Was justice seen to be done?

In the case of the SC verdict on the Mukhtaran Mai case, even if justice was done, it does not seem to have been done.

There is a proverb: Justice should not only be done; it should also be seen to be done. In the case of the verdict of the Supreme Court on the Mukhtaran Mai case, even if justice was done, it does not seem to have been done. Let us elaborate upon this statement.

First, I said ‘even if’ because there are two points of view about the verdict. The first is that the verdict of the court was correct according to the law. If that is so, it means that the way our police prepare the documents of the case are so biased against a female victim that she does not really have a chance to receive justice.

The second view is that the judgement itself is wrong. After all, there was a dissenting judgement based on the same evidence produced before the court. In this context, Abira Ashfaq’s articles in this newspaper — “Deconstructing the SC’s Mukhtaran Mai’s Verdict” parts I and II (April 26 and 27) — are the most cogently argued writing on the subject that a layperson can understand. My article cannot hope to present this aspect of the case better than the learned author, but I do intend to present some other aspects of it.

First, although the facts of this case are well known to most readers, it is necessary to summarise them here.

Muktaran Mai, aged 30, had a brother called Shakoor, who fell in love with a girl, Salma, from the powerful Mastoi tribe. The Mastois avenged their dishonour by sodomising the boy — Mukhtaran says they raped him first and fabricated the story of the love affair later — and a village council (panchayat) was assembled to adjudicate the matter. The council decided that Shakoor should marry Salma while Abdul Khaliq (Salma’s brother) should marry Mukhtaran. The hotheads among the Mastois, however, wanted ‘an eye for an eye’ and raped her when she came to apologise for her brother’s conduct to the panchayat on June 22, 2002. She staggered out of the place where the rape took place in a semi-nude condition and her father took her home. However, on June 28 the village imam, Abdul Razzak, persuaded her family to register the case of gang rape against 14 men — four for the actual offence and ten for abetment of the crime. Her clothes, when examined, had stains of semen.

Now let us come to the opinion of the two judges, as contained in the judgement, who doubt Mukhtaran’s story on several counts: Why did she lodge the FIR so late? How could any medical evidence of rape remain for so long? Why was her body not carrying signs of violence? And the hypotheses advanced are as follows: That the FIR was to harm the Mastois who had slighted Mukhtaran, as Abdul Khaliq did not marry her after all; that Shakoor might have been lying — there is a controversy whether his age was 12 or 16 at that time — because he states that he was kept in the same house as Salma, which no honourable Mastoi could have tolerated. And, lastly, that Razzak instigated her family because he had a personal grudge against the Mastois.

First, the reason the FIR was not registered at once was because the Mastois were from a powerful (which does not necessarily mean rich) tribe, so it stands to reason that Mukhtaran’s family did not dare complain till their resolve were strengthened by the village priest. Indeed, it is a wonder that she did dare to stand up to the Mastois. Our women are so oppressed that most rapes go unregistered anyway. Secondly, since her clothes were soiled and torn they were kept as they were and that is why they carried semen on them. And, lastly, why is it unbelievable that Shakoor was kept in the same house as Salma? After all, he was a much-abused captive, so he was no threat to Mastoi women after his own ordeal. And, lastly, Mukhtaran is reported to have healed wounds on her body which means she did struggle against the rapists but since there were four of them and all men, there was no point in fighting them too much; so the injuries were superficial.

But the focus of my article is not the argument that two of the three judges were, in fact, wrong. It is possible that despite these apparent mistakes in judgement and the dissenting opinion of one judge, the judgement was legally correct. My point is that justice does not seem to be done. The message which comes out is that patriarchy is so powerful that women simply cannot get justice even if their case becomes a high profile one. Earlier, victims of rape, like Veena Hyat and Dr Shazia, did not get satisfactory verdicts either. What is at stake is the mindset, the world view, the ideology of patriarchy. This creates bias against women and makes it very difficult for them to report cases of sexual harassment, let alone rape. Hence, they have to pay for their men’s transgressions through forced marriages, slavery and abuse. The fact that panchayats can order these violations of human rights is never questioned; not even by the courts themselves, whose right to adjudicate in all matters such bodies usurp. Under these circumstances, Mukhtaran Mai stood up against patriarchy,  and for this she should have been respected. The court’s decision has, therefore, strengthened patriarchy and that is why justice does not seem to have been done.

Yet another aspect of the case worth commenting upon is that human rights activists are being insulted as ‘NGO walas’ and accused of having raked in pots of money in the guise of helping Mukhtaran Mai. Such allegations are beneath comment but they are bandied about so much that they make the people even more insensitive than they already are. What is still possible is for the Supreme Court to make amends by constituting a larger bench headed by the chief justice himself (it may have more dissenting judges);  by ordering the police to remove lacunas if that is possible now (which is doubtful); by sentencing the other accused to a ten-year jail sentence instead of releasing them; by studying the dissenting judgement for its merits. This is one case which can improve the image of Pakistan and tell the male-chauvinistic police that women can speak up against rape. As I said, to begin with, justice should seem to be done!



Published in The Express Tribune, May 1^st, 2011.