Isn’t it grand?
They couldn’t make much stick to him, really. The Lashkar-e-Jhangvi’s feared hitman Malik Ishaq did a full fourteen years. His only two convictions, however, were one-and-a-half years and five years. The Lashkar’s activists have started tut-tutting the PPP and MQM(H) activists when the latter two brag about their leaders’ lengthy jail terms.
There couldn’t have been a worse timing of Ishaq’s release. In the aftermath of the Mumbai incident, the Indian media is going to have a field day, much like the liberals in Pakistan, decrying how the “government” has released alleged mastermind of the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team.
But the state isn’t a monolith. There are many self-regulating moving parts in the machine of the government. It is not an executive decision to let go of suspects but a judicial one. The courts could argue that theirs is not a vocation that weighs international implications; it is, instead, one that debates the merits of legal arguments.
It would be instinctive for those with liberal leanings to make a connection between the largely conservative, rightist judiciary and the low conviction rates of the militants that have been apprehended by the law enforcement agencies. But the fact of the matter remains that the conviction rates of our judicial system as a whole, even in cases other than terror, are rather low.
The problem arises from deficits in the capacities of the investigative bodies, the prosecution branch and, yes, the bench.
Efforts have to be made to grapple with this problem intelligently. There is the risk here to move from one extreme to the other. Our self-styled patriot act is one that requires a very low level of proofs for convictions. The extent to which such laws could be exploited need not be explained.
This is a slippery slope. Sometime the requirements of the law and the demands of justice are not the same. The law is a system, a machine. It is bound to have inefficiencies. True, machines can be tinkered with, but any and all recalibrations should be done carefully lest they fall apart completely.