A police state?
Rashed Rahman
The jury is still rightly out whether Pakistan is a
democracy. And this question lingers despite the repeated reiterations by
politicians and powerful institutions that democracy has arrived and is here to
stay. Against these claims must be juxtaposed the realities on the ground.
A democracy inherently is a law and rights based political construct.
Any state and society laying claim to being democratic has to be judged on the
touchstone of whether all aspects of the state’s functioning is lawful and
whether citizens’ rights are upheld and protected. On these two litmus tests at
least, Pakistan appears to be a police state masquerading as a democracy.
Consider some evidence for the above assertion. Extra-judicial
disappearances, torture in secret locations and murders are no longer
exceptional. What started as a set of measures to quell the nationalist
insurgency in Balochistan that started in 2002 have by now spread to all parts
of the country. Alongside these illegal and inhuman acts by state institutions
(with the deep state centre-stage and immune from accountability even before
the highest judicial forums) freedom of expression, another inalienable right
in a democracy, has been virtually strangled. The strangulation began from the
electronic media some years ago, and by now has laid low even the print media.
Having ‘conquered’ the mainstream media thus, the powers-that-be turned their
attention to social media. The five bloggers who were disappeared about a year
ago, and whose blogs suddenly sprouted blasphemous material after they were disappeared
(a virtual death sentence today in Pakistan), went through the ‘normal’
treatment at the hands of their abductors before being released. They chose
discretion as the better part of valour after regaining their freedom and fled
the country with their families, fearing for life and limb. They could, despite
their ordeal, consider themselves lucky to have escaped alive.
While our judiciary, unable to dent the backlog of 1.8
million pending cases, has proved not to have been able to play the role of
protector and defender of citizens’ legal and human rights, our notorious
police, freed of all fetters in the name of reform, has used its brutal methods
with a vengeance of late. In Karachi, trigger-happy anti-car lifting policemen
in plain clothes chased a car that did not stop when asked to, and shot dead a
young man, Intizar Ahmed, home for vacations from his studies abroad. Given
Karachi’s volatile security and crime milieu, it should surprise no one that
someone would think twice about stopping when challenged by gunmen out of
uniform on the city’s streets. MQM-London’s leader in Karachi, Professor Hasan
Zafar Arif, was found dead in his car in the rear seat in a remote location
with signs of bloody violence on his face and body. The police however, have
declared his death as being due to ‘natural causes’. Baloch nationalist
students of Karachi University and Sindhi nationalists throughout the province
have been the recipients of the unwanted attentions of the security agencies.
Lest anyone think only Karachi or Sindh as a whole has such
incidents, a young woman journalist Shehzadi has been disappeared for the
second time for taking up the case of an Indian national, Hamid Ansari,
incarcerated in Pakistan while pursuing a love interest, from Lahore
(initially) and now Islamabad (after being ‘recovered’). A young man, Raza
Khan, running a children’s people-to-people contact effort with counterparts in
India under the rubric ‘Aghaaz-e-Dosti’ has been disappeared some weeks ago
from Lahore. No sign of him so far. Journalist Taha Siddiqui was lucky to have
escaped an abduction attempt. Hamid Mir was not so lucky, barely escaping
multiple bullet wounds. Raza Rumi escaped firing on his car but his driver was
tragically killed. SSP Malir Rao Anwar has been suspended for the
extra-judicial murder of Naqeebullah Mehsud, a young aspiring model from
Waziristan seeking fame and fortune in Karachi. The SSP has yet to join
investigations or be charged. Such is the arrogance and sense of entitlement of
our police ‘encounter specialists’.
The list of such unlawful transgressions is too long to be
contained in this space. Thousands have disappeared without trace, leaving
their families and dear ones in the agony of not even knowing whether their
loved ones are alive or dead. The Commission on Enforced Disappearances turned
out to be a damp squib unable to or even unwilling to unravel the cocoon of
impunity in which the security agencies have wrapped themselves. But why blame
the Commission alone? Even the superior judiciary has failed to protect
citizens’ right to due process and a fair trial in such cases.
While the existence of the deep state is not acknowledged
officially and this allows its components to act freely and unlawfully without
fear of retribution, the police is an older affliction. At independence we
inherited a colonial police, whose role was defined by the British-imposed 1861
Police Act, itself modelled on another colonial police force, the Irish
Constabulary. The Irish-South Asian colonial experience has many similarities
apart from this one. The purpose of the police set up by the British
colonialists in South Asia was control of the restive natives vying for freedom
from colonial oppression. This is the force, complete with a colonial
structure, culture and mindset that we inherited and used intact till 2002. In
that year, the ‘Plato’ of the Musharraf regime enacted the Police Order 2002 to
abolish the executive magistracy (tasked with restraining a police force
immersed in the culture of colonial brutality) and concede autonomy to a force
far from ready or deserving of being trusted with such a responsibility. The
result of this ill-conceived and ill thought through measure that failed to take
account of the character of the police as inefficient, corrupt and brutal, has
arguably led to the rise in ‘encounters’ as the autonomous police’s modern day
answer to crime, lawlessness and terrorism. No marks for guessing where this
will lead.
In the 1960s, Latin America saw a rash of guerrilla
struggles break out, inspired by the Cuban revolution and in resistance to the military
dictatorships that dotted the continent. Disappearances made their first
appearance there. The families, especially the mothers of the disappeared, are
still struggling for full accountability vis-à-vis their disappeared loved ones
to date, despite the rollback of military dictatorships and the emergence of democracy
all over Latin America in subsequent decades. Judging by this example and the lack
of response to Mama Qadeer’s efforts on behalf of the disappeared in
Balochistan, Pakistan seems doomed to become a black hole of disappearances.
About three decades ado, when the Left in Pakistan collapsed
(a decade before the Soviet union’s implosion), it became clear to perceptive observers
that the age of mass repression had passed (with obvious exceptions such as
Balochistan). What seemed to loom on the horizon in its place was the targeting
of critical or dissenting individuals, who could be relatively easily dealt
with through extra-judicial methods. It seems we are there today, with
extremely weak resistance from political or civil society, legal and human
rights defenders, despite exceptional individuals still holding high the banner
of liberty.
It seems that without a revival of the Left to wage a
principled struggle against the injustices meted out by a police state,
Pakistani citizens are likely to suffer much more in this vein.
rashed-rahman.blogspot.com
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