Orphaned by the State

Zulfiqar Ali, a Pakistani, walked to the edge of life and walked back. He did not need to. He did not deserve to. And yet his journey to and from the abyss should haunt us all.

Zulfiqar Ali was arrested by Indonesian authorities more than a decade ago on charges of drug trafficking. As per multiple reports, he was brutally tortured by the Indonesian police and had to be hospitalised with grave injuries. Meanwhile an inquiry into the affair conducted by a member of the Indonesian human rights commission said Zulfiqar was innocent of the charges. This was substantiated when the main accuser — an Indian national — admitted he had framed Zulfiqar. Despite all this, an Indonesian court handed down a death sentence for Zulfiqar. He was scheduled to be executed by a firing squad on an Indonesian island on Thursday night, when literally minutes before the triggers were to be pulled, the execution was halted.

In Pakistan, Zulfiqar was a forgotten man all these years, just like thousands of other Pakistanis languishing in jails across the world. For the State of Pakistan and the governments that nestle in its lap, he was a nobody.

But last week he suddenly became a somebody. Yes he became a somebody not because the State and its various minions took notice, but because his story was flashed across TV screens and front pages of the media via an NGO, Justice Project Pakistan. It was a story dripping with callousness, injustice, and heartbreak. An innocent man was about to be legally murdered and there wasn’t a thing anyone could do about it?

Anyone?

Here starts the story of 72 hours that saw Zulfiqar walk to the gallows and walk back to life. It is a story of hope versus pessimism; of conviction versus doubt; of belief versus apathy. It is a story that swirled around the globe and returned to a small house in a poor locality of Lahore where it manifested itself in a maelstrom of grief that exploded into a hailstorm of unbridled joy.

At Express News we had a ringside view of the saga — sort of. As we began to peel layer after layer of the story, we were aghast at the insensitive response from all levers of the government. Of course the right noises were being made, and of course formalities were being done — grudgingly as they are normally done by our officialdom — but there was no real conviction to getting a wrong righted; there was a total absence of steely belief that an innocent man must not die.

Some within this officialdom may dispute this observation. After all, conviction and belief is hard to measure. These men and women in the service of the government may argue they did everything there was to do to save Zulfiqar from the firing squad; that they pulled all levers that were to be pulled in Indonesia to halt the execution. They will even give examples of the meetings they held, statements they issued and calls they made to convince the Indonesians to hold off the execution.



But urgency fuelled by a call to duty?

At times it seemed Express News was pushing, plodding and cajoling everyone to move. We were extracting statements from the officialdom, we were drumming support among the public, we were carrying along Zulfiqar’s family, we were contacting Indonesian authorities and digging out details from their human rights commission, and we were keeping the matter alive every hour of every day so that calls could be made, statements could be issued, and public opinion could be galvanised.

Is this the media’s job? To a large extent yes. But much of this is what governments should be doing. The nuances of statecraft and diplomacy are best known to those who practise it, but what I know is that the foundation of all governance and jurisprudence is a moral clarity about doing the right thing.

The right thing is often not hard to comprehend. If a man is to die for a crime he did not commit, the right thing to do is to make saving him the highest of priorities. This is the reason that states exist — to nurture, nourish and protect their citizens. That’s the raison detre for burdening ourselves with a government and its civil and military bureaucracy and heaping perks, power and privilege on them.

And yet we in Pakistan lose sight of the fundamental equation that should bind the governors and the governed.

Zulfiqar has unwittingly shown us a mirror to our own ugliness. The injustice that has lacerated him and his family has been perpetrated equally by the states of Indonesia and Pakistan — two states that have trampled on their citizenry repeatedly for the greater glory of those who control the levers of power.

We are outraged that Indonesians tortured our man, and yet we torture our men and women every day in state custody. We are shocked Indonesia indicted an innocent Pakistani and sentenced him to death while we indict and hang men even when there are doubts about their guilt. We are appalled Indonesia kept our fellow citizen in jail for more than a decade despite an official report proclaiming his innocence while we incarcerate innocent men and women, and even children, as a routine within our broken, rotten and corrupt criminal justice system.

Zulfiqar is not the first, and sadly not the last victim of state apathy, indifference and criminal neglect. Pakistanis like him will keep suffering as long as the Pakistani state remains brittle, unresponsive and imperious towards the travails of the citizenry it is mandated to serve. The men and women who sit atop this state machinery act as automatons manufactured from an assembly line of institutions rooted in the experience of distant past. These medieval centres teaching the dark arts of coercive statecraft and diplomacy have now transformed into dank and dingy museums housing dinosaurs long past their extinction date.

And yet, as Zulfiqar may tell all of us one day when he returns home, the dark arts could not weave a spell to help him through his years of suffering. Yes, his bruises may heal and his trauma may dissipate; his nightmares may dissolve away and his memories may become a dull ache, but one brutal lesson will corrode him for the rest of his life: he was orphaned by the State of Pakistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 31^st, 2016.

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