- The beast is within us
On the 20th day of September in the year 2017, a person named Esmail Jafarzadeh was executed in public in Parsabad, a city in Iran near Ardebil province. Unaware of the factors that led to this hanging, people were furious over the heinous crime committed by Esmail Jafarzadeh. This execution went viral on social media as a huge number of people ensured their presence. It is indeed important to mention here the reason but before that, it is equally important to understand the role of George in this situation.
There was a restaurant in the eastern side of the main square, a hotspot for many tourists, where Ismail was hanged. One of those tourists was George who hailed from Scotland and a journalist by profession. George was fond of visiting Third World countries and interacting with the people. That is why he went to Iran and reached Parsabad after visiting Tehran. After checking in at a hotel there on 19 September, he received the news of a person’s public hanging at 10 in the morning in the main square facing the hotel. Ignoring this news, George started viewing the TV. Unable to understand the Iranian channels, George turned on an English channel which helped divert him a bit. An English drama series starring a person who was a shape-shifting man and could turn into any animal grabbed his attention. This supernatural being was actually a human but could change into a bird or an animal to help others.
Not the parents but the state should be held responsible for all this where the leaders intentionally keep us illiterate behind the slogans of welfare
Based on the character of Dr Jonathan Chase, this drama series was aired in September 1983 for the first time on NBCTV and, George saw it in repeat telecast. The programme was titled Manimal. Although ‘manimal’ has a negative connotation, in this series it has been portrayed as a super-human always helping others. George tried to relate this character to real-life humans but could not find any example. He laughed and concluded that such characters exist in fiction only. Contrary to this, wherever he went, he came across so many manimals who were real-life villains, could go to any extreme to fulfill their lust, raped the innocent girls and oppressed the orphans and molested their own sisters. With all these follies, the manimals still call themselves human beings and are not ashamed of their sins even after getting caught. George then slept, and the next morning when he woke up, he saw a crowd of people gathered at the roundabout to witness Esmail’s execution. George asked the waiter the reason for the hanging. Ali Rohani, the waiter, narrated hesitatingly that four months before, Esmail kidnapped a seven-year-old girl Atena Aslani from this area and raped her for many days. His heart did not melt even after listening to her shrieks and he killed her and buried her in his garage. Further investigations and the post mortem report led to his arrest, and he confessed. Later, on he was sentenced to public hanging. George’s eyes filled with tears, he captured the scene of hanging in his camera and wrote an article on it explaining the factors that lead to unveil the beast within humans.
George writes that the transformation of man into manimal becomes inevitable when just the roads and bridges become our priorities. In such situations, parents and teachers cannot be held responsible for a person’s nature. Be it Qasur’s Zainab, Iran’s Atena Aslani or the victim of rape by her brothers in Golra, it is a fact that we all have been distracted and trapped in our individual capacity. We are divided.
Who is to be blamed when the superficial thoughts of the leaders prefer manimal development over human development? What do these leaders care about Zainab’s terrible state of pain while facing the beast? Atena got justice in the form of public execution of her criminal, but who will listen to the dozens of women killed by point-blank bullets in Model Town? Who would bring justice to the innocent boys who have been blindly murdered in the name of fake encounters by police officers just to get medals and promotions?
Who is to be blamed in a society where the oppressed raising their voice for justice have to face an iron fist and mothers are afraid of sending their children out of the homes lest they become the victim of police brutality? Who would listen to the wails of the people facing hunger pangs when the leaders of this nation dance away the nights? Where journalism becomes corporate and rulers rule over their businesses, no one would pay serious attention to Zainab getting raped or Khaleel getting brutally killed with his innocent family. On the other hand, this is a bitter reality that it was not Zainab’s dead body that was found in a heap of rubbish, but the dead body of our rotten humanity. Sahiwal’s tragic incident was actually an act carried out by the deformed elements of this system and the brothers raping their sister in Golra were slapping the brutal face of our incompetent justice system.
Crimes will vanish if there is a uniform system of education and timely access to justice. We shuddered with fear after listening to the news of a girl getting raped by her brothers in Golra, but nothing happened after that. We listened to the news, criticized the inability of the system and then went back to our routine. Time will fly, and we will forget this incident just like we forgot Sahiwal’s tragedy and Naqeebullah Mehsood’s extrajudicial murder. The situation would have been different had the culprits of these crimes been executed publicly to set an example for others. Arabs are better than us who provide swift justice and cut off the hands of the thieves but here, where the law protects the criminals, the dead bodies of the rape victims will forever be recovered from manholes. Not the parents but the state should be held responsible for all this where the leaders intentionally keep us illiterate behind the slogans of welfare and keep us conveniently blind with the mirage of development of motorways and bridges.
While we are kept trapped in the labyrinth of inflation and financial crisis, the rich keep getting richer. George might find manimals as superheroes in some societies, but the reality is that the manimals existing in Pakistan need to be destroyed and only quality education, proper training and speedy justice can help us do so. Otherwise their number will keep increasing and they will be everywhere.
