Several channels took the poor man on as he emerged from hiding after his family had accepted blood money last month and pardoned Davis. The media men insisted that he reveal the details of how the deed was done and who should be blamed for it. The semi-literate guy in his 20s or 30s knew little what he was up against. One channel even tracked down his grandfather in a village, who simply said he hadn’t even met his son (Fahim and Akram’s father) in years and didn’t even know the names of his grandsons!
The question is: why such a media trial of an innocent citizen who rightly said that he and his family had broken no law by accepting blood money; that they acted with pragmatism as advised by all, including the family’s friends, for the sake of the country, and in accordance with the Sharia? The emotionalism attached to the case does not allow for any serious debate to take place as to why we have such laws that are so blatantly open to abuse and that insult one’s sense of justice. A deafening silence prevails on this major issue because the law in question happens to be a so-called Sharia law.
Like the law on blasphemy, which has claimed many lives extra-judicially, including those of a governor and a minorities’ minister, the Qisas and Diyat law too is man-made, as are the laws pertaining to hudood punishments and to admissible evidence before a court of law. They are controversial to say the least. Only their drafter, a cleric and a fallible man as such who was imported by Gen Ziaul Haq from Saudi Arabia to frame Pakistan’s Sharia laws, ascribed divine sanctions to the laws that he drafted.
There has never been a meaningful debate on such laws at a state or a public forum even though no tangible or conceivable good has come of them. Instead, they have eroded the social fabric by mixing up values, most notably of justice, which they are meant to serve, and of whose very lack we claim ourselves to be victims of. The ruse of such laws having a divine sanction behind them, as intended by Ziaul Haq as part of his repressive policies, has since evaded a dialogue on the legally just or unjust standing of all such legislation. It remains Pakistan’s all encompassing blind spot.
Some of the notable founding fathers of our country used popular religious idiom to unite the Muslims of India to attain the goal of Pakistan. When the same tactic was put to practice in the new state, that very idiom became a tool of abuse and oppression in the hands of West Pakistani bureaucracy and the military; the two used it to justify their virtual colonisation of the former East Pakistan, then the majority province.
In the 1970s the first elected prime minister of what remained of Pakistan abused religion again to first declare the Ahmadis non-Muslim and open floodgates of state sanctioned discrimination against that community, and then he introduced other cosmetic measures to appease the religious right. He misjudged the genius of his people who had voted for him as opposed to the religious right that he politically felt threatened by, even though they were not able to strike root in the people the way he did.
The misjudgment on Bhutto’s part was based in the aristocratic lifestyle he privately espoused and the persona he publicly portrayed of himself. Gen Ziaul Haq’s controversial Islamisation process came as a logical next step to Bhutto’s selective use of populist religious sloganeering to hold on to power. Subsequent governments, elected and autocratic, have suffered from a similar disconnect with the people and failed to do anything to fix the mess we have since landed ourselves in.
Amid all this hopelessness, the resounding demand for social justice that is the battle cry of the new generation, say the youngsters on the country’s so-called elite campuses, are our best hope. They are global citizens who embrace global values of social justice without necessarily being westernised in their political thinking—an element that the educated generations before them suffered from and used religion to connect with the ‘masses’, while living a lifestyle that alienated them from their own people.
By contrast, the new generation is very much at ease with its Muslim identity; it practises both religion and certain trends of westernisation in a unique blend that does not make the two appear contradictory to them. It is for this new generation to rise up to the challenge of reconciling the two truths that stare them in the face: how long can we dig our heads in the sand and expect laws that have not worked in the past to deliver us social justice today?
The established media, though independent, has its own exigencies to keep it from debating on such vital issues. But the social media used by the new generation has no such bars placed on it. That should be the starting point for a meaningful debate on all such issues. Or else we’ll see many more thousands of Pakistanis with money and influence walk away from justice for every one Raymond Davis who does that.
