The Lynch Mafia Of Pakistan: New Age Islam's Selection, 22 April 2017
New Age Islam Edit Bureau
22 April 2017
• The Lynch Mafia Of Pakistan
By Babar Sattar
• Where We Stand
By Faisal Bari
• Tainted But Intact
By Abbas Nasir
• I Told You So
By Irfan Husain
Compiled By New Age Islam Edit Bureau
----
The Lynch Mafia of Pakistan
By Babar Sattar
April 22, 2017
How does one understand the motivation and make-up of those among us who seek to justify vigilante acts of lynching, burning and killing fellow citizens in the name of resisting blasphemy? What explains the urge to rationalise (and thus legitimise) mobs killing brothers-in-faith merely on the allegation of having disrespected the Holy Prophet (pbuh) without any verification?
Why has blasphemy become an existential matter in a country where 95-97 percent of the population is Muslim and swears allegiance to the Holy Prophet (pbuh) who delivered God’s eternal message to them?
We continue to hear a false argument backed neither by evidence nor by logic that extrajudicial killings in the name of blasphemy continue because the law doesn’t take its course. The argument doesn’t get effectively refuted, as there is no level-playing field between those who derive power from the abuse of religion and those who are loath to it. (During the Mumtaz Qadri case, his lawyers – some of whom were former judges of superior courts – claimed that seeking an amendment to the blasphemy law, which Salmaan Taseer did, was blasphemy in itself. The Supreme Court rejected the argument.)
There is no consensus in Pakistan against amending the blasphemy law to prevent it from being abused. But there has evolved a coercive consensus against raising or debating the issue, entrenched by Salmaan Taseer and Rashid Rehman’s murders. So organised and effective has been the lynch mafia and its reign of terror that no one is willing to stick his neck out. Dissenters either get killed or live in perpetual fear, looking over their shoulders. But Mashal Khan’s murder was so savage, vile and shocking that it has slapped us out of our terrorised state of hypnosis. It has opened up a window of opportunity to broach the forbidden issue.
The Supreme Court’s judgment in the Mumtaz Qadri case (PLD 2016 SC 17) opens by saying, “Almighty Allah has ordained in the Holy Quran that upon receipt of a news or information the men of faith ought to ascertain correctness of such news or information before they may act upon the same and that harm may be avoided if such news or information is investigated in the first place”. It then quotes Verse 6 of Surah Al-Hujurat: “O you who have faith! If a profligate [person] should bring you some news, verify it, lest you should visit [harm] on some people out of ignorance, and then become regretful for what you have done”.
Addressing the problem of the abuse of religion-inspired laws and the need to debate reform ideas, the SC states that, “in a democratic society citizens have a right to contend, debate or maintain that a law has not been correctly framed by the state in terms of the mischief sought to be suppressed or that the law promulgated by the state ought to contain adequate safeguards against its misapplication or misuse… seeking improvement of a manmade law in respect of a religious matter for better or proper enforcement of such law does not ipso facto amount to criticising the religious aspect of such law”.
And further that, “it ought to be understood quite clearly that any call coming from serious quarters for reform in the laws regarding religion related offenses can only be a call for introducing safeguards against misapplication or misuse of such law… a call for [the] improvement of Section 295-C [of the] PPC for the purpose of providing safeguards against its misuse through [the] levelling of false allegations ought not to be considered as objectionable”.
Endorsing the current abuse of the blasphemy law, the SC notes that, “it is an unfortunate fact which cannot be disputed that in many cases registered in respect of the offence of blasphemy, false allegations are levelled for extraneous purposes and, in the absence of adequate safeguards against [the] misapplication or misuse of such law[s] by motivated persons, the persons falsely accused of commission of that offence suffer beyond proportion or repair”. It unequivocally concludes that, “the law of the land does not permit an individual to arrogate unto himself the roles of a complainant, prosecutor, judge and executioner”.
It is thus established that while the law doesn’t allow citizens to arrogate to themselves the role of state and punish blasphemers, the law, in its existing form, is susceptible to misuse and is being abused. Statistics establish growing blasphemy allegations and incidents of vigilante ‘justice’ in recent decades. But it has taken Mashal Khan’s horrifying murder, the thoughtfulness of Mashal’s social media utterances, the dignity of his grieving family, the poise of his father and the emerging evidence of the premeditated manner in which he was killed to shake us out of our slumber and imagine that this tragedy could befall any of our children.
The National Assembly has passed a unanimous resolution that “condemns the barbaric and cold-blooded murder of Mashal Khan and resolves to ensure that strong safeguards may be inserted into [the] blasphemy law to prevent its abuse through such atrocities in future, including by mobs involved in such crime”. The outrage against the incident was such that the patrons and apologists of the lynch mob probably saw it fit to fight another day. (Though some, like the dogged Maulana Fazlur Rehman, did bare their teeth while claiming that the resolution was a conspiracy of secular agents of the West to undermine Islam.)
Ultimately, lynch mobs are about social control, marking territory and capturing power. The spectacle of public lynching terrorises ordinary folk and is the tool to exercise coercive control over them. Those in the business of politicking on religious matters derive power and influence from the hate and fear they instil in the name of religion. They are the ones in control of tools such as lynch mobs that can be employed at will when needed. If ordinary citizens stand up and express opinions on religion-inspired offences, including blasphemy, it dilutes this power wielded by religious elites and no one gives up power without a fight.
Mashal Khan’s murder has terrorised us in ways that the TTP’s rise or even Salmaan Taseer’s assassination couldn’t. The TTP, for most Pakistanis, was an alien ailment. They would have imposed their will on us only if they had conquered Pakistan. It was like the fear of a foreign power annexing your country. In Salmaan Taseer’s case, there were other confusing angles. He was part of the social elite with an extravagant lifestyle. He was part of the political elite being the governor of Punjab. He stood with a condemned Christian woman. He was not ordinary. The right-thinking ordinary Joe might have thought he was wronged, but couldn’t empathise with him.
Mashal was the right-thinking courageous idealist born in a poor household. His father struggled to feed and educate him. When he was finally ready to become a pillar of support for his family, he was taken away viciously from within a university by fellow students for no fault of his. If this could happen to him, it could happen to our children or us. That is frightening. What is terrifying is that the demon unleashed on him was no alien. It lives within our society and us, in the form of bigotry, hypocrisy and hate, and was brought to fore in the mob that took him. Mashal’s murder has made us afraid of everyone around us – and ourselves.
We need to reform the blasphemy law as it exists today. We need to add procedural safeguards whereby only a superintendent of police can register a blasphemy complaint and the arrest can only be made by the order of a sessions judge.
In view of the gap between the law and its implementation, we further need to criminalise mobs (the assemblage of three or more individuals) that gather with the intent of punishing anyone in the name of religion, as well as those cheering on. And we need to consult scholars to see if blasphemy is an offence that is complete without a guilty mind.
What we did to Mashal has long been characterised as cannibalism. We must put an end to this madness.
Source: thenews.com.pk/print/200031-The-lynch-mafia
----
Where We Stand
By Faisal Bari
April 22nd, 2017
MASHAL Khan was murdered by a mob. The students were worked up into a frenzy, with the knowledge that they will harm Mashal, and then they were led to him and they killed him. The issue used to work students up was an alleged instance of blasphemy.
Blasphemy charges have been similarly misused before this incident too. But this was a particularly blatant and odious use of an emotive issue to settle scores and to get rid of a young person — all because, it seems, Mashal was asking awkward questions of the university administration.
The blasphemy law, religiously and legally right or not, has been misused many times now. The law needs to be changed. Even the unanimous resolution passed by the National Assembly has said that safeguards against the misuse of the law need to be built into the law itself. But that is another debate.
The dominant narrative of Pakistan is power, and violence is its most naked and destructive form.
Mughees Butt (17) and Muneeb Butt (15) did not commit blasphemy. They were, falsely, accused of being robbers and then they too, in a very heinous, cruel and public way, were killed by a crowd in Sialkot in 2010.
In Mashal’s case, the size of the mob was too large for the police to control, while in the Mughees/Muneeb case, the police were present but chose to do nothing. In fact, in the latter instance, some of the policemen present joined the public in encouraging people to torture the two children.
The videos of both incidents are heartbreaking to watch. The sense of revulsion and sadness that one feels when watching human beings acting worse than depraved animals, is almost overwhelming. How can humans do this? How can our countrymen do this? Do these people not have to wake up the next day and live with their memories? What sort of moral/value structure allows a person to throw a stone with the intention of killing or injuring another? Which values give one the power to use sticks for breaking another person’s bones?
Clearly, it is not just religious issues that have led mobs to cruelty and to taking the law into their own hands. Mughees and Muneeb were not accused of blasphemy. A lot of violent protests, due to load-shedding, etc have nothing to do with religion either — though invoking a religious issue seems to be one of the easiest ways of working people into a frenzy, the recent case of violence at the University of Punjab being a good example.
It is not just the spontaneous reaction of crowds that we are dealing with. The creation and unleashing of mobs has been used in a premeditated manner as well. Those who wanted to target Mashal knew they were going to use a crowd. They ensured that instigators were around at the time. In the past, mosque loudspeakers have also been used to target individuals and communities. These come under premeditated action and are not just the spontaneous behaviour of a mob.
In some cases, the premeditation is not just about creating the frenzy and hoping that the crowd will then turn violent; it is, plain and simple, premeditated murder. Most recently, three women killed a person who was accused of blasphemy in 2004. These women waited 13 years for the person to return to Pakistan before they went to his house and shot him dead.
The ease with which situations escalate to violence in Pakistan should be a cause of deep concern for us. A road accident leads to a scuffle far too easily and we have seen plenty of them. People standing in a line to pay a bill: an altercation breaks out between a few people over who has bypassed another or not. Disagreements that could best be resolved through conversation, or at worst through recourse to law, degenerate into physical fights that, more often than not, turn deadly.
The key here seems to be that we, individually and collectively, do not feel that institutional responses can get us an adequate hearing. Only individual and personal responses can work. The threat of violence and actual violence is the strongest form of individual response. If a person has committed blasphemy, we feel the law may or may not punish the person, so we have to respond individually. When these individual actions get coordinated in a crowd, a mob results. But the response is still individual and individuated.
A road accident happens. We do not believe that the law will be able to help us. The stronger side feels that resorting to violence gives them a better way of dealing with the issue — even though, clearly, violence is not the route to justice and/or restitution! The response is individual.
If our institutional structures were stronger and were capable of delivering justice and fair outcomes, and here we are talking not only of the judiciary but of all institutions, especially those pertaining to law and order, would we have the same level of violence in society? Would disputes as easily or as frequently descend to violence and the need to take individual action?
But our institutions are weak and often ineffective. The dominant narrative of Pakistan is power. Violence is the most naked and destructive form of the exhibition of this narrative. Whether it is the state that makes people ‘disappear’, FIA officials beating passengers or individuals/crowds taking the law into their own hands, it is all about power and not about institutions and rules.
We should definitely change laws that are wrong and build safeguards against the misuse of laws. We should also change our education curriculum to bring in tolerance and do a lot of things that people are talking about right now. But the deeper work needs to be done at the level of institutional reform: building trust in institutions that deliver on fairness and justice might be the only way forward for us.
Source: dawn.com/news/1328387/where-we-stand
----
Tainted But Intact
By Abbas Nasir
April 22nd, 2017
AS the Saudi royal jet took off from Lahore airport carrying the former Pakistan army chief to his new assignment in Riyadh merely a day after a Supreme Court verdict in the Panama Papers scandal left the prime minister in office, nothing could have better symbolised the Sharif family’s palpable relief.
Palpable relief because a several months-long cloud of doom and foreboding had finally lifted, leaving no immediate threat. Strained relations between Nawaz Sharif and his appointee Raheel Sharif, which were awkward at best, had degenerated to a near breakdown with the publication of Cyril Almeida’s story in this paper last year.
Side by side, the Panama Papers scandal, which turbocharged the opposition PTI and its leader Imran Khan into organising mass protests to seek the removal of the incumbent prime minister, eventually prompted the Supreme Court to take up the case.
Propriety is as rare in this breed of politicians as probity, whether financial or in terms of governance.
The chief justice’s decision may have defused a possible crisis as a result of street agitation, but once the proceedings started it became clear that the first family was often going to face extremely uncomfortable and embarrassing questions in court while trying to establish how it came to own expensive London real estate through offshore companies.
Towards the beginning of last year, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung received from a whistleblower some 11.5 million documents held by the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca. The paper then shared the data with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
The leak demonstrated how the wealthy around the world use offshore companies to evade taxes, move funds around the world surreptitiously and even launder money. When the names of the prime minister’s sons were found in these documents, the ICIJ emailed them to seek their version before making the information public.
At this stage, rather than seek proper, top-drawer legal counsel or respond to the ICIJ, the Sharifs tried to be clever by half. First the prime minister’s son Hussain gave two TV interviews mainly to upstage the ICIJ release by ‘explaining’ how the family came to own the London real estate.
Then when the information was made public by the German paper and the ICIJ, and a storm started to brew in Pakistan with calls for the prime minister to explain the acquisition of prime London properties or resign, the PM responded twice.
First in a televised address, he offered himself up for accountability (but his request for a judicial inquiry was turned down by the then chief justice) even as he denied any impropriety in the purchase of the flats in the UK capital’s prohibitively expensive Mayfair district.
This was followed by a speech in the National Assembly where the prime minister seemed to offer a more elaborate explanation of how his family financed the purchase. In this speech he also talked of how Z.A. Bhutto’s nationalisation in the early 1970s had made paupers of the Sharifs and how his father then rebuilt the family fortunes by starting industrial units abroad.
Nawaz Sharif’s address may have brought a lump to the throats of his most diehard supporters, but to the rest of us it was clear that the prime minister and his son on two different occasions each, and even his daughter Maryam during a TV interview, were not singing from the same hymn sheet.
Some of these contradictions figured in the dissenting notes written by the two seniormost judges of the five-member apex court bench hearing the case and prompted the two to say Nawaz Sharif stood disqualified from being a member of parliament (also from holding office); and hence should be de-notified by the Election Commission.
The majority, three judges, decided to leave the prime minister in office but called for a Joint Investigation Team to inquire into unanswered questions about the money trail and report back to an SC bench to be set up by the chief justice, at which point action against the prime minister was not ruled out.
Although the composition of the JIT reflected a compromise of the three judges with their two senior colleagues, as they included one member each from the ISI and MI to possibly give it ‘teeth’, the move could have been far more significant had it happened in Gen Raheel Sharif’s final months in office when he was seen as very hostile to the government.
Now with an army chief who seems committed to supporting the democratic order and focusing his attention mainly on professional matters, the role played by the members belonging to the services intelligence agencies may be no more than perfunctory.
Frankly, I have my doubts that the JIT will have the expertise and resources to do the job assigned to it in the given 60 days even when overseen by the SC. Here too let’s see who will head/be in the bench.
It would perhaps have been more advisable to authorise and fund the JIT to co-opt overseas forensic investigators from a firm similar to the one used by senator Saifur Rehman in the 1990s who found Asif Zardari’s $60m in a Swiss bank account.
Barring unforeseen dramatic developments, Nawaz Sharif seems to have survived twin challenges from an overbearing (former) army chief and a determined opposition leader who had sought the help of an increasingly headstrong and independent apex court to dislodge the prime minister.
Ideally, the prime minister should have voluntarily stepped aside for the duration of the JIT inquiry so he appeared before it as a citizen rather than as the country’s chief executive, but propriety is as rare in this breed of politicians as probity, whether financial or in terms of governance.
So, for now Mr Sharif may have been tainted but remains firmly in the saddle. Will his voters or the electorate in general take into account allegations of corruption whenever the next elections are held? Who knows?
Source: dawn.com/news/1328386/tainted-but-intact
-----
I Told You So
By Irfan Husain
April 22nd, 2017
IN a nation of some 200 million, I doubt if a handful could pinpoint Panama’s location. And yet, this tiny Central American state has dominated Pakistan’s political discourse for the last year to the point of tedium.
Finally, after nearly two months of hearings before a Supreme Court bench, the verdict is here. And, as I had predicted to friends a few weeks ago, it is a cop-out that has both sides declaring victory.
For me, the abiding image is of the Sharif brothers, Nawaz and Shahbaz, embracing and beaming at each other. In the PTI camp, we watched Imran Khan and senior party members pass sweetmeats around.
‘Panama’ will continue to resound on TV chat shows.
For the SC, the verdict gave the impression of balance and fairness, with something for both sides to cheer about. Imran Khan had a lot of praise for the two dissenting judges who declared the prime minister ineligible to rule because he didn’t meet the criteria of honesty and integrity laid down in the Constitution.
The ruling PML-N is gloating over a verdict that, for the time being, has let their leader off the hook. As far as the party is concerned, it has every chance of hanging on to power until the 2018 election. Here, according to opinion polls, it is most likely to win a majority. So who’s the real winner in the verdict?
When the Panama brouhaha began a year ago, I had suggested that the Sharif brothers were masters of kicking the can down the road, and would drag matters out indefinitely. Now, with a joint investigative team (JIT) being set up, expect more of the same.
Even though the SC has required the JIT to submit fortnightly progress reports, the fact remains that members of this committee will all be serving members of the civil and military bureaucracy. To expect them all to perform their tasks independently is a rather big ask.
Then there is the problem of the team having to obtain and verify information in different jurisdictions. Will they be able to force banks and government departments in Dubai and Qatar to hand over documents? And all this in two months? Forgive my scepticism, but having first-hand knowledge of the pace at which our bureaucracy works, I have some doubts.
No wonder that Imran Khan is demanding the PM’s resignation. He knows how difficult it will be to get a group of civil servants to report against a sitting PM. But he’s right in underlining Nawaz Sharif’s loss of moral authority to rule.
Irrespective of the legal rights and wrongs of the case, it is clear that the daily drip-drip-drip of corrosive evidence against Sharif and his family has done much to strip away the aura of decency he had tried to project. And his disqualification by the two dissenting judges on the bench has reinforced the impression of corrupt practices at the heart of the Sharif empire.
With supreme irony, Asif Zardari has also demanded Nawaz Sharif’s resignation, and asked if he would be taken to the local police station for questioning, or would the JIT go the PM House? The reference here was to his own vicious treatment over a decade of incarceration.
Indeed, the PPP has good reason to be aggrieved at what has often appeared to be its targeting by the judiciary, starting with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s judicial murder to the sacking of another elected PM, Yousuf Raza Gilani. In many other cases, the judiciary has displayed an apparent animus against the PPP.
And yet, despite demands for his resignation from the opposition, Nawaz Sharif isn’t going anywhere. He didn’t get to where he is by being sensitive to corruption charges. Throughout his political career, he has shown himself to be tough and opportunistic.
Imran Khan has given examples from other countries where leaders tainted by the Panama Papers have either provided full disclosure (David Cameron), or resigned (Iceland’s Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson). However, members of Putin’s and Bashar al-Assad’s inner circle have not even bothered denying the allegations against them contained in the leaks.
As we know, there is no tradition of resignations in Pakistan. Even in Israel, Bibi Netanyahu is mired in corruption charges, but is refusing to step down. But in Israel, the police are far more independent than they are in Pakistan, and have investigated similar charges against presidents and prime ministers before.
Whatever happens next, Panama is a name that will continue to resound on our TV chat shows for some time to come. But will the verdict reduce corruption? I doubt it. But it will force crooked politicians to be more careful about their bookkeeping.
A final factoid: the verdict triggered our stock exchange’s biggest bull run, with the index shooting up by 1,800 points in a single session. Do investors know something we don’t?
Source: dawn.com/news/1328382/i-told-you-so
----
URL: