Wake up, Punjab

One can only wonder as to how low we can go as a nation. This week, we were in for yet another shock. A child pornography scandal has been unearthed in Kasur and the details that have emerged are sickening.

What is worrisome most are the ages and the sheer number of the victims. That this abuse had been ongoing for several years and it was only after a report was released by a government department that the police and the law enforcement agencies started to take action also begs questions.

While the police have accepted that they did receive complaints in the past; the usual excuse of the criminals being protected by “influentials” was enough to justify their negligence.

Only a few of the twenty five men believed to have been involved in this heinous crime have so far been arrested. The rest remain free.

The police blame the courts for letting off those it had arrested earlier. The courts blame the police for poor investigative work. In the end, the issue is forgotten.

In a country where religious parties take to the streets at the drop of a hat, there were no protests over this latest incident. Where we are quick to burn people belonging to religious minorities on mere suspicion, no one was outraged.

It seems we don’t love our children enough. It was our children who were killed in the APS attack in Peshawar last year. Nowhere in the world have we seen such barbarity. It was our children who were kidnapped by a serial killer in the late 90s and murdered in Lahore. In that case as well, the murderer got so frustrated with the ineptness of the police that he finally revealed himself.

And in this latest episode too it is our children who are the victims again. And, before we start praising the Punjab CM for his quick action, let us not forget that he has done far too little.

The case of three sons of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz MNA Mian Farooq and five others who allegedly gang raped a girl last year is all too fresh. And how the case was dropped after the victim girl said she was unwilling to give a blood sample for a DNA test in her affidavit and in perfect compliance the police therefore dropped the case.

No progress has yet been made in the September 2013 incident (almost two years have passed) when some unidentified persons raped a five-year-old girl and dumped her outside a teaching hospital.

The daughter of a Wapda employee, who was playing with her three-year-old cousin outside her Mughalpura home, went missing along with her cousin. The kidnappers threw the girl on the greenbelt outside the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital and the boy near the Services Hospital. A traffic warden finding the boy weeping outside the Services Hospital took him to the office of a private TV channel and then to the Child Protection Bureau.

The father of the victim called upon Shahbaz Sharif to “publicly hang the criminals on the very spot they committed this inhuman act”. The Punjab police made one arrest and that too turned out to be a false lead.

In October 2013, a 14-year-old girl was found unconscious near Expo Center in Jauhar Town, Karachi. Her rescuers took her to Jinnah Hospital’s emergency ward where an initial examination confirmed she was raped. No arrests so far.

In March 2014, a 19-year-old girl from Karachi was raped and dumped on the roadside by some unidentified persons near Ghazi Road, Lahore. The girl was rushed to a local hospital where an examination confirmed she was raped. In this case the girl identified her attackers, but again no arrests were made.

In July 2014, a three-year-old girl was gang raped in Green Town area of Lahore and thrown on a street. The girl was moved to Jinnah Hospital. Again, no arrests. But these are not isolated incidents. There are many more such incidents that went unreported. And the situation is probable worse in other provinces.

When we believe that no news can shock us any more, something happens that makes us change this view. What is also common is that there are no lessons learnt.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 10^th,  2015.

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