- Time to do the right thing
With just a couple of months to go till retirement, the CJP has thrown himself into his mohim to fix the country and bring it onto some kind of track. With a pack of photographers and hangers-on in tow he arrives unannounced at institutions and questions personnel on the premises about the institution’s administration, and contribution to society. He does this with the best will in the world, one is sure, and the zeal of a reformer, although you wonder what set the zeal in motion so all of a sudden, and why the aggressive stance, but oh well. It isn’t clear what but something’s going on. If you’ve read the Harry Potter books these incidents smack of Weasley’s Decoy Detonators which are little objects that run around letting off bangs and puffs of smoke, creating diversions where required. What the bangs and smoke are hiding… in Harry Potter it could be something quite sinister, like He Who Must Not Be Named. Real life is often quite out of a book.
But the CJP is right. Everything needs fixing. Not least of all the judiciary, which seems to have been included in the list at the last moment as if it had suddenly occurred to someone as something that had best be mentioned too.
The legal situation in Pakistan smacks of Dickens’ Jarndyce vs Jarndyce in Bleak House, a case that dragged on and on. Dickens describes it like this:
Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, over the course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out.
There are several cases this reminds one of but none as much as the case of Asia Bibi. Please CJP, settle this before you go if you want to earn that medal of a knight in shining armour.
Aasiya Bibi is a 47 year old Christian woman who has been in prison since 2009, ten long years, made that much longer for Asia as a woman with five young children, who like the wards of Jarndyce have grown older while their mother’s sentence drags on. A death sentence hangs over Asia’s head but has been postponed several times following appeals.
The reason for Aasiya’s incarceration appears to be an accusation of blasphemy made against her by a woman already involved in a tu tu mai mai (unpleasant disagreement) with Aasiya’s family regarding damage to property. Aasiya’s crime was said to be drinking water from the same cup as some Muslim women, which they claim is not allowed in Islam. Really? My daughter in law is Christian. She and I have no such hang ups. But then of course she is white which is categorised differently.
In response she was thrown into prison. Is that really what our Prophet (pbuh) did, or what he would have done? What an ideal opportunity to have thrown away, if one must proselytise at such a point, of enumerating the Prophet Muhammad’s (pbuh) great deeds and forgiving nature, how he would never belittle another person’s beliefs to start with, or treat a woman like Aasiya had been treated, how he was kindness incarnate, and just and merciful as well.
What the CJP and Imran Khan’s government does in the case of Aasiya Bibi is likely to be the pivotal point of judgment with reference to them. You hope they will have the strength of character to do humane justice by her.
