Minority bashing

• Another instance of sadistic hate crime

Unfortunately, Pakistan is usually in the global media glare for the wrong reasons, and the recent case of a Christian youth jumping off the fourth floor of the FIA’s office in Lahore during interrogation will only reinforce this ugly image. An ambivalent attitude towards terrorist groups has put Pakistan in bad odour even with its friends, as the short reprieve won in avoiding the ‘grey list’ in Financial Action Task Force’s Paris meeting painfully revealed. The European Union’s Generalised Scheme of Preferences, allowing market access and favourable trading conditions, also rests on fair treatment of minorities and observing key human rights.

To be sure, inhumane torture, like terrorism, makes no distinction of religion, caste, creed, age or gender, but the present case has turned high-profile because charges against two Christian youth hare rooted in the Blasphemy Law which, though an attempt to protect sanctity of all religions, and carrying prohibitive punishments for false accusations, has sometimes been turned into an uncontrolled vehicle of private vengeance. The two Christian cousins accused of posting or sharing sacrilegious content on Facebook, were manhandled in police presence by the petitioners during court appearance, and turned over to the FIA, in whose custody the alleged order to perform an unnatural act, denied by the concerned officials, compelled one of the youths to risk his life by leaping from the fourth floor and miraculously surviving to tell the sordid tale. Ironically, instead of an independent inquiry, the subsequent investigation has been entrusted to FIA officials.

The process of genuinely proving a charge of blasphemy must be the most unenviable, complicated, and difficult of tasks even for a conscientious officer, demanding a fair and calm judicial procedure, but zealous hatred often overtakes legal proceedings and results in lynching or burning of innocents. The Coliseum in Rome was lit in red on Saturday to highlight persecuted Christians everywhere. Death convict Asia Bibi’s daughter and son in law addressed hundreds of gathered people, while Pope Francis in a private meeting with them remarked, ‘I think often of your mother and I pray for her’. Not even Saatchi and Saatchi can repair such a dark image.