October 28, 2025
By Qambar Ali
On September 10, sirens blazed through Swabi as a convoy of police vans, a few pickup trucks and police motorcycles were racing towards a compound. Amanullah, a resident of the area, was sleeping with his family when the loud sirens jolted them out of their sleep.
‘’Everyone in the city believed it was a raid on hardcore criminals,” he said. “We could never have known that a large number of police personnel had come to raid a music party.”
The convoy pulled over outside and goose-stepping police personnel marched towards the music party with their AK-47s poised. One DSP and three SHOs led the raid. Inside, around 226 people were clustering around the performers. Everyone was swaying and dancing to the music. The police quickly rounded up the men and baton-charged the performers who were from the transgender community. According to the police statement later, they tried to evade arrests.
One of those who was lucky to have slipped away was Zahidullah Khan.
“I could not believe my eyes when I saw a large number of policemen rushing our way. My first thought was that there may be terrorists embedded in us,” he said. “But when the police closed in on us and dragged away the transgender performers, everything became clear. Chaos broke out and everyone tried to scramble away, but in vain.’’
Turning policing into performance
All the partying men were herded outside, paraded before the media and forced to look into the cameras. They were booked under the Loudspeaker Act and various sections of the Pakistan Penal Code for ‘unlawful assembly’, being ‘armed with deadly weapons’, ‘obstructing public servants in the discharge of their duties’, etc. Despite the serious charges, however, the police could not show any recovered weapons.
The video of the raid was posted on District Police Swabi’s Facebook page, garnering more than a million views, over 350,000 comments applauding the police action, with the post shared at least 5000 time in the course of a few weeks. The beat accompanying the video was metallic and foreboding; the policing was turned into performance.
In a statement, Swabi’s District Police Officer (DPO) called them ‘tramps’.
“Coming from various districts, the 226 vagrants and tramps have been arrested. This kind of vulgarity, immorality, and social distortion will not be tolerated and anyone involved will be dealt with. There is zero-tolerance against immoral performances and other operations are also underway. Security has been tightened in the region: snap-checking, checkpoints, and surveillance, are used to deter immoral actors throwing such parties.’’ The tone of the statement was clearly self-congratulatory and dismissive of broader implications of the raid.
Soft targets
The strong language used in the statement was engineered to win public praise, without doing anything substantive.
“The police force has always looked for soft prey and never seriously hunt drug peddlers, extortionists, and thieves. They pander to the public and placate the deeply conservative pockets of society. The real job is never done. Unfortunately, people cannot see through this publicity stunt,” according to Amanullah, an educator.
Hardly a day or two passed following the raid, when an 11-member Jirga was convened in Swabi, which ordered the immediate excommunication of all transgenders from the district and tacitly vowed to use force in case of noncompliance. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) immediately condemned the jirgah’s verdict and urged the district administration to ‘immediately ensure the safety and dignity of transgender persons in Swabi and uphold their fundamental rights under the Constitution and the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018.’
On the other hand, KP’s transgender community protested against the illegality of the jirgah’s decision and petitioned the Peshawar High Court (PHC) against the police, for failing to protect the community after transgender performers faced harassment and violence in Buner, D.I Khan, Bannu, Malakand, and Nowshera.
‘’We have not forced anyone to come and see us dance,” said one of the protesters. “We have not harmed anybody during the show. Fans come on their own and we cannot order them to leave.”
The domino effect of moral policing
Soon after the Swabi incident, the police in Abbottabad and Mansehra also followed suit and uploaded similar posts on their official Facebook pages. These announced similar operations against ‘immoral segments of society’ and warned social media influencers to mend their ways or get ready for the ‘full force of law’.
Mansehra police went a step ahead and constituted a task force to identify social media accounts of women TikTokers allegedly spreading obscenity. Station house officers were expected to begin a crackdown against ‘bay-hayai‘ (vulgarity) and arrest transgender performers, TikTokers, and anyone working against perceived ‘public morality’. Many Facebook channels in Haripur, Abbottabad, and Mansehra started stoking hatred against transgender community and egged on the police in the direction of ongoing parties.
‘’Crackdown videos on transgenders and Tiktokers were viewed thousands of times and touched the public nerve; the police made the wise call,” Nasir, a poet based in Abbotabad told me. “While robbers, murderers, and land grabbers are roaming free, the police force is tilting at windmills.”
Manufactured morality
The police do not effectively prevent heinous crimes such as killing based on perceived honour, fraud, and plain murder. Knowing that the public would never rise to defend them, they have focused on going after those who are harmless. For this they are lauded for upholding public morality.
“The language and the threat of force being used against women TikTokers and transgender performers is itself vulgar,” said Younas Awan, Chairperson of the Human Rights Protection and Development Council. “If the society has any problem with transgender performers and ‘obscene’ content on social media, they should stop watching it. People wrongly believe that the use of force will put an end to transgender shows and to vulgar content on social media. In fact it is our collective failure that we have failed to persuade the younger generation towards what modesty is.”
The law misused, the fear deepened
Legal experts have also warned that the KP Police is exceeding its authority by invoking Section 294 of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC), which criminalizes acts of obscenity in or near a public place.
Advocate Imran Khan, a lawyer representing the transgender community in a case at PHC says that transgender persons primarily earn their livelihood by performing at weddings or celebrations which is a lawful profession.
“The prohibition imposed by the police on attending such functions in different districts is a violation of their right to enter into any lawful trade or profession guaranteed by Article 18 of the Constitution.”
This misplaced zeal has escalated hate speech and violence against the trans community and even women.
‘’I am receiving a lot of messages from men on TikTok in which they threatened to report my videos to the police if I don’t hangout with them,” an Abbottabad based TikToker, Aleena, told me. “Some of the messages are sexually violent and I have even broken down in tears. Men think that if you are a TikToker, you have no shame and you are open to everything,”
As its target is gender-specific, moral policing stokes hatred and online harassment against women in KP. Despite the rising cases of violence, the social media influencers are afraid to report violence to the police for the fear of detention. The Hazara region is already notorious for its patriarchal society and high rates of honour based killings, and this sort of posturing further restricts the social space for women and transgenders. The KP police should adopt gender-sensitive policing, remain apolitical, and refuse to push the conservative agenda in society.
Justice must not bend to popular opinion or mob sentiment. The law should be upheld even if it crosses the majority.
Qambar Ali is an independant journalist based in Peshawar.