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DINA
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February 17, 2006 Friday Muharram 18, 1427

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A city stunned



By our correspondent


LAHORE, Feb 16: An uneasy calm prevailed in the city on Thursday after two days of rioting that left four people dead and caused damages estimated to be in billions of rupees. Attendance in schools and colleges remained thin for the third day, with parents weary of letting their children, especially girls, venture out to school on their own.

Women employees working in offices and commuting by public transport were also told to test the waters before setting out for work.

“The sheer shock of what happened on Tuesday and Wednesday is hard to get over,” said Mrs Raja, 30, a banker who was caught in the melee on Egerton Road on Tuesday. “My mother watched it with utter horror on TV all day, making frantic calls every few minutes to find out if I was safe. She said television footage of the looting and vandalism going on in the street reminded her of the images coming out of Baghdad when it fell to the Americans and there was utter chaos everywhere.”

“It was just not Lahore anymore. I’ve seen nothing like this happening in this city in the 11 years that I have lived here,” observed Ahmed Ali, a post-graduate art student who was born in Tando Allahyar in Sindh and grew up in Karachi.

“After classes were suddenly called off for the day, I came out on the street and saw a band of lathi and club-wielding youngsters who were pushing and pulling to bring down the Zamzama gun on The Mall. Some boys had climbed up, on to the gun, and pretended to be in the battleground. Another bunch was frantically beating Woolner’s bronze statue outside the Old Campus with bamboo sticks,” narrated Ali.

Alfred Woolner (1878-1936) was a former principal of the Oriental College, Lahore, and later became the vice-chancellor of the Punjab University in 1928. His is the only statue that still graces The Mall.

Mrs Aileen Samuel (not her real name), executive secretary, widow and a mother of three, lives in Garhi Shahu. She had taken Tuesday and Wednesday off to do some spring cleaning, “but those were not the days to get anything done. Rioters kept shouting slogans in all their fury and burning tyres right outside my apartment which is on the main road. I was scared; you never know when a minority may become target of unguarded anger that mob hysteria generates,” she explained.

“My brother who lives in Model Town kept calling all day, asking if we needed to be picked up. I said no, because he, too, is a father of two children and Tuesday was no day to be in Garhi Shahu for anyone who wasn’t stuck there,” she reasoned with herself. “But my immediate neighbours were very supportive; they looked in a couple of times to calm us down.”

On Wednesday, after reports of a death in firing at the New Campus spread through the city like wild fire, rumour mills got spinning. “I was in my office in Canal Park when a harassed friend called to say that an angry mob had set fire to a popular restaurant on M M Alam Road,” said Ms Choonara, an NGO worker, who was born and brought up in Karachi.

“Then another friend called and said university students were going to carry the body of the dead man through the main boulevard, so stay in and don’t venture out; we later found out these were just vicious rumours, something I never associated with Lahore. It reminded me of being holed up in a bad Karachi neighbourhood on a bad day,” she reflected.

“On my way back home into the Cantonment from Gulberg, I saw the Rangers backed by armoured vehicles guarding a shopping mall near the Sherpao bridge. It was both crazy and scary. Just what was my city coming to? asked a young woman lawyer. “And there were barricades on the main boulevard too.”

Dileep Premachandran and Siddhartha Vaidyanathan, two south Indian cricket journalists who are here to cover the Pakistan-India series, were shocked to see the city in the grip of violence on Tuesday, as they set out on a bus for Multan. They described the scenes as being “right out of a riot-stricken minority ghetto in a north Indian city.”

Premachandran went on to question: “But why are they rioting against themselves, destroying their own city, their own businesses, it’s like self-flagellation over something your enemy does to you instead of hitting back at the culprit?”

Yasir Jamil, a final-year university student, shared the view. “As a Muslim I am deeply hurt at the provocation the sacrilegious caricatures have caused across the world. But the way some of us have chosen to protest reinforces the Muslim stereotype that the non-Muslim world has of us in mind; that we are an uncouth, unruly mob and nothing more, people need to be contained if the world is to be a safe place.”

Newspaper offices also received calls from concerned citizens all day on Tuesday and Wednesday, with many expressing their outrage on what was happening and simply asking: ‘Where is the government?’



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