Saturday, September 14, 2013

The state is absent, let’s kill them all

A wealthy family’s arrogant young man kills another young fellow. The killer’s family is able to buy every instrument of the state which otherwise exists to protect life and property, and liberty, of the citizens without any discrimination. They do buy: they send their son abroad making travesty of every requirement, formality and legality of traveling abroad; though the father of the deceased is a high-ranking in-service police officer, registering a report of the murder with the police remains in doldrums.

Somehow, friends of the deceased bring out the cause of justice to the social media. Then the print and electronic media get hold of the case. An unprecedentedly independent and judicially active Supreme Court goes for a suo moto and oversees that the murder case proceeds according to the dictates of the law.

Overcoming all the obstacles and distractions money can create in Pakistan, the murder case reaches its logical conclusion. Out of the four accused, two are awarded death sentence and two life imprisonment.

Throughout the case proceedings, the accused behave arrogantly and without any sign of remorse on their faces and in their behavior. Instead, they bluntly ridicule everything this country has established to dispense justice.

It is actually their purchasing power that makes them believe they can buy the state of Pakistan, and go scot free. They do buy it: the government of the Sindh province, where Pakistan Peoples Party is in power, tries to get their sentences pardoned by the president, who happened to be the co-chairman of the Peoples Party also. That scheme somehow fails.

As the apprehensions were already flowing both on social, and print and electronic media, that on the pretext of Islamic laws of Qisas and Diyat, the parents of the deceased will be made to accept an out of the court settlement. That does happen. The convicted murderers are pardoned by the legal heirs of the deceased.

Once again, the Supreme Court takes notice of the pardon settlement. Let’s wait and see what’s in store for this case.

The most noticeable feature of this symptomatic case is the absence of the state in dispensing justice. Rather it plays the role of an accomplice.

The state is there to extort taxes but it is completely absent from its foremost duty of standing between two persons so that life and liberty and the rights of both of them are protected.

That’s why who are wealthy, resourceful, connected with the state, in the state, or belong to or connected with any layer of the Riyasati Ashrafiya (State Aristocracy), get away with anything be it murder.

Here is what’s important is being written in the national newspapers on this criminal absence of the state of Pakistan:

Murder and the state’s responsibility
By Ayesha Siddiqa


[The Express Tribune, September 12, 2013]

Death and dishonor
By Fasi Zaka


[The Express Tribune, September 12, 2013]

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