Saad Rafique goons detain five, allege students
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*LAHORE: *At least five students were allegedly detained by Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader and former minister of Railways Khawaja Saad Rafique in a bid to avoid answering their questions regarding the ghost of absolute water scarcity that haunts the country and provision of clean drinking water.
Earlier this month, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), as well as the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR), had alerted that Pakistan would run out of water by the year 2025 as the country was wasting around 13 million cusec water into the sea.
On Tuesday, five student activists, who had gone to the former minister’s corner meeting held in the Chungi Amar Sadhu locality of the city, were allegedly harassed by Saad Rafique’s “goons” after they expressed concern over the looming water crisis and supply of contaminated water to the people.
As per the details, Haider Ali Butt, affiliated with the Haqooqe Khalq Movement (HKM) – an organisation addressing Pakistan’s hollow democracy and making efforts to promote interaction between voters and their representatives – asked the PML-N leader to outline his party’s plan to address the water crisis in Pakistan and the absence of clean drinking water in his constituency.
Instead of answering the well-meaning question of the student, Saad Rafique ordered the attendees of the gathering to shut off their mobile phones and stop recording what witnesses said was the senior politician’s “humiliation”. A video, making rounds on the social media, shows the ex-minister then asking his supporters to “take the students away and get them clean drinking water”.
According to the victims’ accounts, following the dialogue, Saad’s supporters manhandled them, locked them in a room for more than half an hour and threatened to beat them up.
Haider told that he and around 10 of his fellow volunteers had gone to attend the corner meeting being voters of Saad Rafique. “We distributed pamphlets among the people to raise awareness so that the meeting rather than being a stage-to-crowd contact is an actual democratic and two-way interaction,” he said, claiming that it wasn’t later when a couple of police personnel made the female volunteers leave the venue.
“We did not protest when the police escorted our female colleagues out of the gathering, but when our genuine concerns were responded to with hostility… it was just too much,” said Haider.