Ayesha Tammy Haq’s article “The burden of shame” (September 3) was brilliant.
KARACHI: Ayesha Tammy Haq’s article “The burden of shame” (September 3) was brilliant. It gets more frustrating every day when one goes out and sees people blatantly breaking the law and seeing no recourse.
One sees four-wheel drive vehicles with no number plates being driven by people as if they were crazy, and being followed by another jeep with armed goons riding at the back. They dodge traffic and terrorise anyone who happens to come in their path. All this while, traffic police can be seen busy extorting bribes from truck drivers. What happened to the law forbidding vehicles without number plates and on the open display of weapons?
We have turned into savages. We don’t trust our police. We don’t trust our justice system. At every level there is a fear that if you report an injustice you will be the one who will suffer.
The result: more frustration and anger and the desire to take the law into our own hands. So we have ugly incidents like the one in Sialkot, and in Karachi when people have lynched mobile phone snatchers and burnt them to death. This frustration grows as corruption at every level has seeped into and entwined itself around every branch, every twig of every institution. There is widespread rot settled in the very roots and I wonder how we will ever cleanse ourselves of that. If we, as the privileged ‘elite’ in Pakistan, don’t do something about this soon, I fear that others will, and incidents like the one in Sialkot won’t be news anymore.
The question is, where do we begin, and how?
Rosheen Rahi Mahmood
Published in The Express Tribune, September 4th, 2010.
