On a humid afternoon in Lahore, amid the chaos of traffic horns and shouting vendors, I met a man whose silence carried the weight of fear. Sitting behind the worn handlebars of his rickshaw, he wasn’t just another driver waiting for passengers — he was a man hiding from his own address.

A few days earlier, his SIM card had been traced near a TLP protest site — the very same street where he picked and dropped schoolchildren every day. In a country where digital surveillance has become a quick substitute for ground investigation, that single data point was enough to turn a breadwinner into a suspect.

When the police came to his home, he wasn’t there. His family faced questioning, panic, and humiliation. Since that day, he hasn’t gone back. “I was just doing my job,” he murmured, glancing at the road. “But now I can’t even go home. My kids are waiting for me.”

His story is not an isolated incident — it’s a reflection of a larger political imbalance. Every time unrest grips Pakistan, it’s the working class that ends up paying the price. The men and women who power the country’s economy — drivers, vendors, laborers — become collateral in a system too impatient to distinguish between innocence and involvement.

This episode raises an unsettling question: when the state begins equating proximity with guilt, who really feels safe?

In its bid to maintain order, the government risks alienating the very citizens whose trust it needs most. And in that process, people like this rickshaw driver — whose only crime was being at the wrong place at the wrong time — become invisible casualties of political overreach.

Because while leaders trade speeches and slogans, he still drives the same rickshaw through the same streets — quietly, cautiously — wondering if one more wrong turn could change his life again.