Justice delayed, justice denied: Khadija to share same examination hall with her attacker

Khadija Siddiqui, a law student at The Institute of Legal Studies (TILS), Lahore, who was stabbed 23 times by her classmate Shah Hussain on 3 May 2016 outside the Ambassador Hotel on Davis Road, will be giving her LL.B exams in the same hall alongside her attacker today.

An open and shut case, where eyewitnesses along with CCTV footage of the incident were available to the court, was being lingered on in Sessions Court and Lahore High Court. After Lahore High cancelled the pre-arrest bail obtained by the accused, a Sessions Court parcelled out a post-arrest bail to Shah Hussain, the accused.

In a petition filed by her fellow students at change.org it was demanded that since she has to appear in external examinations of the University of London alongside her attacker, Shah Hussain British Council and University of London ensure the safety of its students by barring Shah Hussain from taking Bachelor of Laws exams in the same vicinity as his victim, and do whatever is possible to protect Khadija and all other students during the examination as long as the case is not concluded.

While talking to Pakistan Today, Khadija wondered what gives a man right to exercise unbridled violence against a woman, ‘I feel that society itself has set up an atmosphere of oppression when it assigns prestige to the one who can get away with a heinous crime,’ said while adding that we, as a society needed to look deep and answer questions like when did this imbalance start. ‘We need to look for the causes and answers that when it became so easy that a woman like me have to suffer the consequences of a man’s wrath,’ she said.

Although more than a year has passed since the incident, Khadija is still striving hard to get justice from the courts, the culprit is roaming free as if he hasn’t done anything. It is pertinent to mention here that this is not an anomaly as few other incidents of same nature like Shahzeb murder case happened and the accused got away scot free.