Pakistani uniformed and plainclothes police beat a lawyer during a protest in Lahore on Monday.
Police officers beat a lawyer outside provincial High Courts in Lahore on Monday.
The real test of whether the opposition to General Musharraf will prevail appears to be several days off: The leader of the biggest opposition political party, Benazir Bhutto, has pledged to lead a major protest rally on Friday in Rawalpindi, the garrison city adjacent to Islamabad, the capital.
The Musharraf government’s resolve to silence its fiercest opponents was evident in the strength of the crackdown by baton-wielding police officers who pummeled lawyers and then hauled them by the legs and arms into police wagons in Lahore.
At one point, lawyers and police officers clashed in a pitched battle, with lawyers standing on the roof of the High Court throwing stones at the police below, and the police hurling them back. Some of the lawyers were bleeding from the head, and some passed out in clouds of tear gas.
It was the second time this year that Pakistan’s lawyers emerged as the vanguard of resistance to the government. In the spring, the lawyers mounted big rallies in major cities when General Musharraf tried to dismiss the chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who has now been fired.
How long the lawyers can keep up their revolt now without the support of opposition political parties, which so far have been lying low, remains in question.
There were conflicting estimates of the number of lawyers in jail in Lahore on Monday night. Some lawyers said that as many as 500 to 700 of their colleagues were in custody, scattered in various police cells and jails.
In all, about 2,000 people have been rounded up since the imposition of emergency rule on Saturday night, lawyers and legal and political analysts said. General Musharraf said in his emergency edict that he was taking the action as chief of the Pakistani Army, not as president, a fact that made his move akin to martial law, said Daniel Markey, senior fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
But General Musharraf stopped short of taking some steps characteristic of martial law, like shutting down Parliament, he said. The main points of General Musharraf’s emergency order were the suspension of the Constitution, the dissolution of the Supreme Court and the four provincial High Courts, and the silencing of privately owned television news channels.
Ms. Bhutto, a former prime minister and the leader of the country’s biggest secular political party, the Pakistan Peoples Party, said she would come to the capital on Tuesday from her home in Karachi, where she has been since returning to Pakistan as emergency rule was imposed Saturday night.
She insisted that a rally planned by her party would go ahead on Friday in Rawalpindi. It would be staged as a protest, she said in a telephone interview from Karachi.
“We decided this would be a protest meeting where we would protest the imposition of military rule,” she said. “This protest movement will continue until the Constitution is restored.”
The demonstrations were not confined to Lahore. In Multan, a city in the same province, Punjab, as Lahore, two new judges who had taken the oath of office under the emergency rule were forced to leave the courtroom by hundreds of angry lawyers.
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