The arrest of an elected MNA is indeed an appalling sign that illustrates how the parliament has lost its honour. It seems that a lawmaker has to be tight-lipped otherwise he will have to pay a heavy price for breaking his silence.
While talking to Mashal Radio, Ali Wazir’s wife Sayera Wazir burst into tears over her husband’s protracted durance, and said that she is quite depressed, even sometimes considers committing suicide. She didn’t know what kind crime her husband had committed: “Ali indeed passed some remarks about the establishment like other Parliamentarians have, but he is targeted as he has been accused under section 302.”
Last year, through a social media video message, Ali’s brother appealed the Prime Minister and the Chief of Army Staff to free his ailing brother. He said that “they should not be treated as disloyal to a country for which their elders have rendered high sacrifices.” Many of his family members have appealed to such authorities, but in vain.
Since the 2018 general elections, Ali Wazir has been arrested twice. First, he was sent to jail along with his colleague MNA Mohsin Dawar due to their sit-in protest at the Kharqamar security check post in Miramshah in May 2019, where firing by security forces resulted in multiple fatalities. For the second time, he was taken into custody by Peshawar police at the request of Sindh police on 16 December 2020, accusing him of expressing disparaging remarks against state institutions in a Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) rally in Karachi. While being shifted to Karachi at Central Jail for judicial proceedings, Ali Wazir was handcuffed as though he were a most wanted terrorist.
Ali Wazir is an elected representative of the people of Waziristan, who have suffered enough from the flames of so-called War on Terror. Many thousands of tribal Pashtuns were lost their lives, many more have been injured and thousands of families had to face unbearable displacement when security forces began operations against the militant groups.
Wazir's family is one of the most tormented families of Waziristan, whose members have made enormous sacrifices for about two decades. Farooq Khan Wazir, his brother, was killed by the Taliban in 2001. He was the prime victim but not the last, because the same family received more than fifteen dead bodies of their beloved ones. In 2005 Taliban killed Mirza Alam, father of Ali Wazir, along with wo sons and two nephews. In those days, Ali Wazir has been already detained and then he was shortly freed to visit his beloved ones for a quick glance. For the third time militants assassinated his brother, along with his two cousins, after a few months. In short, the number of adult men in this family decreased and the number of orphans and widows rose.
On the other hand, terrorists cut down Ali Wazir’s economic resources by bulldozing his petrol pump, shops and even destroying his crops in Azam Warsak. It is believed that the militants built toilets from the bricks of these demolished buildings. When Ali Wazir was asked by Mashal Radio as to why the militants installed the bricks of his erased petrol pump in toilets instead of using it in another building, he replied: “It is because they believed that the destroyed pump and houses were owned by infidels, therefore the leftovers of these constructions should be used in dirty places".
Javed Latif, a PML N parliamentarian, was also imprisoned under the same charges last year in April, however, he was fortunately freed on bail in June. But Ali Wazir is behind bars even today. Unfortunately, insulting of MNAs has been a dismal trend in Pakistan that needs to be ended.
Thousands of activists belonging to the PTM have staged a sit-in in front of Sindh Assembly for the last four days to ensure Wazir’s release, but their demands have not been met yet.
Even as this piece is being written, unfortunately, an ATC ordered Wazir’s arrest in another case involving the “maligning of state institutions” and “arousing the public” against them. By apprehending lawmakers, it seems that the state has truly vowed to further suffocate an ailing democracy that has already been on a ventilator and whose democratic viability was already in great doubt.
Ali Wazir is a legislator, and the government should, at the very least, grant him bail – for the sake of Parliament’s sanctity, as soon as possible.