The proverbial saying “there’s light at the end of every tunnel,” appears to lose weight in the tragic case of PTM lawmaker Ali Wazir, who has yet to taste freedom. The endless round of musical chairs continues as he is dragged around to be tried for sedition charges. Just two months earlier, his acquittal by an anti-terrorism court in Karachi was heralded as a new beginning for the parliamentarian, whose spell behind bars has literally become the key mantra of his party. Sadly, round and round goes the wheel of misfortune as the Charsadda police is now sharpening its share of knives to grill the MNA in a case that was lodged two years ago. Despite securing bail in most cases, Mr Wazir remains incarcerated in the central jail in Karachi because of the identical nature of cases lodged in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Sedition is a very serious charge and no one can be allowed to undermine the sovereignty of the state or any of its institutions in the name of freedom of speech. However, the iron-fisted approach of tackling the dissidents has seldom resulted in anything but triggering more fires.
The reservations of those who stand behind Mr Wazir are not entirely off-the-mark because if special arrangements cannot be made to allow a sitting parliamentarian to appear in the proceedings of the august house, express the concerns and the expectations of people in his constituency and perform his constitutional duty, how can an ordinary man walking on the street trust his country to listen to his grievances and at least try to resolve them? His crippling absence is a dreary reminder that while the world around us may have moved on to embrace the twenty-first century, we are comfortable living in the past.
Had this high-handedness been applied to cases of other so-called rabble-rousers, especially participants of a very rowdy, break-the-state, attack-the-citadel and burn-everything-in-sight, we could take solace in the equality of the citizens before the law, however strict. But until then, are we to believe that some crimes are easy to forget than others? *
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