Outside Islamabad

In Dawn’s editorial Brutalized Society today, I found out that the Sialkot Tragedy had also visited Gujrat.

“a man was bludgeoned to death over a minor traffic row. Eyewitnesses say that the victim, Tariq Mahmood, narrowly avoided a collision with a motorbike. An argument ensued after which the bikers, whose apparel indicated their association with the legal fraternity, started hitting the car driver. Mahmood took refuge in his car but the enraged bikers, joined by three of their colleagues, broke the car windows, pulled him out and beat him with bricks until he was dead.”

I tried to avoid taking part in the Sialkot lynching debate, because I thought it was over the top. There have been numerous instances across the world where such unfortunate, brutal incidents happen, sometimes even with the police standing by. Khurram Husain listed a few in his Tribune piece, Poetry of a Lynch Mob. But with another incident, merely a month a part. I am worried.

More from the Dawn Editorial:
“It is not surprising that deteriorating conditions in Pakistan, amongst them spiraling poverty and a worsening security situation, have rendered society brutal to the extreme. It seems that employing violent means comes almost naturally to a citizenry that has witnessed countless atrocities that include mass killings, suicide bombings, lynchings, beheadings and the stringing up of corpses by groups such as the Taliban.”

There is no doubt that the constant string of bombings and violence in Pakistan and the media’s equally attentive portrayal of the violence, coupled with its equally lacking contextualizing of the violence, is going to have an effect on the people’s psyche. Every spat of violence is reported with an equal amount of conspiracy theories. The people of Pakistan just don’t know who is in the wrong and who is to blame.

And our educated lawyers too are not free from falling into that trap, as Adam Ellick’s report, Losing on the Media Front in the NYT back in March, showed.

“The tragedy, coming so soon after the lynching of two brothers in Sialkot, makes us wonder how far Pakistani society is from the level of beasts. The incident reminds us that education or even a certain social level — as indicated by the men’s garb and mode of transport — is no bar to brutality….Deplorable too, as in the Sialkot case, was the role played by the police: they stood by and watched. An eyewitness says that he appealed to three policemen present a few yards away but they refused to intervene on the truly shocking pretext that they had been deputed merely to check vehicles. Neither did they make any attempt to apprehend the killers”

Without getting in to the whole corrupt police/they-don’t-get-paid-squat debate, I can see why the police didn’t step forward to help out. When I was producing my Disposable ally series in February of 2009, we had to shoot outside the Diplomatic Enclave in Islamabad. I got to talking to some of the policemen at the security cordon, and I asked one of them, a middle-aged man named Sarfaraz with the most striking blue eyes, if he was worried about doing his duty outside one of the highest risk areas in the country?’ And he replied, “I haven’t had a day off in 8 months, my daughter is sick, I need to take her to a doctor, but my application for one-day’s leave hasn’t been approved for weeks, that’s all I’m thinking about these days.”

With Pakistan’s increasing security concerns, the job of the police has slowly been shifted from law-enforcement to maintaining security-checking cars, manning buildings and guarding VIPs. And at the same time, the number of policemen haven’t been increased substantially. That’s why the police officers at the Diplomatic Enclave had not had a day off in 8 months. Currently Pakistan only has 350,000 police personnel for a population of 180 million. That puts one poorly-trained, badly-paid, unmotivated police officer to about 514 security-starved Pakistanis.

The last few years, Pakistani masses have been watching and living a continuous marathon of violent films; and police officers have been pulled away from their primary duty of maintaining law and order & catching the bad guys, to primarily being security guards or the first line of defense in a suicide attack.

Dawn’s Editorial rightly concludes “matters in Pakistan are rapidly reaching such a pass that the rule of law is being replaced by the law of the jungle.”