Mass sentencing

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The mass conviction of PTI workers – and that too after a jaundiced trial – is making a mockery of law and the courts. The speed with which the opposition legislators are being disqualified hints at a plausible cleansing of dissenting voices from the parliament. Thus, it is now the writing on the wall that political stability would remain elusive, with the country rapidly sliding towards more chaos and societal discord.

This tendency of intolerance from the government is unacceptable and it is surely not acting as a political entity. The May 9 riots and the subsequent retribution on the part of authorities have now become a bone of contention, and justice is being denied under the premise of political victimisation.

The manner in which 108 more workers and leaders of PTI were summarily sentenced by an Ant-Terrorism Court of Faisalabad is disgusting, as they were all judged on the criterion of prosecution's testimony. The who's who sent behind bars for a decade are Omar Ayub, Shibli Faraz, Zartaj Gul, Sahibzada Hamid Raza and Sheikh Rashid Shafiq. It is also bizarre to note that some of the stalwarts, especially Fawad Chaudhry and Zain Qureshi, went off the hook on the basis of the same witness, making it a point of sarcasm.

It is expected that if law takes its due course at the appellate level, most of the convicts will walk free as proper norms of adjudication and cross-examination have fallen short of merit. Thursday's sentences, nonetheless, came on the heels of 98 more convictions, and this clean sweep of opposition into jail is motivated to exterminate their political space.

To make the equation bitterer, lower courts have issued hundreds of arrest warrants in pending cases, coupled with the Punjab Assembly's decision to send references against 26 PTI members to ECP for their "unwarranted behaviour". It's high time this momentum of discrimination and denial of due process of law to PTI came to a halt, and some wisdom was exercised to broker reconciliation in the larger national interest.