Where criminals are secure, and innocents die
Once lucky, twice confident, thrice dead, goes the saying, and more often than not, it does play out that way. Unfortunately, as far as Rana Sarwat is concerned, somebody else did the dying. The convicted kidnapper and under-trial murder accused managed to evade death for the third time in the face of James Bond/Ethan Hunt-inspired assassins, only for two innocent women, the mother and sister of the cabinet secretary, to lose their lives in a hail of gunfire as a pair of gunmen entered the supposedly secure VIP ward of Pims and managed to leave after the incident without any ...
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Order of the day
I called a friend in Karachi the other day to ask how he was doing. He responded with a verse from Ghalib which talks of a sea of blood in front and fears of worse to come. Asked about the government’s efforts to prevent further aggravation, he read another verse by Ghalib complaining of the confusion caused by new rules being announced every day. You may not find the couplet in Ghalib’s Dewan. It is one of those verses buried in his letters describing what Delhi was going through after the 1857 Mutiny was put down. Soon after this friend ...
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Chronicles of blasphemy
The British Raj criminalized blasphemy in 1860 and till 1986, the maximum punishment for the crime was ten years in prison. An amendment in 1986 created penalties of life imprisonment and death. This makes the Pakistani blasphemy laws the harshest in the world. Section 295 C awards the the death penalty for innuendo or insinuation. Words which, by very definition, are subjective. Our criminal system can put a person to death for vague terms. Here is an example: Muhammad Mehboob (alias Booba) was accused of putting ishtihars on the main gate of his local mosque which were allegedly against the dignity of the Holy Prophet (PBUH) and hence ...
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When will our police act?
I had not completely recovered from the shock of losing six of my friends in the Airblue plane crash when I witnessed another gruesome death on Wednesday night, day two of the recent spate of violence in Karachi. I was returning home from work when the situation in Gulistan- e- Jauhar suddenly deteriorated. There was heavy firing between two spots in the area, Jauhar Morr and Jauhar Chowrangi. In a state of panic, most cars turned around on the same road creating a jam. In the midst of this, my eyes were drawn to a few bystanders looking down at something. With a ...
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