By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: The horses arrived first. The applause never did.
That is the image Pakistanis have been passing around since Saturday: two of the country’s senior bureaucrats, riding into an Independence Day parade in a carriage built for heads of state, to a crowd that would not clap.
By Saturday afternoon, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi was online trying to explain it away.
The video itself runs only a few seconds. Capital Development Authority Chairman retired Lt. Sohail Ashraf and Islamabad Inspector General of Police Syed Ali Nasir Rizvi come rolling into the parade grounds in what looks unmistakably like the presidential buggy. Someone off-camera prompts the crowd to applaud. Nobody does. It is that silence — not the carriage, not even the officials in it — that has done the most damage online.
Naqvi’s account, posted to X, was that none of it was supposed to happen this way. He and the event’s chief guest had been held up, he said, by a meeting between the president and the prime minister, and a crowd that had been standing since 5 p.m. was owed a start time. So around 6 o’clock, with no sign of the delay ending, he told the two officials to begin without him.
“The chief guest and I were delayed due to the president’s meeting with the prime minister,” Naqvi wrote. “The crowd had been waiting since 5pm, and at around 6:00 pm, when it became clear that we would be late, we instructed the officers to start the programme because we did not want the public to wait any longer.”
The carriage, he said, was never meant for Ashraf or Rizvi in the first place — it had been arranged for the chief guest. Circumstance put the two officials in it instead. Naqvi insisted they hadn’t wanted the job.
“I can say on record that both officers initially resisted starting the programme in our absence, but we specifically instructed them to proceed for the convenience of the public,” he wrote, thanking Islamabad residents for turning the evening into what he called a true celebration.
Nobody online seemed especially interested in the explanation.
Former federal minister Shireen Mazari reposted the clip with a one-line note: “Unbelievably stupid to try and revive such colonial practices! Self-humiliation!” She was sharing a post from digital rights activist Usama Khilji, who had gone further, arguing that the ride exposed something structural. Pakistan’s elected officials, flawed as they are, still need votes, Khilji wrote — but the civil and military bureaucracy “functions with complete impunity, much like the British Raj from which we inherited them.”
“This is what happens when you do things unbecoming of your office,” he wrote.
Journalist Farzana Ali wanted to know if this was really the same country that keeps asking its poorest citizens to absorb one more hardship. Zarrar Khuhro, another journalist, didn’t bother with a full sentence. He posted the video with a single word: “CRINGE.”
Researcher Ammar Rashid read the crowd’s silence as the real story — proof, he argued, of how little goodwill is left for what he called unelected officials “ruining our cities.” “Anti-people DC Raj needs to go.”
Absar Alam, a journalist and former chairman of the Pakistan Electronic Media Authority, didn’t mince words either, calling the footage “revolting” and describing it as the “inferiority complex of brown sahibs of bureaucracy” on full display.
Former Sindh governor Mohammad Zubair reached for a comparison instead of an adjective. Earlier in the week, he noted, Norway’s foreign minister had been seen handling his own luggage at the Islamabad airport. Now this. “What a contrast,” Zubair wrote on X, “difference in the behaviour between the top minister of the richest country versus grade 22 officials of one of the poorest countries.”
Political analyst Zaigham Khan took the longer view. He shared his own copy of the video with a note on how far the symbolism has fallen. “Once upon a time, this was a symbol of immense grandeur and splendour,” he wrote. “Today, it brings nothing but humiliation, yet even this much about our changing society hasn’t dawned on our owners.”
Neither Ashraf nor Rizvi has issued a separate public statement on the episode.
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