Crime and punishment

It is about weak state that is unable to establish law and order or hand out substantial punishment to unjust accusers

Recently there was a heart-breaking picture of three very young children doing rounds on social media. Two of them are crying with an intensity that gnaws at one’s soul while their grandfather, who looks outnumbered and old, attempts to comfort them.

These children are the painful reminders of Shama and Shehzad’s tragedy.



Now cut to another image. Pop star-turned-preacher Junaid Jamshed stares at us earnestly through a screen, his hands joined together in ‘maafi’ as he repeatedly refers to himself as flawed and asks forgiveness for inappropriate remarks he made during a televised sermon about a revered religious figure.

The Pakistan Penal Code states that use of derogatory remarks in respect of holy personages can earn the offender a jail sentence and a fine.

Opinions seemingly diverged as his mentor Maulana Tariq Jamil, head of the Tableegi Jamaat, while dissociating himself from the comments, said that he had asked Jamshed to seek forgiveness. But the Pakistan Sunni Tehreek that issued a fatwa against him is in no mood to forgive. It has rejected his video apology and insisted that he must be tried in court. The police have since opened a blasphemy investigation against him.

Meanwhile, Mr Jamshed’s online apology has been viewed more than 600,000 times and shared by more than 50,000 people on Facebook. It has also elicited a wave of support for him as many commenters wrote that he should be forgiven and we cannot be judge and jury or decide who amongst us are the sinners.

This lenient tone and conciliatory attitude is quite novel if not completely absent in the usual blasphemy debate. Amongst many others, there are at least three little children who could and should take issue with this double standard (if they were even old enough or could ever dare).

Shama and Shehzad never got a chance to plead their innocence, apologise, explain, indeed the accusations against them were never even proven. They were hunted down and executed by a mob incited to violence in a depressingly familiar pattern.

It can be argued that the blasphemy laws did not directly come into play here, as this case and many others like it, did not go to court and victims died at the hands of enraged vigilantes. In instances where the blasphemy accused have not been executed extra-judicially, many are languishing in prisons.

The immediate concern here is that of self-appointed implementers, who act with impunity and do not care that the law at least requires due process. Most such cases eventually boil down to personal, monetary, and power disputes so the argument is not really about religion. It is about a weak state that is unable to establish law and order or hand out any substantial punishment to the unjust accusers, exploiters and violent implementers of this bit of legislation.

These mobs, then, are the only logical outcome of a society where the silent majority is not violent but its sanctimonious attitude seeps into the fabric of the nation so that some among us can take this latent intolerance to a very real and very violent conclusion for the most vulnerable.

The majority has a false sense of security that its religious credentials are too strong for it to be accused of blasphemy even though the highest number of those booked have historically been Muslims. Maybe this high-profile incident will now rattle a few comfort zones.

Mr Jamshed has all the right social and religious credentials by our society’s standards, but his tearful apology and alleged absence from the country is proof positive that even the rigidly compliant amongst us can be brought down.

Among the not-so-compliant or not so socially/religiously well placed, the danger is palpable, imminent and very real.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 10^th,  2014.

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