Whither humanity?

Ten-year-old Farishta was abducted from outside her home in Chak Shahzad Islamabad and for five days police refused to fill an FIR for her being missing. She was found dead after she was tortured and raped. There is a sit-in going on in Islamabad. I am not going to taunt the nation on singing paeans of piety and yet having vultures who can commit such heinous and unimaginable crime.

This perversion and the unthinkable capacity to extract nauseating pleasure from innocent bodies of children is a trait which is a collective failure of humanity. I, rather, must call out the inhumanity, the cruelty and the complacency of the state and authorities which let this crime happen again and again because they aren’t serious in putting the ignominious of humans to justice.

In the case of Farishta that violent neglect is extreme, making this unspeakable tragedy open to contesting narratives. There were slogans that what happened to Zainab would not happen again but how soon we go into complacency when there are straw men to cling to and when tragedies of equal horror happen but are forced out of the mainstream. This collective human failure and this confounding of the tragedy by the oppressive and selective procedures of the state is an injustice to little Farishta that should haunt our imagination and consciousness for long.

Naveed Abbas Maitlo

Islamabad