It is not OK to kill

Legal eye
We seem to be losing our sense of proportion and balance as a society. Lawyers may have let idealists down when they failed to take the rule of law movement to its logical conclusion. They may have the proclivity to resort to hooliganism and turn into a mob when aggrieved by the state’s heavy-handedness. They may be wrong in calling frequent strikes that hurt innocent litigants already stung by a dysfunctional justice system. Their professional ethics might leave a lot to be desired. All this is wrong. But none of this makes it okay to kill them.
In every cause and effect sequence there are redlines that must not be breached. In our society those redlines have faded away. At the slightest provocation, law-enforcement agencies and citizens degenerate into armed hordes and mobs, respectively. The underlying code of honour causing an insult or incitement to translate into a no-holds-barred conflict might be the same. But can we attribute equal blame for disproportionate responses by the police and citizens?
During the altercation in Daska, was SHO Shahzad Warriach required to shoot live rounds with the aim to kill protesting lawyers in self-defence? Or was it out of anger at the audacity of lawyers to not bow before instructions of uniformed men holding guns? Whatever the sequence of events or the insults involved, the SHO was responsible for undertaking crowd control in a rowdy situation. And how did he handle it? He killed two lawyers and injured many others.
Michael Brown, an unarmed black youth was killed in Ferguson and there were riots in the city. Freddie Gray died in police custody and a curfew had to be imposed in Baltimore to prevent violence. Rana Khalid Abbas was the president of Daska Bar Association. He was not a criminal. He was not fleeing from a crime scene. He was unarmed and neither a threat to the police nor to society. He and Irfan Chauhan were killed point blank in full public view by an on-duty police officer called in to diffuse an altercation between lawyers and TMA staff.
Abbas and Chauhan are now buried under heaps of mud, never to come back. Their friends and family are tormented. Is it not incredible that sensible folk wish to present the angry and aggressive response of lawyers as the real issue here? There can be no justification for lawyers being violent or attacking the police or the media or anyone else. That such events happen is despicable.
But Abbas and Chauhan were killed not because lawyers are rowdy. They were killed because our police have begun functioning as vigilantes and mercenaries. That lawyers get no sympathy from sensible folk and newspapers publish cartoons depicting lawyers as stick-bearing-aggressors after a tragedy that leaves two of them dead and two critically injured is because lawyers are seen as a rowdy lot.
Without justifying breach of the law in any form, let us acknowledge that if there is one lesson our state reinforces everyday it is that you won’t be meted out any service (forget service on merit) unless you force the state to deliver. In this scenario police are the face of the state and lawyers that of society. Both faces might be ugly to an extent. But responsibility for abuse of authority can’t be distributed equally between them.
What the lawyers were doing in Daska and post-Daska on the streets was a manifestation of their tribalism. How do army officers respond if police ever misbehave with one of their tribe? Why did young doctors have to gang up and agitate on the streets of Lahore? Why did the blind have to protest outside Punjab Chief Minister’s office (and get beat up by police in the process)?
The state simply doesn’t think you exist unless you can throw your weight around. How much nuisance value you wield depends on the tribe you belong to (there being a pecking order among tribes). So when the state representative (ie the SHO) decides to terminate the head of a local tribe with some nuisance (ie the Bar president), one wonders whether we are entering a state of anarchy where even the rules of the jungle that otherwise regulate the relationship between our predatory state and society don’t apply anymore.
Abuse of power and authority by police is not peculiar to Pakistan. But in other civilised societies it is the exception and not the rule. There exist institutional checks to control and minimise the abuse. Here, the police as the coercive arm of the state do nothing but coerce, either at their own behest or that of their masters. In the 1990s there was speculation that the Punjab Police included gangs of mercenaries that could be hired to kill. The Model Town tragedy confirmed that the role of the police still remains suspect.
Last weekend, many newspapers ran the photo of masked police commandos outside the Sindh High Court. Their brief probably was to avenge the insults that Zulfiqar Mirza has been hurling on Asif Zardari. The only thing ironical about the setting was that it seemed commonplace within our socio-political culture: if you feel your honour has been sullied you can readily resort to violence to seek its restitution; and if you have power it is accepted and even expected that you will abuse it. Our culture of honour encourages and justifies violence.
If someone abuses your elders in a rural or tribal setting, honour demands immediate resort to physical violence. If a female family member elects to marry of her own choice, restoration of honour becomes contingent on the couple being killed. If someone says something that offends your religious sensibilities, you must be man enough to take revenge for the sake of your religion’s honour. The state not only endorses this honour code but also offers its coercive apparatus for its implementation and preservation to anyone who has access to state power.
Psychologists conducted a test in the US where they studied the responses of two groups of youth, one from the south and one from the north, to the same provocative measures. The responses of youth from the south were significantly more aggressive than those of youth from the north. Notions of honour are rooted in culture. The honour code prevalent in Pakistan is a violent one. And our state and its institutions, rather than breaking this code with professional training and checks and balances, have unfortunately internalised it.
At an institutional level, we need to urgently rebuild our police force into a professional institution focused on servicing the security needs of citizens. When we persecute officers like SSP Muhammad Ali Nekokara and DIG Aftab Cheema for showing the gall and seeking space to perform their duties professionally and in accordance with the law, we should not be surprised when SHOs such as Warriach use their power and their gun for instant satiation of personal egos or when a team of police commandos shows up outside a high court to beat up Mirza.
At a societal level, we need to revisit our honour code. Progression is about conservation and change. We need to preserve what is noble about our culture and change what is oppressive. And the first thing we must change is the value we place on human life. We must itch into our collective conscience a bright line rule: no matter how provocative or loathsome the words or actions of an individual, so long as he/she doesn’t threaten the life of another, his/her right to live must be preserved.
The writer is a lawyer based in Islamabad.
Email: sattar@post.harvard.edu