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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