Daily Times

With the terrorist incidents going down, going up are the crimes committed by the people whose criminal tendencies remain undetected till the day they get caught. Three such recent incidents shook the nation when an eight-year girl, Zainab, was killed brutally in Kasur; a child student was beaten to death by a Madrassa (seminary) teacher, Qari Najmuddin, in Karachi; and a college principal was shot dead by his student, Faheem Ashraf, on false blasphemy charges in Charsadda. They all appear to be different crimes committed at different locations, but a closer look reveals many common features that surround these incidents.

Imran, the killer of Zainab, is a 23-year-old man with appearances similar to all other ordinary people of his age. Watching him recite Na’at, one can quickly take him as a pious person with hardly any doubt on his character. The madrassah teacher, Qari Najmuddin, who has beaten his student to death, appears to be in the same age group as is Zainab’s killer. While the 12th-grade student, Faheem Ashraf, who killed his college principal is a bit younger than the other two criminals and from his photograph, one can easily sense the innocence of his teenage-looking face. But the tone of his confession for the crime reflects him as an angry young man well entrenched into an indoctrination he considers to be pure and divine. In contrast, Qari Najmuddin seems to be a soft-spoken person with a feeling of repentance on something that had gone wrong though. In his opinion, he was merely trying to discipline the child using the methods that he learnt from his experience. Imran, the Zainab’s killer, is a unique character among the other two criminals. He was seen attending the protest rallies carried out against the killing of Zainab showing no sign of any guilt on his face for the crime he had already committed.

Now that one of the culprits is arrested, all the religious and political leaders have become louder than their real voices without feeling any guilt over how they had rejected the child marriage bill in the assembly, an act that is tantamount to allowing child rape legally

What appears to be common in all these criminals is that they intentionally or unintentionally used the religious shelter to either hide or justify their crimes. Ironically, the punishment demanded by the people for Zainab’s killer is also justified by religion. From TV anchors to panellists and parliamentarians are all in agreement on one point: hang him at a public place. While everybody is focused on Zainab’s case, the brutal killings of the madrassah student and college principal have gone into oblivion. No doubt the ordeal with which Zainab had to go through makes one agree that her tormentor should be put through the same pain, torture, and suffering. However, on second thought, these suggestions appear no different from a sudden outrage of a mob when a robber gets caught red-handed. They get violent and vent out their frustration by unleashing their barbarity at the robber knowing their own inability to make the legal system work for them. Last year, seven robbers were beaten to death, and five were severely beaten in Karachi. Yet, no decline in robbery-related killings was seen in Karachi, and the city lost its 42 inhabitants during the same year at the hands of robbers. If this data is not enough, let us look at the figures for the years of 2014-16 when a number of times Karachi city dwellers took the law into their hands and beat to death 47 robbers and injured 20 more of them while the casualties of the people in robberies were 149 dead and 45 wounded. To hang a criminal publicly is going to serve no purpose other than to legitimise the mob-driven justice system that has already been going on in the country for the last many years without having any positive outcome on controlling the crime.

What we basically fail to recognise is that all these crimes are social crimes that have been either ignored or supported for one or the other reasons by the society itself. Until the emergence of Zainab case in Kasur, everybody from police to the political leaders and the religious leaders remained silent and indifferent to the regular occurrences of the brutal killings of children in that small city of the country. Now that one of the culprits is arrested, all of them especially the religious and political leaders have become louder than their real voices without feeling any guilt of how they had rejected the child marriage bill in the assembly, an act that is tantamount to allowing child rape legally and spreading a message across the society that there is nothing wrong with child abuse – legal or illegal makes no difference.

Take the case of the college principal’s murder on blasphemy charges. A joint statement issued by Pakistan Ulema Council (PUC) underlined that Islamic Shariah did not allow anyone to kill an innocent person on such accusation and even if anyone had committed blasphemy, the court had the mandate to punish him/her. They are right, but the question is: “do they really believe it and want to do something to bring an end to this un-Islamic practice?” Who killed Salman Taseer on the same accusation and wasn’t it the court of law that had awarded death sentence to his killer, Mumtaz Qadri? Both events are well known and need no additional information except the reactions exhibited by the religious community on these events. To this date, the ulema consider Mumtaz Qadri a hero and a tomb in his honour is being built to eulogise him for what he had done. Will the religious lobby, based on PUC statement, be willing to take another look at all the extra-judicial killings of blasphemy accused that run into 78 persons now including 12 women? To apply the law selectively is a shameful act of complicity in the crime and honesty demands that PUC recommendations be applied to all accused of blasphemy cases and all the future incidents of child abuse should also be dealt with the same care and attention that were exhibited in Zainab’s case.

All these incidents are a wakeup call for all of us to look inside our wickedness and besides seeking due punishment for one culprit, all other forms of complicities to such crimes must be analysed and exposed to ensure that such behaviors are controlled before they become a mindset for providing justification to crimes because of a biased perspective. Would we all listen to this call?

The writer is a Senior Research Fellow, Center for Research and Security Studies

Published in Daily Times, February 19^th 2018.