Lahore: The Awami Workers Party (AWP) Punjab has condemned in the strongest possible terms the gruesome rape and murder of seven-year old Zainab in the city of Kasur and the complete failure of the state’s law and order apparatus to provide any kind of justice to the aggrieved family. Rather than offering justice, the local administration and police fired upon protestors demanding justice for Zainab, killing two in the process. The AWP has said that the only ‘rule of law’ operating in today’s Pakistan is that which protects the rich, powerful and right-wing reactionary forces, and if the current degenerative state of affairs is not arrested, society will descend into complete barbarism. AWP Punjab president Aasim Sajjad has said that Pakistan is among the most patriarchal societies in the world, and this is in large part due to the state’s policies which have yielded discriminatory laws and sanctioned public and private violence against women, often under the guise of religion. The state is supposed to protect all citizens against such brutality but in fact it has created a conducive environment for precisely such brutal actions and the latest case of Zainab is just one more on an endless list. The AWP has said that most such acts of violence go unreported, and it has been proven time and again that law-enforcing agencies are either complicit in such violence or unwilling to take action against its perpetrators. Aasim Sajjad has said that the piecemeal responses to individual violations against women and girls are insufficient to address the disease of patriarchy and its many forms of forms of violence. He said that it is no longer adequate to make demands of the state because the latter is itself part of the structural problem. It is therefore incumbent for all progressives to come together and force change in both state and society by pushing back against abuses of power by state functionaries and institutions, as well as self-anointed guardians of public morality that refuse to speak out against patriarchal violence in the name of tradition. The AWP is committed to uniting all progressives and to seeing that the unspeakable crimes committed against seven-year old Zainab and countless others like her are never forgotten. In the meantime, AWP Punjab demands that all local state functionaries who have failed to provide any measure of justice to the aggrieved families of Zainab and at least 12 other minor girls to have suffered a similar fate in and around Kasur over the past few months be given exemplary punishments, and that any and all efforts be made in the supervision of the Inspector General Police (Punjab) to apprehend those responsible for these gruesome crimes. Published in Daily Times, January 11th 2018.