Whatever you do, don’t call the police
In 1992, a second year student and some family members were arrested under murder charges. The charges were false. What should have been a simple investigation to decide the matter turned into years of his family bankrupting themselves trying to keep the boy alive. Years of pleas for appeals fell on deaf ears – he was sentenced to death in 1998, a sentence upheld in 2008 by Lahore High Court. It wasn’t till 2016, twenty four yearsafter his unlawful and unjust arrest, that the Supreme Court granted an appeal and admitted what he had known from the start: there was absolutely no evidence that Mazhar Farooq had committed the crime. An innocent man has spent half his life in prison – a guest of the infamous hospitality of the Pakistan police – all for nothing.
Where does one begin to right such a wrong? How does one correct an injustice this grave? The police force, reported as one of the ruling party’s primary concerns for revival in the general elections of 2013, is far from a diligent saviour – it’s a joke at best, and at its worth, an instigator of the very terror and corruption it’s supposed to curtail. And with all eyes on the judiciary in the wake of Panama-gate, reports like those about Mazhar Farooq are hardly stellar recommendations for the country’s judicial process. In any other country, his story would have been picked by the media and film industries as material for a powerful eye-opener about the criminal justice system. He would be heralded as a hero –not only for surviving the ordeal, but for refusing to give up on his education while behind bars. In Pakistan, though, the system is decidedly set against the poor and for the service of the powerful. Mazhar Farooq isn’t an anomaly. Sadly, he’s the norm.