied in a bun, had been picked up.

It is such a simple tale of right and wrong that it’s hard to write on it.

However, this time luck was with the brave and the weak. The protesters were released shortly after being picked up.

But others have not been so lucky.

For the past week, in between reporting and analysing the usual high politics we are obsessed with, there were also a few stories about protesters who were picked up in Islamabad and further afield. The ones in Islamabad had collected peacefully to ask — a handful of people can only ask and not demand — for the release of he-who-must-not-be-named (or is it his organisation that cannot be named?) He had been arrested earlier and taken to jail.

The parliamentarian among this small bunch of protesters was released immediately but the rest weren’t so lucky.

They were picked up, reportedly charged with sedition and sent to jail. Few were surprised by this measure as sedition is the new black as far as non-kosher protesters are concerned. When students had dared to march recently, some of them in Lahore were also charged with the same ‘sin’.

By Monday, as I was writing this, Twitter informed us that the Islamabad High Court had ordered the release of the Islamabad protesters but the television channels were reporting other, more important news.

But Twitter has done so much more than just tell us the basic facts about a few nameless protesters who were picked up. As in with Quratul Ain’s mother, the ones arrested in Islamabad were also brought to life. They were not just names or a bunch of unknown protesters but living, breathing human beings, each with a unique story. Among them was Ammar Rashid, a young man with a degree from a prestigious university in the UK, who opted to join the left-wing Awami Workers Party and work for the most vulnerable such as the inhabitants of katchi abadis in Islamabad. He has a young son, whose video saying he misses his father was shared widely on Twitter.

Along with him was Nawfal Saleemi, a Lums graduate, who quit his job in the UAE to come back to Pakistan and joined the AWP. He too worked with the powerless who were evicted from katchi abadis and ran a free school for the children of one such settlement. A brilliant young student even before being on the dean’s list at Lums, he had secured a fee waiver for his ‘A’ levels and has also got admission into places such as Oxford and LSE. His sister told us all this on Twitter, adding that “We had lost our father at a young age, since then he has been a good brother & a great son. He is a father-figure to his nephews. I am scared s*** for him, but also so proud. I hope he & all our friends return home soon.”

By now these young men’s pictures — as they went about their work as well as when they were brought handcuffed to the court — have appeared so often on social media that they have become known faces. But it says so much about our times that idealistic, young men have become famous because they were handcuffed, charged with sedition and jailed. Otherwise, they would have continued to work and live in relative obscurity.

There is really not much to say about the entire episode or series of episodes of the arrests and hounding of young people who thought protest was their right. It is such a simple tale of right and wrong that it’s hard to write on it — how long and in how many ways can one say that it is wrong? It is a wrong so basic and so evident that one sentence should suffice.

How many times can one ask why the hordes who descend on the capital and threaten to topple governments make the state buckle in fear but a handful of peaceful protesters can’t be tolerated? Only because the latter are so few in numbers that they can be picked up? How many times does it have to be pointed out that states which can tolerate dissent and criticism prove to be far stronger than those who stifle dissent? So often have these in-your-face arguments been repeated that they have become clichés.

And yet, such is the state of affairs around us that it needs to be said. Again and again and again.

Perhaps Faiz had something similar in mind when he wrote “Ek arze tamana hai so hum karte rahenge”.

For it seems in our times human rights are little more than a yearning which we are sometimes allowed to express aloud.

The writer is a journalist

Published in Dawn, February 4th, 2020