Page 10 - Pakistan Link - September 25, 2020

P10 – PAKISTAN LINK – SEPTEMBER 25, 2020
n By Karamatullah K. Ghori
P Toronto, Canada
rime Minister Imran Khan
echoed the national senti-
ment of his people when,
in an interview with a private
television chan-
nel on Monday,
September 14, he
lamented that the
gruesome ‘high-
way gang-rape’ in-
cident had “shak-
en the entire nation.’’
IK was commenting on that
bestial incident, on Lahore-Sialkot
Highway, four days earlier, in
which a young mother, stranded
on the highway because her car had
stalled, in the middle of the night,
was gang-raped by two gunmen in
front of her three young children.
The national uproar triggered
by this outrageous incident in
Pakistan evoked the memory of a
similar gangrape tragedy in Delhi,
India, in December 2012, in which
a young university student was out-
raged by a clutch of drunken rap-
ists on a bus in front of her fiancé.
That ghastly occurring had sent a
shock wave across India and shak-
en a slumbering nation to its core.
Justice in that heart-wrenching case
in Delhi took its own time, though.
The three perpetrators of that
crime were hanged only a couple of
months ago. It’s shocking that both
India and Pakistan—inheritors of
the British judicial legacy- have
both abused it.
But no less shocking in this
tragic Lahore event was the callous
statement issued by the CCPO of
Lahore—the city police’s chief cop,
in simple parlance—Omar Sheikh
on the heels of the story breaking
across the parameters of Pakistan.
The man saddled with the respon-
sibility to ensure safety and security tragedy.
of every inhabitant in his jurisdic-
tion, quite casually turned the re-
pugnant incident on its head when
he blithely questioned why the lady
had chosen to go out in the middle
of the night?
The police in Pakistan isn’t
known for efficiency of service. On
the contrary, it has quite a reputa-
tion for being a refuge of criminals-
friendly rogues and scoundrels who
think their uniform gives them a
license to abuse the people in the
name of being watchdogs of their
security.
But the callous, cold-hearted
comments of the Lahore CCPO,
that virtually pointed the finger at
the victim of the rape and held her
responsible for inviting that visita-
tion upon her was a class act of an
essential service, i.e. police, being
totally divorced from reality.
No surprise that the ultra-in-
sensitivity of the CCPO has invited
swift and well-deserved condem-
nation, across the board, from an
outraged intelligentsia dominating
Pakistan’s social media. Calls from
across the social media spectrum
have demanded of the government
to fire the callous CCPO and hold
him accountable for his tentative
sense of service to the people—a
demand that IK has yet to address.
Outrageous as the chief cop’s
off-the -cuff remarks maybe he was
echoing the sentiment that rules the
roost as far as the cultural mores of
Pakistan’s male-dominated feudal
society are concerned. Misogyny
has been an endemic feature of this
feudal system that has prevailed
for centuries. Women are at best
second-class denizens in this male-
Change This Misogynist Culture
dominated, patriarchal, milieu.
Their role has been defined and
instilled in the hearts of women, in
particular, as being there to serve
their male species and carry out
their orders without demur.
It’s unfortunate that in a sup-
posedly democratic country like
Pakistan, with its constitution
loudly proclaiming that both gen-
ders, men and women, will have
equal rights in its domain women
have regularly been short-changed
and denied their fundamental right
of equality with their men-folk.
It isn’t surprising, at all, that
women have had no luck in their
quest for redressal of this appalling
imbalance in their place in the so-
cial pecking order, because misogy-
nist feudal culture also hogs the
country’s political order. Legislative simple parlance—Omar
assemblies, at federal and provin-
cial levels, have long been havens
for feudal lords and their scions
and minions. The same thread runs
through the civil services, includ-
ing, most importantly, the police.
So, Omar Sheikh, Lahore’s
CCPO, was echoing the sentiment
of his feudal class when he acerbi-
cally, and almost vicariously, held
the woman gang-raped in front of
her children responsible for her
PM IK, in his aforementioned
television interview seemed to fa-
vor exemplary punishment for rap-
ists. He was of the opinion that a
rapist should either be given capital
punishment or castrated for good
with the use of chemicals, as is the
practice in some European coun-
tries.
IK, seeking to strike a com-
mon chord with the vibrant social
media, apparently wants his sense
of personal outrage to register on
the minds of his people, particu-
larly the social activists, that he
was in their corner on this grue-
some incident and wanted to turn
things around. He has long been
an ardent and vociferous advocate
of a ‘New Pakistan’ where conven-
tional moorings working against
the interest of the common man are
taken down for good.
His advocacy of change has
been a welcome initiative for the
younger generation of Pakistanis.
However, his two-year track record
in office doesn’t quite live up to his
protestations of ‘change’ in a mean-
ingful and substantive sense. What
meets the eye to even a casual ob-
server of the socio-political order
under his administration is more of
the same. Déjà vu is how any pundit
would describe it.
IK’s party, PTI, claims to have Punjab, the notorious Sharif Broth-
changed the police culture in the
province of KPK, where the party
has been in power since 2013. It
can give itself some wiggle room
by insisting that in Punjab, it has
been in power for only two years,
which period may be insufficient
to change—or impact in any sub-
stantive sense—the patriarchal and
heavily-feudal mores of the coun-
try’s largest and most populous
But no less shocking
in this tragic Lahore
event was the callous
statement issued by the
CCPO of Lahore—the
city police’s chief cop, in
Sheikh on the heels
of the story breaking
across the parameters
of Pakistan. The man
saddled with the
responsibility to ensure
safety and security of
every inhabitant in
his jurisdiction, quite
casually turned the
repugnant incident
on its head when he
blithely questioned why
the lady had chosen to
go out in the middle of
the night?
province.
Punjab, indeed, is a can of
worms as far as its archaic, but
deeply-entrenched, patriarchal feu-
dal system is concerned. That me-
dieval system—in which women
are at a lower rung of society than
men—is a case of double jeopardy
for women because patriarchy is
backed up to the hilt by an unen-
lightened clergy at the beck-and-
call of their feudal lords.
To make matters worse, Pun-
jab had been in the clutches of
the bone-corrupt Sharif clan for
www.PakistanLink.com
well over a decade until IK’s PTI
knocked them off their pedestal
in 2018. But in the course of their
long hold on all levers of power in
ers, Nawaz and Shahbaz, the police
force of the province was totally
abused, corrupted and won-over
to the service of the Sharifs. They
used the police force of Punjab and
its officers as their bell-boys, to run of all hues, will consider such an ac-
errands for them and do their bid-
dings without batting an eyelid.
Unconscionable officers, like
CCPO Omar Sheikh, are specimen
of police officers sold out to the
Sharifs. The Model Town massacre
of dozens of followers and aficio-
nados of Tahirul Qadri, the Shar-
ifs’ nemesis, is a text-book case of
how the Punjab police was used by
corrupt political leadership of the
province to pull their chestnuts out
of the fire.
The mission to turn around a
police service long wedded to its
colonial mentality of being masters
of men and not their servants is a
tough call for Imran Khan. But not
subduing this beast isn’t an option
for him. His political future would
hang in the balance without it.
At the same time, the younger
generations of Pakistanis will have
to be disabused of this lethal mind-
set of male superiority and domina-
tion over their women. Education
holds the key to such a transforma-
tion at the grassroots. That educa-
tion should begin, now.
Yes, by all means, IK should
bring in exemplary punishment
for rapists, child molesters and all
other kinds of criminals guilty of
gender-based crimes. Pakistanis
of all stripes and persuasions stri-
dently insist that theirs is an Islamic projects for GB, be it development
State. So, every justification that the project, educational, health, roads,
Islamic Republic of Pakistan should
dispense justice and punishments
according to the teachings of the
Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Holy
Prophet, PBUH.
The Islamic code of punish-
ment allows no leniency for crimes
against humanity. Raping a woman,
or an innocent, under-aged girl is
a heinous crime and an abuse of a
woman’s human rights under any
canon of laws. Let phony human
rights advocates and self-serving
NGOs—and their puny, brain-
dead Pakistani intellectuals—cry
themselves hoarse against capital
punishment. But if IK is really con-
cerned about gender-equality, as
mandated in Islam and the Con-
OPINION
stitution of Pakistan’s Islamic Re-
public, he should ignore all and any
alarm against capital punishment
for rapists.
Let it begin with those beasts
who defiled the sanctity of a mother
in front of her children. They should
be made a horrible example.
- K_K_ghori@hotmail.com
(The writer is a former ambas-
sador and career diplomat)
DILEMMA FROM P6
laid down in the resolutions of the
Security Council.”
One of the highly noted Lon-
don-based Kashmiri scholars, Pro-
fessor Zafar Khan says, “If Gilgat
Baltistan is absorbed as 5th province
into Pakistani Federation, Kashmiris
tion unfriendly by the Government
of Pakistan, similar to the one, taken
by the Narendra Modi government
in Indian Occupied Jammu & Kash-
mir on 5 August 2019.”
We are equally thankful to the
leadership of Azad Kashmir, be it
Muslim League, Nawaz; Muslim
Conference; People Party of Paki-
stan; Jamaat-e-Islami; Azad Kashmir
Peoples Party and others who unani-
mously adopted a resolution in 2014
in the Azad Kashmir Assembly that
“Making Gilgat-Baltistan a fifth
province will weaken Pakistan’s na-
tional stand on Jammu and Kashmir
at the international level.”
When I talked about this devel-
opment to a former diplomat of Paki-
stan here in the United States, his in-
stant reaction was, “With friends like
these, Kashmir does not need any
enemy.”
Obviously, making Gilgat-
Baltistan a province of Pakistan will
have disastrous consequences for the
disputed territory of Jammu & Kash-
mir. Those willing to advance its
cause among the international com-
munity will have lost a major ally.
The Kashmiri diaspora urges
the Government of Pakistan to pay
attention to the genuine grievances
of the people of Gilgat-Baltistan. The
government should undertake mega
etc. There is no doubt that the peo-
ple of Gilgat-Baltistan need imme-
diate relief from the Government of
Pakistan. It must be attended to im-
mediately and not left to tomorrow.
As Justice Muzaffar Ali, for-
mer Judge of the Gilgat – Baltistan
Supreme Appellate Court, has said,
“A prosperous Pakistan requires ad-
dressing of the grievances of GBians
which are being felt by the educated
youth of Gilgat–Baltistan bitterly.”
There can be various possibili-
ties of addressing the issues of Gilgat-
Baltistan. One: Let the people of Gil-
gat-Baltistan be given choice to elect
the Prime Minister and President as
is the case in Azad Kashmir. It will
have its own Supreme Court.
Currently, Gilgat-Baltistan has
elected a Chief Minister as is the case
in Punjab, Baluchistan, Khyber-Pak-
htun and Sindh. This gives the ap-
pearance as if GB is one of the prov-
inces of Pakistan. This mistake needs
to be rectified.
Whatever the shape and form
of future governance, one possibil-
ity should be out of consideration,
i.e., making it a province of Pakistan.
Let’s not forget all the sacrifices given
by the people of Jammu and Kashmir
to exercise their right to self-deter-
mination.
(Dr Fai is the Secretary General
of Washington- based World Kash-
mir Awareness Forum - gnfai2003@
yahoo.com)