The night is dark

Five Hazaras were gunned down in Quetta on June 7. Numbering 500, the bereaved families and members of the Hazara community later protested on the streets with coffins of the deceased – in vain.
Aftab Bahadar was hanged on June 10. Sentenced in 1992 for murder along with Ghulam Mustafa, the plumber for whom he worked, he had been painfully waiting on the death row for 22 years. However, both Ghulam and the eyewitness who testified against Aftab only recently repudiated the claim that Aftab was complicit in the crime. According to The Guardian and the human rights organisation, Reprieve, Aftab said that when he was arrested the police asked for a 50,000 rupee bribe and said they would let him go if he paid. He couldn’t.
What lies between these deaths is hollowness, a hollowness of promises and vows that continues to get more and more jarring each day since December 16, 2014.
With a seriously flawed judicial system and reportedly the world’s largest number of inmates on death row – believed to be over 8000 – the lifting of the moratorium on the death penalty in Pakistan was controversial from the start. Yet all reason was jettisoned in an attempt to satiate the seething fury and mourning after the Peshawar attack. The decision was oblivious to logic in disregarding the fact that the very desire of terrorists resides in death, and that an ideology as toxic, bloodthirsty and pervasive as that of extremism cannot be bound, let alone defeated, by the mere physical elimination of its members.
Nonetheless, the restoration of the death penalty was made to appear as a seemingly bold step against terrorists; symbolic of the state’s newfound deadly and steely resolve against terrorism. However, the reinstatement of the death penalty was but a grand eyewash and façade used to deflect from taking real action on the fronts that demanded immense political will, honesty, courage and tenacity. A reality starkly reflected between the unabated killings in Quetta and the hanging of Aftab Bahadur at Kot Lakhpat.
The comprehensive National Action Plan that emerged in January as the government’s guide to countering terrorism and extremism seems to have been an act of plain political grandstanding since it remains far from any noticeable implementation. A critical statement on the state of madressah education by Information Minister Pervaiz Rasheed was enough to evoke hatred against him, prompting fears for his safety.
Such are the hazards and hurdles associated with the problem of extremism in Pakistan that a mere statement can shackle the government from action. As for the minorities, Shikarpur, Youhanabad and Quetta are enough as examples. Minorities continue to be hounded while militant outfits such as the LeJ and SSP continue to run amok with their lust for blood.
On the other hand, decisions taken in the wake of the Peshawar attack such as the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government’s permission to allow teachers weapons inside schools resonate with the coarse nature of political imagination in the country. The prevalence of such poor governance that determines this slipshod management of alarming issues and knee-jerk reactions to them has only recently taken the life of a 12-year old pupil in Swat who was accidentally shot dead by a teacher while he (the latter) was cleaning his pistol.
Despite the monstrosity that bloodily usurped the lives of 141 children, the government’s reaction has been marked by the customary national cycle of temporary outrage, condemnation, protest, forget and repeat. The recent killings of the Hazara in Quetta and the execution of Aftab Bahadur serve to illustrate lack of any decisive, solid or substantial government and state action against terrorists and extremists, and the superficiality of the steps taken, such as the restoration of the death penalty, in curbing this menace.
Little has changed six months on since the Peshawar Attack, most of all when it comes to the captivity of Pakistan and its collective consciousness by political, ideological, social and moral paralysis.
At such a moment in time, one must listen to a dead man speaking from his grave; Aftab Bahadaur’s words from his last letter (translated and published in The Guardian a day before his execution):
“While the death penalty moratorium was ended on the pretext of killing terrorists, most of the people here in Kot Lakhpat are charged with regular crimes. Quite how killing them is going to stop the sectarian violence in this country, I cannot say. I hope I do not die on Wednesday, but I have no source of money…I have not given up hope, though the night is very dark.”
The night ended for Aftab as his last, but Pakistan‘s nights remain very dark.
The writer is a freelance contributor.
Website: hafsakhawaja.wordpress.com