Khaled Ahmed - The curse of the law: victims of Pakistan’s blasphemy law are mostly the poor and the helpless
The Supreme Court of Pakistan delivered a historic
“observation” on October 27 when it decided that asking for “improvements” in
the country’s blasphemy law was not objectionable. Imagine, it took a court
verdict to enable a citizen to criticise what is the most draconian law in
Pakistan, snagging innocent citizens to death.
The court actually stated: “Any call for reforming the
blasphemy law (Section 295-C Pakistan Penal Code) ought not to be mistaken as a
call for doing away with that law; and it ought to be understood as a call for
introducing adequate safeguards against malicious application or use of that
law by motivated persons.”
The court was hearing the case of a murderer who can’t be
hanged despite a conviction because he had killed a man after blaming him
for blasphemy in 2011 — then Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer. There is the
street power of conservative lawyers and religious sects favouring him. In the
background, there are more powerful elements with outreach, which protect them
and scare normal citizens, including the judges — the terrorist organisations
Pakistan first gave birth to and now fears.
Taseer’s killer belonged to an “elite force” police commando
assigned to him for his protection. Taseer had been speaking out against the
biased judicial process prosecuting a poor Christian woman, Aasiya Bibi, under
the blasphemy law. The Supreme Court defended Taseer by saying that his
corrective criticism of the law was fair and that the killer policeman,
therefore, had to hang.
In February 2011, in the wake of the murder, Stephen Cohen,
author of a number of books on Pakistan, had this to say: “These are symptoms
of a deeper problem in Pakistan. There is not going to be any good news from
Pakistan for some time, if ever, because the fundamentals of the state are
either failing or questionable. This applies to both the idea of Pakistan, the
ideology of the state, the purpose of the state, and also to the coherence of
the state itself. Pakistan has lost a lot of its stateness, that is, the
qualities that make a modern government function effectively. So there’s
failure in Pakistan on all counts. I wouldn’t predict a comprehensive failure
soon but clearly that’s the direction in which Pakistan is moving.”
Do we finally have the “good news” Cohen was despairing of?
If you look at it from the point of view of Aasiya Bibi rotting in jail, it is
hardly any news. The Supreme Court has spoken from its Olympian perch, but the
factory of unilateral conviction grinds on at the level of the district courts.
The court was probably aware of it because it recalled that “434 offenders
under blasphemy laws were arrested in Pakistan from 1953 to July 2012; and
among them 258 were Muslims, 114 Christians, 57 Ahmadis and 4 Hindus.” The
statement could be misleading because it didn’t note that blasphemy cases
spiked only after the blasphemy law was imposed by General Zia-ul-Haq in the
late 1980s. And if you go by proportion ratios, then it is not Muslims
who have been most entrapped under this law but Christians and Hindus.
One lame excuse is that if you don’t have the law, people
will dish out their own justice by killing the accused. Since 1990, much after
the legislation, 52 people have been extra-judicially murdered for insulting
the Prophet. The fact is that the law has prompted the killers to kill. Many of
the killers are not “outraged” but are motivated by the lure of property-grab.
Christians are attractive victims because their slums are often located on
prime land, much of it leased to them by the British Raj in areas then
uninhabited.
In 2013, 15 Christians, five Ahmadis and two Hindus, accused
under the law, languished in jail because the alleged offence is non-bailable. Do the judges let off victims after finding them wrongfully
accused? No, they are too scared to do what their conscience might recommend.
Only one death sentence was overturned in 2013-14. Today, 17 innocent citizens
are waiting for their trial to end while 20 others are consoled that they have
to serve life sentences. No one has been hanged for blasphemy so far, but the
modus operandi in Pakistan is this — let the price of a bad law be paid by
innocent victims by staying indefinitely in jail.
Lawyers and retired judges who indulge in this sick pastime
of punishing blasphemy don’t care if the victims are mostly poor people who
can’t afford effective professional defence in court. Sadly, if these poor
people are defended by a rare lawyer dedicated to human rights, he can be
killed too. A Multan lawyer, Rashid Rehman Khan, was killed last year in such a
case by a powerful ex-jihadi gang after telling him that he was in their cross
hairs. Before his “foretold” death, Rehman said, “Defending a blasphemy accused
in Pakistan is like walking into the jaws of death.”
There is no mitigation for blasphemy, since judges are
scared of letting the accused walk. They are supposed to spend long periods in
jail, roughly calculated at an average of eight years. Of course, no one has
been acquitted, but in one case where a Christian was to get foreign asylum, it
took that length of time, which means the life of the innocent victim was
seriously curtailed.
