In
1995, Justice Arif Iqbal Bhatti, along with other judges of a Lahore High Court
bench, struck down allegations of blasphemy
against two Christians. A third who had been accused along with them had
already been murdered while leaving court under police protection. The two
acquitted -- one of them a teenager -- left
Pakistan seeking asylum, declared innocent but still unable to live in a
country where mobs had thronged their court hearings asking for their deaths.
In
1997 the judge was shot dead in his office. The next year a man owned up to the
crime, but has apparently disappeared from custody since then.
Since
the creation of the blasphemy laws, at least 38
cases of extrajudicial killings (some of which involved the active involvement
or wilful neglect of the police) of people alleged to have directly committed
blasphemy have been documented. Arif Bhatti's was a relatively unusual case at
the time. More recently, though, two uniquely courageous Pakistanis lost their
lives for defending victims of Pakistan's
blasphemy laws. One was, of course, former Punjab Governor Salman Taseer. And
now the federal minister for minorities' affairs, Shahbaz Bhatti, an outspoken
critic of the law, a defender of the rights of the country's religious
minorities and one of Pakistan's
bravest citizens, has met the end he had
been predicting for himself these last few weeks.
In
both cases, criticizing the law against blasphemy -- one known to be
exceptionally open to misuse, invoked to settle everything from professional
rivalries to land disputes -- became blasphemy itself. The Pakistani Taliban's
response to Bhatti's murder made this abundantly clear; "He was a blasphemer
like Salman Taseer," a spokesman said.
Another person on the list of those condemned for simply criticizing the law is
former information minister Sherry Rehman,
who tried to table a bill to amend it. Several attempts have been made to
register cases against her, although these have largely remained out of the
public eye, and she has been barricaded in hiding since Taseer's assassination.
What
these examples show is an even more disturbing shift in an already disturbing
situation. The boundaries of blasphemy for some Pakistanis have now been
extended to include disagreement with a manmade law, and the punishment for committing
this particular flavor of "crime" - just like that for violating the law itself
- can be death without trial. The growth of intolerance within Pakistani
society, fallout from years of state sponsorship of militancy and more recently
from unwillingness or inability to wipe such militancy out after it struck out
at the state, has forged an extreme, murderous antipathy to freedom of
expression.
The
unwillingness of certain sections of the media to confront this militancy
loudly has only spurred it on. As others have noted, on Pakistani television this
evening most political talk show hosts focused on the security aspects of the killing
-- why, they insisting on knowing, was Bhatti, a politician arguably under
greater direct threat than any other, traveling without his guards when
ministers' extended security entourages are an enduring sight on the roads of
Pakistan's larger cities? Quite aside from the glaring fact that after Taseer's
murder at the hands of his guard, Mumtaz Qadri, Bhatti might not have trusted
the ability of the police to weed out extremist elements within their own
ranks, these analysts seemed to be -- perhaps deliberately -- missing the point.
The
question now is, will the ruling Pakistan People's Party (PPP)
government do the same? Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani condemned the murder
in the National Assembly in harsh terms today, and the information minister
went on air, complete with grief-stricken face, to rail against it. But the
same was true at the time of Taseer's murder -- it was easy enough for the PPP,
of which Taseer, Bhatti and Rehman are all members -- to criticize it the day
of, when the nation was reeling in shock. It was in the days following his
death, when right-wing political parties jumped into the vacuum to exploit the
incident and Qadri's supporters began coming out of the woodwork, that calling
Taseer a martyr became something most politicians were scared to do in public
and the government withdrew Rehman's bill (as
much as you can withdraw a bill that was never actually tabled).
It
was behavior unworthy of Bhatti, one of their own. "I was told that if I came
clean against the blasphemy law ... I will be assassinated, I will be beheaded," he
said in a recent interview with the BBC. "But the forces of ... extremism cannot
harass me, they cannot divert my attention."
"So
you won't be silenced?"
"Not
at all."
And
he wasn't -- until today. At a time when it needs heroes, Pakistan has lost one of the few it
had left.
Madiha Sattar is a senior assistant
editor at the Karachi-based monthly The Herald.
(1)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE