Monitoring Desk: The unfolding story behind the Bannu incident indicates that elements within the party rather than the provincial government have the sole target which is Chief Minister Gandapur and such elements had gone too far to play havoc with the law and order situation just to put Gandapur down from the power he enjoys.
On July 15, eight soldiers of the Pakistan Army were martyred in the terrorist attack in Bannu Cantonment, while two civilians were also martyred in the crossfire of the terrorists. Bannu Local Trade Union chief Abdul Rauf Qureshi called for a peace march which was later attended by PTM, PTI, and JUIF.
On July 19, the protest was forcibly brought to Bannu Cantt, there was no sign of the police or civil administration, which suggests the disinterest of the provincial government in the law and order situation that such a large crowd entered a sensitive zone where already a suicide attack took place. The protestors burnt the temporary wall of the Cantonment and looted the CSD Store while armed forces followed the policy of refrain and waited for civil administration to reach the spot because the law and order situation falls purely under civil administration. This attack could be called the May 9 kind of incident but armed forces kept following of restrain and fired aerial shots to disperse the angry crowd. However, protestors carrying weapons opened fire on the protest, killing one civilian and injuring several others and they also fired at the sports complex, injuring people there too – while all this was happening, nobody from the provincial government and district administration reached the spot and let the vandalism continued. Even the local police disappeared from the scene.
The initial investigation by intelligence agencies indicated that all happened by design and the target was not only the Cantonment but rather Chief Minister Amin Gandapur after the firing immediately the trade union backed down from protest as by design while the PTI and PTM started misusing the incident on social media for their political purposes. The incident showed that there was no provincial government in the province and no civil administration is operation and both were failures of Chief Minister Gandapur. When Gandapur tried to manage the damage and asked his media team to downplay the incident, PTI leadership like Umar Ayub, Asad Qaiser, Shandana Gulzar, and Shehryar Afridi started igniting the situation and their social media messages started inciting the public to create more chaos in Bannu and other KP areas. Insiders say that CM Gandapur is still trying to figure it out what kind of situation he is facing. There are two clear purposes of doing this, one is to show Ali Amin Gandapurpur as a failed Chief Minister so that he can be replaced by a member of this group and the other is to discredit him by placing him directly against Pakistan Army—that he is avoiding since months. PTI insiders from Peshawar claim that the situation would be further drawn out and further inflamed just to achieve petty political objectives.
There is no doubt that the delay in punishing the culprits of the May 9 vandalism has encouraged everybody to attack military installations in the country and this credit or discredit goes to the higher Judiciary that is lingering on all May 9 cases.
