Beyond shaming and damning.

NO words are strong enough to condemn the maniacal raid on Lahore's Punjab Institute of Cardiology by a group of lawyers. Even if the common narrative is shorn of exaggeration and the distortion of facts, no justification whatsoever can be offered for the insane targeting of a premier medical facility, the critically sick patients there, and the doctors in attendance. The incident puts the entire Pakistan society to shame.

The bar organisations have to do some intensive soul-searching regarding their failure to check indiscipline within their ranks. For many years, especially since the conclusion of their campaign for the restoration of Iftikhar Chaudhry as the chief justice of Pakistan, various groups of lawyers have figured in one violent incident after another, inside courtrooms and outside, and their associations have made no serious attempt to arrest the hot-headed descent into the ugliest forms of hooliganism. There may still be time for lawyers' organisations to regain the status of dignity they enjoyed as the last bastion of resistance to dictatorship. They are expected to compel the rulers to stay within the limits of the law and the Constitution, and not to become agents of disorder and lawlessness themselves.

A self-appraisal needs to be done by the fraternity of doctors as well, especially to determine whether their agitations in recent years have been in accord with their oath to tend to the sick under any circumstances.

What made the incident utterly unbearable is the fact that it could have been prevented, or at least the scale of madness contained. The storming of the PIC was not a sudden response to a grave provocation; all accounts of the horrible incident confirm that it was a deliberate, premeditated operation for the realisation of an objective that is shrouded in obscurity. The action was apparently discussed and planned at none too secret meetings, and if the law-enforcement agencies did not become aware of these confabulations they do not deserve their plumes.

The rehabilitation of lawyers will require considerable effort by the greyheads among them.

The mob marched several kilometres along the city's main roads and a police contingent quietly followed them all the way. The chief minister sent a minister to intervene but no ranking member of the administration seems to have tried to control the situation. The causes of this all too evident administrative failure need to be probed.

All this has been said in various...