Daily Times, Lahore

EDITORIAL: Our legal and social extremism

Dr Younus Sheikh, who was accused of blasphemy and arrested in October 2000, has mercifully been released. He was sentenced to death by the additional district and sessions court Islamabad on August 18, 2001 and moved the Lahore High Court a few days later. But after having extricated from a legal system that nets people through extremist decrees like the Blasphemy Law, he could not live in Pakistan for fear of his life. The release has also brought exile for Dr Sheikh, who has had to leave Pakistan for the safety and tolerance of an alien country and society. The activists who worked so hard since Dr Sheikh’s arrest to secure his freedom have every right to celebrate their hard-won victory. But two burning issues continue to cast the long shadow of despair. Until they are addressed, the victory will not be complete.

The first is obvious: the Blasphemy Law remains on the statute books. True, sentences under it by lower courts, stuffed with judges bristling with ideology, have invariably been overturned by the higher judiciary. But delayed justice can hardly recompense those charged with blasphemy and sentenced under it. The accused have to spend years in agonising pain, fearful of being killed either in jail or outside, if and when they are released. The fact that even after being released, the blasphemy accused are liable to be killed leads us to the second issue. What can be done to purge the society of the bigotry and the violence that issues forth from it?

Clearly, social attitudes are as much to blame as the law itself. Ironically, proponents of the law justify arrests for blasphemy by arguing that being in police custody in fact secures a person thus charged from the anger of the mobs or anyone whose cup of piety is running over. This argument is not only absurd it is downright malicious. Not just because in certain cases persons charged with blasphemy have been murdered in jail by pious inmates in collusion with the equally pious jail staff — which means there is no guarantee that a blasphemy accused would be safe even in custody — but also because this argument seeks, implicitly, to justify the blatantly unlawful behaviour of the pious by presenting their ‘rightful’ anger as constituting extenuating grounds for committing murder. What makes it particularly ugly is the hidden assumption that action against blasphemy is beyond the purview of the state and its laws, especially if the state allows a person charged with blasphemy to walk away instead of lynching him officially. That there may no grounds for sentencing the accused, especially if it is proved that the charge was based on malafide, does not seem to matter. A person once charged with blasphemy has to live with that curse and, perhaps, die with it, the veracity or otherwise of the charge, notwithstanding.

This is the extremism Pakistanis do not want to talk about; most would not even call it extremism. Ditto with hounding the Ahmaddiya community, which has become a national pastime, the contagion having spread even to the enlightened sections of society. But that is exactly what it is — extremism. And it exists at the level of both state and society. The real victory will come when the statute books are cleansed of such laws and the social attitudes undergo a transformation. But the first is important for achieving the second goal.

23rd Jan 2004